Automate: Streamline Your Workflows to Become More Efficient
Efficiency drives economic growth. The more efficient you are at doing something, the more valuable your time becomes.
Take Henry Ford as an example. He developed the assembly line, pioneering a new way of producing things. This new process of assembling cars made it more efficient to build them, dropping prices for consumers and making Ford one of the most valuable companies in the 20th century.
Looking at personal productivity from a business lens – rather than trying to find clever hustle hacks – will lead you to more efficient solutions of getting things done. Efficiency is often a byproduct of streamlining tasks and standardizing them. That starts by thinking more intently about how you do things and for what purposes – just as a business would.
This essay is Part Three of a three-part series on how to streamline your workflow to become more productive.
Automation is going to be a core part of your productivity stack in the near future if it isn’t already. While you might think automation equals technology, really it’s just another way to think about streamlining your processes. You can use technology to replace repetitive tasks, or you can develop analog solutions that “automate” parts of your workflow for you.
This third essay is about automation. It’s all about how to set and forget repetitive tasks so you can leverage more of your time for higher value activities.
Before you automate anything, make sure you create a workflow of everything you do.
Do you know what you do on a daily basis?
Chances are, unless you’ve done a time audit on yourself, you don’t. You probably clock in to your job and collect a paycheck but you likely don’t have an account of how you spend your time throughout the day.
In Part One I recommended doing a time audit so you could eliminate unnecessary tasks from your workload. As a byproduct of doing a time audit, you’ll have records of how you spend your time. This information can be useful to help you start documenting your workflows.
A workflow is essentially a process. It’s the steps you follow to get something done. If you work for a company, you probably participate in a workflow whether you realize it or not.
As a writer, I have a specific workflow for writing new articles. It looks something like this:
Create an outline of what I plan to write
Write a draft of the article
Edit and fact check it
Proofread and format it
Upload it to Substack
Share it with my network
A workflow acts as a guide that tells you how to do your job. I do all six of these steps, but if I worked for a larger publication like The Wall Street Journal, I’d probably work on a team and pass along my work to the next person in the workflow depending on my role.
This is one reason why I suggested hiring a virtual assistant in Part Two. You might wear a lot of hats but no one is good at everything. I’m going at writing and coming up with new topics to write about but I’m not the best at editing or sharing my work on social media.
The most productive people and companies build teams to capitalize on different strengths. A team of virtual assistants allows you to not only get low-value work off your plate but it also helps you capitalize on other people’s strengths.
By working with a virtual assistant, you have the opportunity to train and onboard them into your workflow. If you don’t have your workflow documented already, onboarding a VA becomes a forcing function that requires you to create documentation of your processes. Training someone else to do part of your work helps you refine your workflow and improve it.
There’s a lot of flashy software that offers AI tools to help you become more efficient. But if you don’t know your workflow or have a process where you can use these tools, how effective will they actually be?
Figure out your workflows and write them down. Once you’ve done that, begin looking for ways to optimize your workflows using automation.
Create rules and templates to automate your workflows.
When you think of automation, you probably think of artificial intelligence, robots, and algorithms. That’s part of what automation is but it isn’t what I mean when I say automation in a productivity sense.
Automation is simply finding ways to streamline repetitive tasks. You can do this using a digital tool or you can “automate” your workflow by creating templates for yourself.
Here’s an example: as a self-employed writer I’m constantly doing business development. I’m reaching out to editors, marketing directors, and publications looking for new work opportunities. Instead of writing a new email to every person I reach out to, I use a pre-written template.
Templates can be customized and modified depending on the task, but they act as a guide to help you get things done more efficiently.
Once you have a workflow documented and templates created for repetitive tasks, you can use a tool like make.com to integrate different tools and platforms with one another.
Going back to the example I gave above for business development, if you think about it, that’s basically a sales role. I need to find potential partners to work with, points of contact to reach out to, and then go through the process of actually reaching out to them to generate leads.
I can hire a virtual assistant to find contact information for me and input it into a spreadsheet. Using make.com I can create a workflow where I take a written email template and information from that spreadsheet to draft emails in Gmail. I can then go into each email and modify them slightly before hitting send.
By working with an assistant to do this, I can familiarize myself with the data I actually need to collect and how it needs to be formatted. Eventually I’ll be able to use make.com, for the entire workflow, even finding contact information for new leads.
Whether you work for yourself or a larger company, everything in the knowledge workforce is a numbers game. You need to send out more resumes, connect with more people, and find more users for a product than ever before.
Automation allows you to increase the volume of reach you have, increasing your chances of landing new work. The more you do this, the more valuable your time becomes and the more productive you can be focusing on the things that actually matter to you.
Document your processes to be able to eventually train digital assistants.
While using software and automation tools can help you become more productive right now, that isn’t the end goal.
You’ve heard about artificial intelligence taking jobs and that’s about to start happening. OpenAI and other AI developers are about to release AI agents. Unlike AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude, agents are highly specialized digital assistants that can focus on very specific tasks and work autonomously.
Think of this like an intern. The intern doesn’t know all of the functions of every team or department within a company. They just know the team they’re working on and the tasks they’ve been assigned to perform.
AI agents will be able to do similar levels of work while making decisions independently.
By documenting your workflows you’ll be able to give a future AI agent material to train them on how to do your tasks. And by working with a human virtual assistant, you’ll be able to practice onboarding someone to follow your documentation and perform tasks for you.
If you haven’t done this before – documented a workflow and trained someone on how to execute it – you’re not going to be able to train an AI agent well. Or at least, you might find the task difficult at first.
This is where we’re ultimately heading from a productivity perspective. It’s not about hustling anymore. It’s about efficiency. Workers and business owners who are more efficient will outlast their competition, earning the lionshare of whatever new windfall lies ahead.
By doing this now, you’ll set yourself up for success in the coming years.
Putting it all together: Eliminate, Delegate, Automate
This is a framework for getting things done in a world where technological tools are going to become a core part of productivity and economic resiliency. Your ability to quickly learn these tools will not only make you more productive, it will help you stay on top of new technology as it’s released.
Start by eliminating anything you don’t need. The less you have to manage, the easier it will be to develop workflows and automate processes.
A lot of work you’re already doing is probably unessential as it is. By eliminating things that aren’t boosting your productivity – like scrolling through social media apps – the more high-value work you’ll be able to get done during a given workday.
Once you’ve gotten rid of things you don’t need to do, delegate tasks to a virtual assistant. This gives you practice delegating work while helping you prioritize high-value tasks.
I want to be clear on something: high- and low-value work isn’t a statement on personal worth or value. It’s merely a reflection of capitalizing on what you’re good at.
For me, writing is high-value work because I’m good at it. I need to get rid of work that I’m not good at – like accounting and bookkeeping – so I can spend more time honing my craft.
Building a team of people with diverse skills will allow you to do just that.
Through delegating work to someone else, you’ll have a clearer sense of what your workflows are. Begin automating your workflows to streamline your work.
Workers who leverage technology the fastest will become the most valuable workers in the near-term. The more valuable you are, the more leverage you’ll have.
If you want to switch jobs, knowing how to work with new technology like AI agents will make you more valuable. If you want to scale down your workload so you can focus on raising your kids, you can leverage automation tools to increase the value of your time so you can spend less of it on work activities.
This is the ultimate goal of becoming more productive. It’s not just about getting more things done, it’s about giving yourself more leverage.
The more leverage you have, the more efficiently you can use your time for the things that actually matter to you.