Stop Wasting Time – Automate Your Repetitive Tasks

Businesses Should Think About Automation to Improve Efficiency

If a task only needs to be done once or twice, just get it done. But if you find yourself repeating the same steps over and over, it’s time to automate. For businesses, automation isn’t just about cutting costs—it’s about enabling employees to focus on higher-value work rather than getting bogged down in repetitive tasks. Here’s how businesses should think about automation to improve how much employees can manage:

Identify High-Impact, Low-Skill Tasks That Can Be Automated

• Look for time-consuming, repetitive processes that don’t require human judgment.
• Examples:
  • Data entry, report generation, scheduling meetings, invoice processing.
  • IT help desk tasks (e.g., password resets, software installations).

The key question to ask continually is, “Would automating this task free up employees for more strategic work?“

Measure Productivity Gains Instead of Just Cost Savings

• Automation shouldn’t replace employees—it should enable them to handle more important tasks.
• Instead of focusing on reducing headcount, think about:
  • How much more work can an employee can handle with automation in place?
  • How much time is freed up for creative, problem-solving tasks with automation in place?

The key question to ask is, “Can automating help employees serve more customers, or complete projects faster?“

Automate Without Creating Complexity

• Overcomplicating automation can lead to maintenance headaches.
• Follow the principle of Occam’s razor, which states “the simplest explanation is usually the best.”
• Keep automations simple and scalable—start with small wins.
• Ensure there’s a fallback plan when automation fails (e.g., manual override).
• When automating business processes, ensure that automation is making the process smoother, and not just creating more problems.

Centralize Automation Efforts Under IT Governance

• Automation should be managed at the company level or at least department level, ensuring security, compliance, and maintainability.
• IT should own the infrastructure and frameworks for automation, while employees contribute insights on what needs automating.
• Employees shouldn’t be manually creating ad-hoc scripts that nobody else understands.

Use Low-Code & No-Code First—But Know When to Code

• Low-code and no-code solutions can jumpstart automation quickly without heavy development effort.
• However, they shouldn’t replace well-architected custom solutions when scale, security, or flexibility is required.

When to Use Low-Code & No-Code Solutions

• Great for quick wins, MVPs (minimum viable products), and non-technical teams:
  • Automating simple workflows (e.g., Zapier, Power Automate, Make)
  • Internal business apps (e.g., Retool, AppSheet, Bubble)
  • Report generation and dashboards (e.g., Power BI, Google Data Studio)
  • CRM and sales automation (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce automation tools)
• If a process can be automated in hours, not weeks, low-code/no-code is the right choice.

When You Need Custom Code Solutions

• When flexibility, performance, and long-term maintainability matter:
  • Scalability Issues – No-code tools can become bottlenecks for high-volume processes.
  • Security & Compliance – Enterprise apps often require strict data handling rules.
  • Complex Business Logic – Multi-step workflows that involve APIs, databases, and integrations.
  • Long-Term Growth – If a process will grow in complexity, investing in code early prevents future migration pain.
• If it outgrows low-code, becomes costly, or limits innovation, move to code-based solutions.

The Best Strategy: Start Low-Code, Transition to Code When Needed

• Prototype with No-Code, then build a scalable, coded solution once requirements stabilize.
• Use No-Code for quick automation, but maintain a long-term vision for replacing brittle, high-cost workflows with custom-built, efficient solutions.

Custom Solutions Should be Built with Standardized, Scalable Tech

• Define a standardized Tech Stack for custom built solutions
  • Encourage the use of widely supported, mainstream programming languages such as:
    • Python, or Ruby (for scripting, API integrations, and automation workflows).
    • JavaScript / Typescript (for browser automation, serverless functions).
    • Go/Rust (for high-performance backend automation)
  • Instead of proprietary low-code tools with vendor lock-in, prefer flexible frameworks like:
    • Node.js & Express (for automation APIs and scheduled jobs).
    • Django / FastAPI (for Python-based automation).
    • Serverless Functions (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions).
• Leverage Well-Supported Open-Source & Enterprise-Grade Platforms
  • Custom automation doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel—use proven, industry-standard solutions as building blocks:
    • RabbitMQ / Kafka for event-driven automation.
    • Playwright for browser automation.
    • Terraform for infrastructure automation.
• Ensure IT Oversight & Scalability
  • Provide guidelines for code quality, security, and maintainability.
  • Automations should always be version-controlled (e.g., GitHub, BitBucket, etc).
  • Centralized logging & monitoring (e.g., Newrelic, Datadog, ELK stack) should track automated processes.
• Make Custom Solutions Modular & Reusable
  • Instead of teams creating redundant scripts, build shared automation libraries and APIs.
  • Encourage the development of internal automation frameworks that different teams can extend rather than everyone starting from scratch.

Businesses should empower teams to build custom automation but within a structured ecosystem using widely adopted technologies. This ensures that solutions are scalable, maintainable, and do not create IT silos.

Encourage Collaboration

• If multiple teams are doing the same tasks differently, this is an inefficiency.
• Encourage cross-team automation sharing that way best practices are established, adopted and implemented consistently.