Don’t be Afraid, Do be Patient
Every day at work I am surrounded by people who would love to make menial tasks disappear but are uncomfortable or scared when shown how to actually make it happen. There’s no reason to be afraid of attempting automation as long as you are cautious.
What if I mess something up and can’t fix it?
— Co-workers
The most common concern seems to be, "What if I mess something up and can’t fix it?", which seems to be a reasonable reaction if you’ve never seriously tried to automate things! However, I believe most of that reaction stems from the belief that "coders" or "programmers" are special people with mental abilities far beyond what "normal" people are capable of. This belief is wrong!
In reality programmers’ primary skills are problem solving, researching, and technical reading. These skills aren’t anything special, most people use them in their daily lives to complete tasks which are boring, manual, and mandatory. Automation shouldn’t be anything special. It’s a different way of completing the tasks that you’re already doing. Some problems are so elementary that they only require a human to click a series of buttons. Tasks like that are begging to be automated!
Patience and persistence are helpful too, but if you can put up with the tedium of doing things that your computer should be doing for you… you can handle the tedium of automating.
Problem Solving… Practicing Patience
The point of research and reading is to help solve a problem, right? Whether that’s giving all the files in a certain folder consistent names, resizing a bunch of pictures, or adding some numbers in a spreadsheet together and then putting them into another spreadsheet.
Frequently this requires some creativity in deciding how you want to use the myriad tools at your disposal to get something done. Don’t expect everything to be easy; there’s a reason that no one has automated certain tasks yet! As you gain experience, there will be less searching and more, faster automating.
Patience is important. You will probably find yourself correcting several things before (and maybe after) you get your automated process working. Fixing those problems can take a lot of time, research, and reading. If you are patient it will be the last time you have to deal with that particular boring task, and you can move on to bigger things! Practicing patience pays.
Practice Makes Possible
I frequently force myself automate simple tasks in order to keep my skills sharp and learn new ways of doing things, which makes it possible for me to quickly and easily solve more problems with automation. Another advantage of frequently automating simple tasks is that some or most of your work will be reusable on different tasks, which can save you a significant amount of time. Reusability is completely lost with manual tasks. Like anything you want to get better at, you have to practice.
Where to start???
Computer automation is a toolset that most people have access to but never actually learn how to use, which is extremely disappointing to me; it’s actually the reason that I started this blog! Having good help is critical while starting your automation journey and can be the difference between success and failure. My Getting Help post has information about finding the help you will need. If you would like to see how to access some basic built-in tools, consider reading this Starting Out article. To learn more about the mindset I’m approaching this blog with, see Hello World!