Every small business I have ever worked with has a list it does not write down. It is the list of things that have to happen between the work that pays and the next thing that pays. Confirming an appointment. Copying a number from one tool into another. Chasing an invoice that should have chased itself.
None of it is hard. That is exactly why it never gets fixed. Each task is too small to schedule and too frequent to forget.
Why automating matters
When I was younger, my dad was always on me about writing down what I needed to do. It took me far too long to realise he was right, and why. Every task you are holding takes up space, in your head and in your energy. The simple act of remembering that you need to do the thing burns energy you could be spending on the thing itself.
But writing it down does not make it go away. You still have to do it. And if your days look anything like mine, that list fills up with the same tasks over and over. The loops. These are the ones I keep pushing down the list, because I know I can knock each out in a few minutes, and there is always something louder competing for my attention.
What I mean by a loop
A loop is any sequence you repeat without deciding to. It usually has three parts:
- A trigger you do not control (a form, an email, a clock).
- A few steps you do by hand every time.
- An output someone is waiting on.
When the middle is the same every time, the middle is a candidate. Most of what I build lives there.
The goal is never to remove the human. It is to remove the parts no human should be spending judgment on.
How do we break the loop?
I spend a good chunk of my day job automating tasks. Partly out of love for the game, but mostly because it pays for itself fast. Every loop I automate is time back in my day, and that time goes straight to my customers. They get quicker responses and more of my attention, which was the point all along.
When I sit down to break one, I run the same four steps every time.
Watch yourself do it once. Before automating anything, do the loop by hand and narrate every step, even the parts that feel too obvious to say out loud. The obvious parts are where the hidden work hides. You will almost always catch a step you forgot you were doing. If you remember the exercise in elementary school about listing the steps for making a sandwich, where you start with opening the cabinet, then grabbing the loaf of bread, opening the bag of bread, this is the level of detail you want to achieve.
Name the real trigger. Every loop starts with something. A form submission, an email landing, a date on the calendar. If you cannot point to the exact event that kicks it off, you do not understand the loop yet, and whatever you build will fire at the wrong time.
Separate the rote from the judgment. Walk the middle steps and mark each one: does this need a human, or does it just need doing? Copying a number, formatting a message, logging a row, those just need doing. Deciding whether a refund is fair needs a human. Automate the first kind, leave the second alone.
Build the smallest version that kills the worst step. You do not have to automate the whole loop on day one. Find the single step you dread most and remove that one first. A loop that is half automated still gives you half your time back, and living with that half teaches you what the rest should look like.
If you can describe the loop, it is probably worth automating. Identifying the loops that will benefit the most from automation is a skill that takes practice, but it will make your life so much easier.