Unlock your productivity in 2024 through automation – your first step

How well are you unlocking productivity by automating your repetitive daily tasks?

There’s a theory that states 70–80% of daily work is made up of tasks that take up more time than is necessary. For some, it’s gathering data. For others, it’s analyzing the data and summarizing it into reports. For others, it could be the creation of a document or an update to a database that involves exactly the same set of steps every time it is executed.

These tasks can take up to 4 hours, 8 hours, or even more of your daily time. But with the right type of automation, they can be converted into a 10- to 30-minute tasks, freeing up more of your time for less routine, more creative and strategic-level activities.

How can you identify these sort of tasks? Well here’s a quick rule of thumb:

• If the task comprises the same set of steps every time (repetitive)…
• …and requires minimal information processing or complex thinking…
• …and it takes up more than 2 hours of your day or week…

then you should look into opportunities to automate the task.

Productivity hacks save time, and saved time improves the quality of life.

The below quadrant summarizes this rule of thumb. Back to the opening point: do you have daily tasks that fall in quadrant A below?