What are some things you are automating? What would you like automated in life or work?
With great products from IFTTT, Buffer, Feedly, and Zapier automating is a seamless process. What are some of your favorite automation hacks or tasks you would like to see automated?
My favorite hacks now
- Curating content and getting inspiration using feedly
- Tracking popular subreddits with IFTTT
- Google Alerts for articles based on keywords
- Flight push notifications using Kayak.
Some things I would like to see automated.
- Joining conversations real time based on topics I'm interested in.
- Quality Lead Generation
- Faster research
- Trend Monitoring
- Create a new station on Pandora from a new Shazam discovery
- Flight/trip booked based on price and time I want
- Easier networking online or finding new tribes based on my interest.
I work in data entry and I've automated around 90% of my job using Python 3 and the PyAutoGUI library.
Having now written half a dozen desktop GUI programs in my spare time (on evenings and weekends, comprising a few thousand lines of Python 3, perhaps around 10k in total), my day job has become ridiculously easy.
To give an example: one part of my job is typing and entering lists of names (around twenty at a time) into the company computer system. Now, having written the Python code to automate this task, I get all the data emailed across to me, pastea list of twenty names into my Python program and click a button. The program then enters the twenty names automatically while I sit back for a minute and watch it complete the work.
Another example: typing all the information for a particular event into the company computer system - perhaps thirty separate pieces of information per event, where you have to click on a separate text box and type for each piece of data.
Now, instead of clicking thirty different times on different boxes and typing all the pieces of information, I copy and paste all the info into my Python 3 programs and click a single button, then sit back for a minute and watch as it types all the info in and saves it for me.
Over the past three years or so, I've written around half-a-dozen programs like this and gradually automated almost the entirety of my day job. I now spend most of my day clicking buttons and waiting for a minute at a time as my programs do my data-entry work. It's made me a lot more efficient at my job; I reckon I'm around 50% to 100% more productive when compared with another worker at the company that doesn't use any of my software (which would be almost everyone else that I work with...)
I've also written my own simple GUI automation language, with around eight commands, that sits on top of Python 3 and PyAutoGUI and allows me to quickly write small custom scripts for automating any repetitive tasks that I may need to do. It's got commands like:
click 45, 345 // click pixel 45, 345 on the screen
type hello // type the word hello
press enter // press the enter button
loop 150 // loop 150 times :)
etc.
I wouldn't mind marketing this software to other companies that have a lot of similar data-entry tasks to the one for which I work, but:
I'm not sure where to find such companies
I'm not sure what to charge them. What would a good one-off charge be for a piece of software that makes your data-entry workers 50% to 100% more effective/productive? What should you charge for ongoing maintenance/support?
Anyways, that's my automation story.
Thank you for sharing. I want to get more into Python myself and will do some more research. Maybe you can look into setting up a gig on Fiverr. That way can start to find customers looking for you. Also maybe just pinging a few companies from a Google search or job search that appear for 'data entry companies'.
This is great!
I love hearing stories like this. Makes me want to automate so much stuff.
From what I remember, the book that turned me onto automating GUI tasks with Python 3 and PyAutoGUI was "Automate the Boring Stuff With Python". It's a game changer. :D
Everything I need to be updated in one single email every morning :) ... So I get a mail which pulls in data from my FB, twitter, top HN, coin prices and couple of news.
Great post idea.
Right now, I am not automating much but I wish I could :/ Mostly I use canned responses and automatic follow ups with Front for emails.
Maybe someone should build a productized service startup which helps companies automate things, I would certainly be a buyer :)
This is actually the next idea on my list! My current business is entirely automated and have started receiving requests for this service. Will pop over an email.
I would be interested too. (And to hear what you've done to automate your own business)
Hi Kevin - Always happy to talk about what I've done to automate my business and what can be done. Drop me a line patrick@ghostlyscribe.com - always happy to chat :)
I want to explore this idea. I've had a similar idea years ago, but thought IFTTT/Zapier fixed these issues.
What would you like this startup to do? Is this a one-time service?
Edit: is kissflow.com what you're looking for?
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My friend and I have been spinning the idea of automating flight/trip booking based on price and time.
Not entirely sure what it will really take but does seem like a cool idea.
I had some ideas on this myself. Maybe you can round a few people to support and build this!
Flight price alerts based on time, etc, exist from established players (for example - SkyScanner).
The challenge, I guess, is making an alert that also automatically books the trip, as there's no straightforward API for bookings (selected countries aside).
And, of course - whether there's a market for it :)
I've long wanted this too.
I agree with you that the quality lead generation process could be automatized. In the past, I've tried to do it by connecting different platforms, but it was a pain in the ass.
This is why I'm building heyprospect.com, an all-in-one platform that helps you automate the lead generation, the outbound and reporting tool in one single and easy to use platform.
Let me know what do you think!