Automate the Niggle

There is an old line about giving a hard job to a lazy person, because they will find the easiest way to do it. I have never been sure it is a compliment, but it does describe how I work.

If something in my week creates friction, I cannot put up with it. I will automate it, script it, or build some small system to make it go away. Most of these take an afternoon and save me minutes. Occasionally one turns into something bigger.

The useful part is not the automating. It is noticing what to point it at, and almost everybody points it at the wrong things.

The big processes are not the opportunity

Ask somebody what they would automate and you get the obvious answers. Do You Actually Need Software, or Just a Smarter Process? is worth reading first. Invoicing. Onboarding. The monthly report.

Those are fine to do, and they are also the ones already on someone's list, already half-solved by software you are paying for. They are visible, so they get attention.

The things that actually cost you are the ones that have gone invisible. The small friction you hit every day, absorbed, stopped noticing, and now cannot see because it has become what work feels like.

My own example, which became a product

For years my calendar lied to me about time.

It would show a meeting at two and another at three, in different towns, as though that were a coherent plan. So all day, in the background, I would be running the maths. What time do I actually need to leave? Can I fit the call in first? Is the three o'clock even possible after the thing in Bournemouth?

I have an AuDHD brain, which means an unresolved thing like that does not sit in the background politely. It sits there like Chief Inspector Dreyfus developing a twitch. Anyone who knows the films knows exactly the escalation I mean.

The fix was to make the calendar account for travel time on its own, and later to have it handle the mileage records that go with it. That one turned into a product, which is not the normal outcome and not the point of the story.

The point is that I had been doing that arithmetic for years without ever once writing it on a list of problems. It was too small to count as a problem. That is precisely what made it expensive.

Think about the scale of it for a moment. Every person with a diary and a car doing that same sum, several times a day, for a decade. That is a daft amount of collective brainpower spent on "when should I leave?"

The friction audit

Twenty minutes with a notebook, and the only useful method I know.

For one week, note anything you calculate in your head more than once. Anything you re-type from one place into another. Anything you check to reassure yourself rather than because something changed. Anything where the phrase "I just need to remember to" appears.

Do not filter. The instinct will be to leave out the small ones, and the small ones are the whole exercise.

At the end you will have a list, and most of it will be things you had never mentioned to anybody, because each one is too minor to raise.

Which ones to fix

Not all of them, and this is where enthusiasm goes wrong.

Frequency beats size. Something that takes ninety seconds and happens twice a day deserves more attention than something that takes an hour twice a year, and it never feels that way round.

Prefer the ones with a clear right answer, and be wary of gluing them together with something brittle. "Work out when to leave" has a correct answer that a computer can reach. "Decide which client to prioritise" does not, and automating judgement produces confident nonsense.

Leave the ones where the friction is doing a job. Some small annoyances are the last check before something irreversible. Smoothing those out is how you end up sending the wrong invoice faster.

And some of them you should simply stop doing. Half of what turns up on a friction list is a task nobody needs any more, still being done because it was on a checklist in 2019. Deleting is cheaper than automating and always available.

If you have a list like that and cannot tell which items deserve an afternoon, that is a good conversation to have. Get in touch and we will go through it with you.