Automate Everything You Can

2025-02-23   mentalmodel programming sketch

What to automate?

1. 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
     

2. Track your life and find the bottlenecks, places where takes most of the time. Prioritize them for automation, as Amdahl's Law
   

   • Measure everything in your life
     

What can be automated better?

• Things that machines do better: local, detailed, progress-oriented, high memory required
  

  • Leverage Dichotomy of Human vs Machine Thinking
    

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
  

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
  

  • the-principle-of-least-effort

    “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”
    

    —Alfred North Whitehead

    
    

Examples

• Sync, Build & Deploy at One Action
  

• Data transformations and movements
  

• System maintenance and monitoring
  

• Generation and analysis
  

• Code formatting and linting
  

Find more examples

• automatetheboringstuff.com
  

  • 
    

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?

https://xkcd.com/1205/

https://xkcd.com/1319/

https://xkcd.com/1988/