Every job has repetitive tasks. Sometimes the monotony can be nice and relaxing, but more often than not it is a waste of your time. Having to type out the same email again, posting to multiple social media sites, invoice reminders, calendar coordination, and hundreds more. While the tasks are necessary, spending time manually performing them is not. These can all be automated to save you time each day.
The Power of Automation
Every founder and solopreneur quickly learns the value of time. No matter how much you do in a day, there are always more things to do. A large part of this comes from experience as you learn what actually matters in a business. Early on, entreprenuers often spend disproportionate time on little details that don’t make a big impact. As they better understand their customers, their product, and the systems they put in place, time is often spent in more impactful areas. They learn how to prioritize.
This is the first step in efficiency – eliminate the unnecessary tasks. Once that is done, you can start to automate.
How Much Time Can You Get Back?
According to the Harvard Business Review, 25% of CEO’s time is spent on tasks machines could do. This is a quarter of every day, every week, every year. Imagine what you could do with 25% more time.
Automation requires a bit of up-front time investment, but it quickly pays itself back. It takes several hours to learn a new automation tool, set it up for your personal workflow, test it, and start using it. But then you can let it run in the background indefinitely, saving you time every day.
As a personal example, my team previously spent about 30 minutes each day creating social media posts for each platform and posting them. With 3 hours of up-front work to create an automation for it, we were able to cut that down to 5 minutes a day. So after 8 days, it was already saving us time. For every week after the first, we were saving almost 30 minutes a day from that one quick setup. And that is just one simple automation.
The Different Levels of Automation
There are differing levels of automation. Take a report on customer experience for example:
No Automation
Email each customer with a custom message asking about their experience
Record their response
Compute each score to get an average
Create a presentation on the results.
Some Automation
Copy/paste a standard message to email an entire customer list at once
Export the list of responses to Excel to get the averages
Create a graph from the spreadsheet
Full Automation
Each time somebody buys from your business, their email is automatically added to a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM).
An email is sent through the CRM from a template and automatically fills information based on their profile and purchase.
Their responses are recorded in a database and linked to their profile for future improvements and product recommendations.
The database gives the average experience across multiple date ranges, identifies outliers, and provides a live dashboard that can present data in real time.
Not every task needs to be fully automated – in fact some either can’t be or shouldn’t be. But many can be, freeing up valuable time to focus on high impact items or take some time for yourself and your family.
Some Tools That Can Help You Start Reclaiming Your Time
There are countless tools that can help you automate your tasks, ranging from small improvements to full scale process automation. There are free versions all the way up to enterprise level accounts with thousands of features. Each business has different needs and each person has different preferences. I’ve included a few tools below that can help you get started.
Make is a “drag and drop” automation tool, allowing you to create integrations between different apps. It differs from other similar tools with its more visual approach, allowing you to easily follow the steps that you created for that “scenario”, or workflow. The free version is very robust, giving a good feel for how the system works. If you later decide that you need more operations, you can upgrade to a higher tier.
Make is what I recently started using for my personal automations.
Zapier is one of the big names in automation tools. Similar to Make, it allows you to easily create integration chains between different apps. In the social media example earlier, I used Zapier. The workflow watched for a post to Instagram, copied the post text to Chat GPT to slightly reword it, and posted the new text to Twitter, Discord, and Reddit with relevant hashtags on the platforms that support it.
Workato uses a linear “if/then” approach, similar to Zapier. While it integrates with thousands of apps, it excels at marketing and sales integrations. The simple interface shows relevant information for each step while reducing clutter. Workato connects with common ERPs for metric tracking and visualization automation, making the process easier for associates and executives alike.
No automation article would be complete without mention of ChatGPT. While useful across a wide range of subjects, it has become a favorite tool of content creators. With quality prompts, ChatGPT can create a great starting point for content creators to add to, revise, and add their personal touch and expertise.
For more information on how to effectively use ChatGPT, I highly recommend following Edgars Griga, who posts tips and tricks to make the most of the tool.
Want help creating your own integrations?
I’ll soon be releasing a video guide on some of the automations I have used, showing you step-by-step how to create them on some of the most popular platforms. Make sure to follow me on LinkedIn to be notified when it’s released!
Thank you all for reading! If you have any other sources I missed, or useful tips on automation, let me know. Looking forward to seeing you next month for the next edition!
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