Automating on the fly

Automating on the fly

Insight from Ciler Demiralp

Alright, let’s say that you aren’t quite ready to hire a CAO.

That means, for the time being, you’re going to be automating everything yourself.

Well, not everything. 

You need to decide what tasks to automate, which to delegate, and which to continue managing yourself.

The process for this is straightforward:

• Start by tracking your own time for a week. Look for the repetitive tasks that occupy a large proportion of your time. Specifically, make note of the tasks that follow a step-by-step process every single time. These are the tasks you want to automate.
  

• Break those candidate tasks down into components. Where does each step of the task take place (Gmail, Google Sheets, etc.)? What are the “triggers” that begin the task?
  

• Define the actions that the automation needs to fulfill, step-by-step. The more detailed you are, the smoother the process will be when it comes time to build the automation in your platform of choice.

Start with the 3-5 tasks that are occupying the most time every week. I doubt you’ll want to stop there though.

Once you’ve successfully automated a time-consuming task, it becomes a little addictive.

Spend a little bit of time to get a lot of time back.

Learn more: The Make Academy for building automations