Identifying Automation Opportunities

The lesson is called 'Identifying Automation Opportunities.' I want to be clear about what that means, because I suspect a number of people completed it believing they now know how to automate things, when what they actually know is how to identify that automation might be nice.

That's a bit uncharitable. Knowing which tasks are worth automating is genuinely half the battle. Most people waste time automating the wrong things entirely.

I'll grant you that. Someone who automates their email signatures while manually copying spreadsheets for three hours a day is not a success story. So yes, fine — the identification step matters.

High praise from you. I'll have it framed.

The first principle is repetition. If you are doing the same thing more than twice and it follows a predictable pattern, you have already failed to ask the obvious question. The task is not the problem. The fact that you're still doing it manually is the problem.

Though there's a trap there — people see 'repetitive' and immediately think volume, when actually the more important word in that takeaway is 'rule-based.' Repetition without clear rules is just chaos at scale. You can't automate judgment.

You cannot automate judgment. That is the sentence I'd have led the entire lesson with, and I notice they didn't. Instead we get a video of a man drowning in paperwork, which is presumably meant to make people feel seen.

It probably does make people feel seen, which is why it works. Not everything needs to open with a provocation.

The ROI point is where most people's eyes glaze over, and I find that telling. They're enthusiastic about automation as a concept right up until someone asks them to justify it numerically, at which point it becomes 'a gut feeling' and 'it just seems like it would save time.'

To be fair, not every automation needs a formal ROI calculation. If it takes you twenty minutes to set up and saves you ten minutes a week, you don't need a spreadsheet to know it's worth doing.

No, but you do need to have done that arithmetic, even informally. The people who skip it are the same people who spend a fortnight building an elaborate automated workflow for a task they do four times a year.

That's a fair point, actually. The calculation doesn't have to be formal — it just has to have happened.

The data privacy section is listed third, which is the lesson's most quietly catastrophic editorial decision. It is not third in importance. If you automate a process that pipes sensitive client data through an unsecured workflow, the time you saved is not the number anyone will be discussing afterwards.

I'd push back slightly — I think they listed it third because the lesson is structured around building enthusiasm first. You get people bought into the concept before you give them the constraints. Pedagogically that's not unreasonable.

It is not unreasonable. It is also how people end up enthusiastically automating things they absolutely should not have touched. But I take your point about sequencing. I don't have to like it.