It's the 21st Century. Automate!

Automation. One of the great promises of the computer age. The ability to have a computer perform repetitive tasks for us instead of having to manually repeat time-consuming actions is upon us. We may cover the other great promises of the computer age in future articles: Quickly performing complicated calculations, and posting cat photos online.

Automation can help with the challenges you face when running a business. Perhaps you're manually maintaining a customer feedback process, editing surveys and managing mailing lists. Or maybe you're short-staffed answering phones and replying to email. You would like to focus on acquiring more customers, (who wouldn't?) but you can't seem to find the time to break outside your already busy schedule.

A Zapier report found that "Nearly two-thirds of knowledge workers (64 percent) currently use automation software at work, and nearly a fifth (18 percent) intend to use it in the future."

What tasks do you have that could be automated, and how do you get the ball rolling? In another article, Zapier says there's a 3-step process to implementing automation: Recognition, Automating, and Fine-Tuning.

The first thing to do is to identify what can be automated. Do you regularly have to move data from one software application to another or are there any repetitive tasks you perform? Are there any simple tasks that take you away from what you really want or need to do? Some areas you may want to consider automating are engaging customers for feedback, asking customers to post reviews on places like Google, social media post scheduling, a set of canned messages for frequently asked questions, holiday or birthday vendor emails, payroll, and recruitment.

Photo by David Levêque on Unsplash

Next, take the time to automate the task. You may feel you have to weigh the benefit of automating the task, especially if you're trying software you haven't used before. Does the amount of time it takes to set up an automation outweigh the time saved by the automation? If you've correctly identified the time-consumer, repetitive tasks, probably not. But even smaller, less repetitive tasks are great candidates for automation, even if just for the knowledge you'll gain from creating the automation. Keep in mind, by learning automation software such as Zapier, IFTTT, or ActiveCampaign, you become so proficient in the software, you'll be able to automate even more tasks. When presented with a burdensome task in the future, you'll already know how to automate it because you're an automation expert.

And lastly, watch the automation. Is it working as expected? Can it be better? Can anything else be automated or fine-tuned? Does any member of your team have tasks that can be automated? You created a list of emails for customer feedback, can that same process supply emails for a company newsletter? Can the social media posts you scheduled be automatically sent to your blog?

Once a process has been automated and made efficient, completion time of tasks decreases, errors are reduced, and overall costs are reduced. You can't afford to rely on the old ways of moving data around by hand. Learn to automate today.