Use automation in personal and professional workflows

Look closely at the daily task list and calendar, there is a certain number of repeated elements. They may follow different cadence e.g. some tasks repeat daily, some weekly, some maybe fortnightly or monthly. Some of these tasks will be exact repeat but there is a class of tasks which are close enough to repeating but is not exactly same.

Sometimes a large portion of productive time during day is consumed by these tasks and if we do not take care of these they tend to increase over time and we all have 24 hours per day. They can really overwhelm us and we might get that feeling of running at 300 miles but being on a treadmill.

Automation can come to rescure, we should seriously evaluate automation tools and workflows for our schedule and tasks and deploy them to freeup time during the work-day.

e.g. I maintain few projects in Open-Source, therefore a repeated task is to review and accept pull requests. One can not automate it completely, however it can be divided into multiple tasks, e.g. running builds, testing, validating formats etc. are fairly scriptable, and they can run on demand whenever a pull request is raised.

It can improve the quality of submission and the time you will have to spend to review the pull will not be repeated as often and thereby give back some of the time that would have been required to babysit the submission until it is accepted.

Automate Automate Automate !