The Automation Muscle

I like to think about #automation as a muscle. I call it a muscle because it’s not something you can learn but something you can train.

Key traits for those with the automation muscle

1. You will be very uncomfortable with monotonous tasks. Not just you doing it, but even when others on your team do it. It will kill you. You will want to stop everything you do to go automate it.

2. You will not rest until you bring everything down to minimal possible clicks (Sometimes, zero clicks). You’ll not understand why people are willingly spending time on things that can be completely eliminated.

3. You will not accept “That’s how we’ve always done it” for an answer. You will try to find out what constraints existed and understand if they still exist. If not, tweak things to remove manual effort.

4. You will not see things as “5 minutes per day” but as “21 hours a year”. You’ll find it completely justifiable to invest 5 hours to automate something that takes 5 minutes.

5. You will cringe when a manual process is introduced into an established system, creating a potential for failures.

Automation is not just in IT, it’s everywhere. While the actual solution might lie with IT, automation is for everyone to identify in their current roles. Build that muscle.