People often ask why I contribute to open source projects or otherwise work on building automated tooling. They see me spending hours to automate a task or fix a bug that take seconds to do or avoid manually, in a way that the original XKCD comic says won’t pay off. The disconnect seems to be that the comic and those people only consider time it saves me, not time it saves the tens to thousands to millions of other people who will use the script or patch or whatever when I publish it. So, here’s a version of xkcd.com/1205 updated for making decisions that benefit a thousand people instead of just one.
I’m just trying to think of anything that I do 50x a day that takes five minutes.
How many things does anyone do 50x a day, period? Apart from autonomic body functions I can’t think of anything. I probably don’t even stand up 50 times a day.
Copy, cut, paste, undo. Use those keyboard shortcuts and if you work with documents for a notable part of the day you will save a half day a year or so.
I click the left mouse button more often each day, also when you work in a production facility you have a bunch of repetitive tasks, automating them is pretty much was humanity did in the last century.
I click the left mouse button more often each day, also when you work in a production facility you have a bunch of repetitive tasks, automating them is pretty much was humanity did in the last century.
How can we shave a second of the time it takes for you to click the left mouse button?
That area of the chart is for people with really repetitive jobs/hobbies. There are MANY jobs where you do the same 5-10 minute thing 50x a day.
I have a lot of repetition in my job (CAD modeller). Even just knowing keyboard shortcuts & setting up shortcuts for frequently used operations can easily net me 5 seconds per operation. I want to spend my energy on solving the task at hand, not on how to use the tool in the moment. I don’t want to move the mouse away from the work area if I can help it.
Maybe not as frequent 5 per day - but scripts for really bottom of the barrel stuff:
- Cycle thru all currently open drawing documents, zoom to full page and force save.
- zoom out ensures drawing can be identified from document thumbnail.
- the software is known to crash, especially editing drawings.
- easy 10mins duplicated work saved.
- Printing all open drawings out to the office printer in order with a delay between them, so i don’t spend the next 20 minutes manually sorting the drawing prints.
- printers don’t always print in incoming order, some documents take longer to process.
- find/replace for text notes
- the software doesn’t have that feature.
Consider using an auto formatter. I just barf my code into the editor, press a magic key combo and it’s all formatted better than I could do by hand.
Write emails? At 250min, or 4 hours it’s either a major repetitive work task or a hobby.
Or if you’re into wargaming or model making, assembly tasks or painting.
Write emails? At 250min, or 4 hours it’s either a major repetitive work task or a hobby.
Remember though, this is the amount of time savings something has to represent.
So you still have to accomplish the task.
So doubling it: your entire repetitive job. Would have efficiency increased to halve the time. Pretty rare.
FYI: there is actually an XKCD font if you want to match the original more closely. https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font
This graph needs to be put on a poster with the caption “This is what you pay IT for”
I feel it, fellow automation-human.
To me the automation calls harder than the gains, but when I do fix stuff for my org of 500 or so people, it is so good.
Thanks for this!
I’ll do it for things that don’t seem like it will save much, but because it was such an infrequent task I would forget how all the cogs worked when it needed to be done again, and what pitfalls to avoid. So it’s not just direct time saved, but also increasing reliability.
Question, can anyone please tell me what job titles cover this skill set? I’ve seen and performed a tremendous amount of this automation work by data analysts and data scientists, but it doesn’t seem to fit the titles. I’ve seen ‘process automation X’ as an example but more often than not that title seems to be used for an actual engineer in some assembly line manufacturing job rather than what is essentially a programmer/GUI automator
I work on business intelligence, and part of my job is automatize processes, like comercial team updates excel files and those updates needs to be updated on the database so the dashboards show the latest version. I could do the update manually, but I don’t like do that and wrote a python script that do that for me.
I contribute to open source because i use the tool and the problem exists for me as well, and I know how to solve it. I don’t care if others use it or not.
