What's one task you still do manually every week that you know you should probably automate?
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We all have that one repetitive thing. Takes 15–30 minutes. Feels like it could be automated. But you just keep doing it by hand.
Every Friday, I manually copy data from three different dashboards into a Google Sheet, reformat the dates, and email it to my team. Takes 25 minutes. I've told myself "I'll automate this" for six months. Still doing it by hand.
What's yours?
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I still manually check a handful of dashboards every morning instead of having everything flow into one place. Takes a few min, but those mins add up.
@brody_vincent A few minutes each morning = a full day by the end of the year. Scary when you do the math.
Which dashboards? Maybe we can find a simple aggregator.
@wasil_abdal For me it’s usually the “small reporting” tasks that stay manual for way too long — pulling numbers from different places, cleaning them a bit, then sending the same kind of update. The funny part is that these are exactly the tasks automation is best at, but because they only take 20 minutes, they never feel urgent enough to fix.
@alpertayfurr Exactly. 20 minutes feels "too short to automate", but do it weekly, and that's 17 hours a year. Still feels small, but it adds up.
The real trap is that it's never urgent. So we just keep doing it. 😅
@wasil_abdal Exactly 😄 The “not urgent” part is what makes it dangerous. It doesn’t hurt enough in one week, but it quietly becomes part of your operating system. I think a good rule is: if I’ve complained about the same manual task three times, it probably deserves automation.
The funny thing is that automation isn't just a technical problem. It's a psychology problem.
A 2-hour task gets automated immediately because it's painful. A 10-minute task survives forever because it's easy enough to tolerate and annoying enough to repeat.
@varun1jan That's painfully accurate. The 10-minute task is the real villain, tolerable enough to ignore, repeated often enough to waste your life.
Maybe we need a "time until insanity" metric instead of just time saved. 😂
Checking through member sign-ups to manually filter out spam and prioritize the real community builders. It takes 15 minutes of scrolling and clicking profiles every few days, but I haven't trusted an automated filter to do it cleanly yet.
@minhle5551 That's a tough one to fully automate. But maybe a middle ground: auto-flag obvious spam (temp emails, weird names), then you just review the rest. Cuts your 15 to 5.
Still keeps the human touch where it matters.
Hello Wasil.
I am a software engineer and in my opinion,, it is not so hard to automate your Friday work.
Did you try to make a mini program?
@silvercrane_harry Honestly? I'm the marketing half of our duo. My coding skills stop at "Hello World" 😅.
But you're right, it's probably easy for someone who knows what they're doing. Maybe I should bribe my co-founder with coffee.
For me, it’s weekly follow-ups. I still go through emails, LinkedIn messages, and notes manually to see who needs a nudge. It’s not hard work, but it takes just enough time every week that I keep thinking I should automate it.
@farrukh_butt1 Oh, follow-ups are sneaky time thieves. I've started using a simple CRM to track who needs a nudge; it's saved me hours. Even a Google Sheet with a "last contacted" column helps.
But yeah, still feels manual. Good luck automating it "next week." 😄
Reconciliation of the invoices with my accounting software, total waste of time and resources, such a waste!