Automating personal and business workflows

In an average month, there is a lot of stuff you will have to do. Stuff like paying the bills, taking care of inventory for home/company, budgeting, and your day to day work.

The best thing I have found to do it is to automate as much work as possible. I’m not only talking about programming something to do the work for me, but to write down all the processes that I’m using in my work and life.

By writing everything down, you are able to generate check lists, for every process. Although this sound pretty boring and lame, the alternative is panicking when you’ve forgotten to take the health insurance card to your vacation. Or your drivers licence for example. Or kids (OK, I sincerely hope that this one only happened in that movie) :).

Having a printed out check list does wonders when I have to set up a new server environment from scratch, although everything is scripted, there is always manual work involved. Checking each box gives you confidence that everything is working as it should be. If a process fails though, you are able to retrace the steps, figure out what went wrong, and fix the step, or add a few in between.

When you document everything, it’s a great time to hire someone to do the menial work for you. You don’t have to waste your precious time by paying the bills, or ordering water, or doing anything except the one thing you do best, whatever that is. That thing got you to where you are now, but most of us have businesses to run, and that also takes it’s toll.

Tolls don’t matter here, start with pen and paper, then see if anything else fits better. I use Markdown and ia Writer Pro to accomplish my goals, to write the process down, but lately I’m experimenting with something bigger, as I want to focus on writing more.