Automate Everything You Can
What to automate?
- Human instinct of boredom is the best indicator of where to automate. If something is boring, it is what to automate.
- It's nature's way of pointing toward automation opportunities.
- When you feel bored, your mind is telling you: "This task is beneath your cognitive capabilities."
-
The Boredom Principle
- Track your life and find the bottlenecks, places where takes most of the time. Prioritize them for automation, as Amdahl's Law
What can be automated better?
- Things that machines do better: local, detailed, progress-oriented, high memory required
When to automate?
- Tasks you've done more than twice
- Processes that follow clear rules
- https://xkcd.com/1205/
- https://xkcd.com/1319/
How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you're spending more time than you save? (across five years)
- how often you do the task X how much time you shave off
| 50/day | 5/day | Daily | Weekly | Monthly | Yearly | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 sec | 1 d | 2 h | 30 m | 4 m | 1 m | 30 s |
| 5 sec | 5 d | 12 h | 2 h | 21 min | 5 m | 2 s |
| 30 sec | 4 w | 3 d | 12 h | 2 h | 30 m | 2 m |
| 1 min | 8 w | 6 d | 1 d | 4 h | 1 h | 5 m |
| 5 min | 9 m | 4 w | 6 d | 21 h | 5 h | 25 m |
| 30 min | + | 6 m | 5 w | 5 d | 1 d | 2 h |
| 1 hour | + | 10 m | 2 m | 10 d | 2 d | 5 h |
| 6 hours | + | + | + | 2 m | 2 w | 1 d |
| 1 day | + | + | + | + | 8 w | 5 d |
When not to automate?
- One-off tasks
- Highly creative work
- Tasks requiring human judgment
- When automation cost exceeds long-term benefits
The compounding effects
- For The Principle of Least Effort, automation makes your effort compound
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The Principle of Least EffortExamples
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” —Alfred North Whitehead
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- Sync, Build & Deploy at One Action
- Data transformations and movements
- System maintenance and monitoring
- Generation and analysis
- Code formatting and linting
Find more examples
Leverage Dichotomy of Human vs Machine Thinking
As a last thing, the goal of automation is not efficiency for efficiency's sake, but to make more time for human "things": creativity, innovation, and human connection.
How to decide what to automate?
Local graph
Linked from
- Automate Your Ops NS Workshop — Relevant to [[Automate Everything You Can]]
- Life algorithms — [[Automate Everything You Can]]
- The Art of Unix Programming - Basics of the Unix Philosophy - Chapter 1. Philosophy (archived) — - [[Automate Everything You Can|Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can]].
- Workflow automation mental models — Related: [[Automate Everything You Can]]
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