In your work, how much can you actually automate? How many dumb, repetitive tasks are you doing on a daily basis?
Keep automating all of it.
The more people can automate the tasks that keep them bouncing from one thing to another, the more effective they can get with the high value tasks that they should be focusing on.
I’ve been automating as much work as possible, saving hundreds of hours of work (even more so if you think about how it affects what you’re doing over years of time), reducing mental overload, and unblocking the rest of the team. AI has allowed even more automations to happen.
Example scenario
-> Glare keeps a record of all of our Design Under Pressure newsletters.
→ A person (@nathaliesmith and I) downloads the HTML content from CustomerIO after each send.
→ We had to go to a submission form, upload the HTML, pull out image from the HTML manually, add the proper slug/date, add an excerpt summarizing the post, and then hit submit.
This all took 15-20 minutes every single time.
Our Solution
To solve this, we created an AI Slackbot, taking advantage of where a lot of our work happens.
Now, here’s the flow:
-> @nathaliesmith downloads the HTML.
→ @nathaliesmith@mentions the ZURBEngineerBot and asks it to create a newsletter post, with the HTML attached.
→ The bot handles the rest.
Definitely the first time that I’ve experienced moving over functionality across 3 platforms to try to maintain parity, while also creating a bit of variation.
Oh yeah, automating the creation of our data comparison spreadsheets was amazing. Used to spend up to 30 minutes per project moving around spreadsheets, copying over data, and adding images for context. Now our new Data Comparison tool can put together an even more powerful data view in less time that it takes me to brag about it in this comment!
This is a great summary on what happens when you automate tasks.
This is why I think the conversation around AI replacing work is more nuanced than people realize.
The interesting shift is what happens after automation.
As we automate repetitive tasks, cheap competence becomes available everywhere. Suddenly everyone can produce more output, more code, more content, more concepts, more workflows. But that also creates a flood of generic work that still needs judgment, refinement, orchestration, and direction.
That’s the paradox. AND opportunity!
Creating and putting together Glare in the last few months has been eye-opening… excited to keep making it more useful for everyone!
