Before joining the workforce, I didn’t know what automation was all about.
Yes, some could argue that given my background in music production I was already exposed to effect automations, but these are far different from the ones I’m referring to, the ones that save you time and let you escape from repetitive work.
Even if I didn’t know how to set up automations, or what components made up such a complex flow, it didn’t matter because my brain instantly triggered to find solutions to repetitive work so I could focus on more meaningful tasks.
I define “meaningful tasks” to the ones that you find interesting, or the ones that create the most value and will return you higher returns from working on them.
My first automation came from discomfort, something I didn’t find real intrinsic value from doing it over and over again. It was before the ChatGPT era, so it took me weeks and different versions to have it right.
I was tasked to create Teams Webinar links for my colleagues based on a ticket that contained all the requirements needed like the name of the session, duration, speakers and description of the webinar. My first approach was like everybody’s else: just copy-paste and hope for no errors.
But this got old quickly, I needed to move forward with that. So I came up to the conclusion that I needed some sort of automation to just paste the ticket somewhere, and extract the relevant information, I’d then only need to copy-paste the cells without dragging my mouse over the content.
I achieved this by first standardizing and simplifying even more the ticket structure so errors would be minimized as much as possible.
Later on, I created an Excel spreadsheet with concatenation rules that basically scanned the whole ticket and extracted the relevant fields needed for the ticket.
I had to create at least 20 iterations of this file to finally work, yet it helped me to become more efficient and develop the foundations of critical and analytical thinking that would later ease my way to more complex automations like the ones I show here and my socials.
So for me, automation started as a need and wasn’t optional. It still is like that today, best part is now I have a wide variety of tools at my disposal and more experience under my belt to help other teams to overcome redundant tasks and focus on what they find value.