Notes on: How to Automate Away Your Most Boring, Time-Consuming Tasks

'How to Automate Away Your Most Boring, Time-Consuming Tasks, Even If You Don't Know How to Code' is an article by Jessica Stillman and was originally published on inc.com.

Like just about everyone, whether you own a business or are a parent, we all have mindless, time consuming tasks that we have to do throughout the day. Whether it is submitting expenses, prepping your kids lunches, or updating a deck for a meeting, these types of tasks would be great if they were automated or delegated, but most of us do not know coding nor have a personal assistant.

Non-technical automation

While speaking to hundreds of programmers for his book Coders, Clive Thompson confirmed that they use miniature bits of code, called scripts, to automate a lot of their tasks. For some, this meant a script that checked for their favourite shows on torrent sites and auto-downloaded them when they were available, some had scripts that scanned social media platforms and populated a spreadsheet with information whenever their company was mentioned.

Automating repetitive tasks in this way sounds difficult to most people, but Thompson, who is not a programmer himself, explains that he has also managed to set up some automated scripts to help him with some of his mindless tasks. One script he wrote checks for and download his son's homework, and another texts him news headlines from around the world. He insists that creating these scripts is much easier than you think.

As long as you are willing to learn a little, just enough to solve a problem you may have, then you have the attitude necessary to learn how to create scripts to automate your life yourself.

No-code options for those who cannot code

Thompson suggests a free online book, called, 'Automate the Boring Stuff With Python', that can get you started, but you do not even need to know how to write code to do this. There are lots of low-code or no-code options that will automate things for you, for example, If This Then That, Zapier, or Workflows on iOS, and bits of JavaScript and filtering in Gmail, and Power Automate on Windows and Automator on macOS.

These tools may only save you a few minutes here and there, but those minutes add up to hours and eventually days, not to mention the sanity it saves you which enables you to be more productive with your time.