30+ Ideas for Automating your Work & Life
Showcase of the automation scenarios that help me run multiple projects on autopilot. Get inspired and create your own robots managing your tasks while you sleep!
Two weeks ago, in the Journey from Chaos to Control — Introduction to Automation, I wrote about the basics of automation and an approach that will significantly increase your productivity. We tackled creating the first automation in Make.com and Zapier. I hope you have already acquired these skills, and since it was one of our highest-rated materials, I would like to expand on it with this post.
Many tasks we perform every day are repeated dozens or even hundreds of times. Even small time savings in their execution quickly add up. That's why it's a great area for automation or optimization, which can start saving us time almost immediately and, furthermore, work for us for months or even years.
In this post, I’ve created tons of inspiration and examples of automations that work for me and my teams, developed in Make:
For example, this simple scenario allows me, with the help of Alice, to publish posts on Social Media while generating images for them at the same time. I just tell Alice what to post or come up with a post idea by chatting to her. She then sends it to the automation, that schedules posts on X and LinkedIn via Buffer!
This one, on the other hand, allows sending a text message reminder for a Zoom meeting, ensuring that I don't miss it.
Another one allows me to set up an autoresponder on Slack for people who message me while I'm on vacation.
These are examples of simple automations, and in my work, I also use much more advanced ones, such as this one for generating presentations with reports from various metrics:
Or this one, which generates sales reports on Stripe for me, which I can ask Alice about.
Or this one, handling important processes after the sale of various products:
For my projects, I work with fully automated processes consisting of multiple scenarios:
Automation of live events or webinars, so that people automatically sign up, receive notifications, social media posts are scheduled, and tasks are divided among your team on Slack;
Marketing automation that segments customers and selects the best leads for targeting. It then sends messages to the sales department when a person revisits the website and performs a "key task";
Extracting data directly from the database and creating an administrative panel with blocks (buttons, tables, and others) showing query results and allowing responses (e.g., to notify users of updates);
Sending users automated messages and notifications based on their activities;
Conducting automated surveys that your bots can respond to and automatically re-engage users, then distribute their suggestions among your team members and create tasks for them;
Building a panel with all recurring services I use and bots handling payments, collecting invoices, and deleting unused ones;
Automatically managing your calendars and meetings with text reminders and messages about roadblocks on the way to your meeting.
AI-tomation
Why does delving into this topic today give you even more advantages? Over the years, I have built thousands of robots of this kind. However, it turned out that the emergence of AI has opened up completely new possibilities for me to interact with such automations. The Alice application, which we have been developing over the past year, is precisely designed to collaborate with these types of automations, taking us to a whole new level of productivity!
In practice, tools like these can be used as a conversational approach to carrying out our daily tasks at work. I can say to Alice:
Add client X to the CRM, who has budget Y and is looking for properties in Z
And then ask:
Please find new property listings for client X.
Subsequently, Alice communicates directly with one of these automations to retrieve the data:
This is exactly what the future of work, which we are developing right now, will look like! Next week, we will inform you about the launch of the Alice application - we can't wait!
As you can see, deepening knowledge in automation, combined with AI, can yield fantastic results. Automation scenarios themselves may seem like esoteric knowledge at this stage. However, in practice, even preparing a complex scenario takes no more than 1-2 hours.
Inspirations for your own robots
In designing automations, it's often not the technology that is the barrier. Scenarios that save us the most time usually revolve around single actions, based on a simple idea. In theory, it sounds easy, but in practice, it's entirely different. That's why I would like to present a series of practical examples to you now, which I use in my work and which save me hundreds of hours monthly.
Creating automation itself isn't difficult. The challenge lies in figuring out what automations can do for us.
Therefore, today I will introduce you to a series of inspirations regarding what and how you can automate, as well as what tools you can use in this process:
Payment Reminder Automation
Missing payment deadlines is a common occurrence and negatively impacts a company's cash flow. Often, missed payments result from mere absentmindedness and forgetfulness.
Developing automatic reminders sent directly from our email inbox works excellently. Reminders can include:
messages about upcoming invoice due dates
messages that today is the invoice due date + an SMS reminder
messages indicating that the invoice due date has passed + SMS + phone call.
In case of no response, we can notify ourselves of the need to seek the services of a debt collection company. However, in such a situation, it's worth attempting a personal explanation of the missed payment beforehand, as involving a debt collection agency signifies the end of cooperation with that particular client.
Meeting and Communication Automation: Keyboard Maestro
After the meeting, it's worth sending a summary message to the participants. You can prepare a template that you will fill in during the meeting with your notes and then paste it into an email to send to all interested parties.
You can create the template using tools like Text Expander or Keyboard Maestro.
Both applications can be used to assign frequently used phrases or easily paste meeting links (e.g., for a recurring Zoom room).
It's worth noting that setting up Text Expander is extremely simple, and using it just requires developing the right habit.
Notification Automation: Useful Notifications
Most notifications we receive on both our phones and computers are not very valuable and often just distract us. However, the notification system itself is incredibly useful and can be utilized in the right way.
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