How does automation facilitate your workflow?

Are you bored with the repetitive tasks of your daily work? Like running in a circular path, doing the same thing repetitively, without an end. According to the Forbes article, the ‘boreout’ causes many people to feel depressed and want to leave their jobs.

Now, there is a chance, to escape the endless loop, and to save you from the cycle. With the concept of automation, we can let the computer help us finish the work automatically. Here let me demonstrate an example.

If you are a worker in the customer service department of a software company and you receive several hundred feedback per day, your job is to send them to the corresponding units in charge. There are several rules for assigning correspondence units. For example, If the feedback mentions some software error (‘bugs’), the report must be sent to the development team. While if it mentions the wish list of some new features, it should be sent to the project management team.

As long as there are some rules for your task, these jobs can be automated using some basic functions or scripts, without the need to manually assign the tasks. Automation can save you precious time to focus on more complicated jobs.

So, how does the automation work?

Its essence is to let the computer do the repetitive work by giving them some rules.

As mentioned above, it is our job to clarify the rules, and the computer’s job to execute them. Luckily, most computer software has provided some ways to ‘create the rules’, it is called Application Programming Interface (API). For instance, Microsoft Excel’s rules can be assigned using the built-in functions, or the Visual Basics for Application (VBA), the Google Sheets can be controlled by their built-in functions, and even the computer file system itself can be controlled via the programming language like Python. These APIs gain us control of the software, thus automating the process.

It may sound scary to hear the word programming language. I would say it won’t be easy at first glance, but it will become much easier after you know some basics. Let me explain it with the learning curve.

Initially, you may need to spend some amount of time learning the basics, but the good news is most programming languages share the same basic logic, and you don’t need to relearn it every time. After some investment in time initially, you can just let the computer do the work and save your precious time.

In conclusion, most office work can be potentially automated saving your precious time, increasing efficiency and perhaps improving mental health by decreasing boredom. Learning to automate the process is hard initially, however, brings great help to your work. 

Now one may ask, how to start? I will share about it in the next article, please stay tuned!

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Thanks for reading! With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, especially language models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, how will these technologies impact automation? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

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