Limit Breaks #4: Automation

WHERE'S ELI WITH THE GUNS?

“The first figure of note to attempt the goal of interchangeable parts was Eli Whitney. Having seen his attempt to market his cotton gin end in disaster, Whitney turned in 1797 to the idea of gun manufacture. At the time, Congress anticipated an attack from Napoleon. Playing on this fear, Whitney was able to initiate the practice of government contracts for arms dealers -- a custom that continues to this day.
 
“The contract was astoundingly generous. Going into effect on June 21, 1798, it called for Whitney to produce 10,000 muskets, the first 4,000 of which would be delivered in a year and a half. For each musket delivered, he would receive $13.40, for a grand total of $134,000, with advances along the way if necessary. What made this handsome sum all the more astonishing was the fact that Whitney had almost no knowledge of gunmaking in a time when the best armories were unable to produce more than 5,000 guns a year.
 
“Whitney set up a factory in East Haven, Connecticut and drove his workers hard, but come his first deadline on September 30, 1799, he had no muskets to show for himself. Indeed, he hadn't even equipped his armory. Thinking quickly, he wrote a letter to Secretary of State Oliver Wolcott, announcing a "new principle" in manufacturing. This principle, he claimed, would revolutionize that arms industry even as it improved the quality of the goods.
 
“"One of my primary objects," he wrote, "is to form tools so the tools themselves shall fashion the work and give to every part its just proportion -- which when once accomplished, will give expedition, uniformity, and exactness to the whole." Intrigued, Wolcott granted an extension, on the condition that Whitney demonstrate his results.
 
“In January of 1801, before an audience that included President John Adams and Whitney's old friend, President-elect Thomas Jefferson, Whitney personally showed how he could fit 10 different locks into the same musket using nothing but an ordinary screwdriver. He then did one better and took 100 different locks apart, scrambled their pieces and put them back together "by taking the first pieces which come to hand." His audience was amazed.”
 
-- “ Eastman and Mass Production ”, PBS.org
 
***
 
FICTION AND REALITY
 
The American novelist Tom Clancy once wryly noted, “The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”
 
We’re going to be talking about automation  this chapter.
 
It’s very useful stuff.
 
It’s also supremely complicated to tell the tale of it.
 
Where to even begin? The whole thing is almost hilarious in its mess of how it came about.
 
Well, let’s start in media res  – in the middle of the action.
 
I’m generally proud to be an American, and I think if you look at the historical record, for all of America’s flaws, American leadership has mostly acted in a well-intentioned and good faith way on the international scene.
 
A notable exception is how the early Americans treated the French after the French Revolution.
 
The French and Spanish monarchies supported the 13 Colonies in the American War of Independence, largely to hurt their rival power, the British Empire.

This included the French King giving loans to the Americans to finance the war, to be paid back over time.
 
When the French Revolution followed the American Revolution, the American leaders did something perhaps a bit underhanded: when the new French Republican government wanted to collect on the French loans to the Americans, the Americans hemmed and hawed a little bit, and said: “Well, gee, you know, the French King  loaned us the money from the French Crown , and you killed the King and dissolved the Crown, and so, umm, there’s no one for us to pay our loans back to, and they’re nullified.”
 
The French didn’t take well to this, and America and France were on the brink of war at the end of the 1790’s. In fact, there was an undeclared “Quasi-War” when American and French naval ships harassed and attacked each other.
 
Worrying that perhaps the French might declare a full war against America, Congress authorized the manufacture and purchase of weapons to fight the war.
 
One of those commissions went to Eli Whitney, who invented the famous cotton gin to clean cotton by mechanical means. He’d never made weapons before, but he got the commission on the strength of his reputation.
 
Unfortunately, he missed his first deadline to deliver the muskets. When American government officials called angrily on him – “Hey, Eli, where’s the guns?” – he replied that he had something marvelously better  than the old way of making weapons to show them.
 
***
 
REALITY AND FICTION
 
It’s hard to do justice to just how much Whitney’s demonstration would have shocked those in attendance. Let’s try –
 
“Until [Whitney’s demonstration], all firearms were made by highly skilled artisans who made the entire weapon, crafting each part from scratch and filing and fitting them by hand. Each part, and by extension each musket, was one of a kind—the trigger made for one gun wouldn’t work on any other because it fit only that musket. Broken muskets could only be repaired by expert craftsmen. If the weapon broke in the middle of a military campaign, you were out of luck. Armorers capable of such skill were scarce, and new ones took forever to train, which was why the U.S. arsenals were having such a hard time making muskets.”
 
-- “ Changing the World Twice: The Story of Eli Whitney ”

Before Eli Whitney, high-precision gunsmiths were required to keep weapons functioning, and every musket required precision custom work to build, repair, and maintain. Everything was custom.
 
“A “stand of arms” was the flintlock-era term for a musket and its accessories (ramrod and bayonet). The accessories had traditionally been hand-fitted to the gun, too: as strange as it sounds to a modern soldier, if you and the fellow in the next rank inadvertently swapped bayonets, you might both be left unable to fix them.”
 
-- “ Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts ”
 
Congress had ordered 10,000 regular muskets from Whitney, but when he fell behind on his delivery schedule, he decided to buy some time for himself by showing he could make a far better weapon that required far less from gunsmiths and armorers to both manufacture and to keep working.
 
The general historical consensus now is that Whitney faked much of the demonstration – his factories weren’t good enough to make weapons truly interchangeable, so he cheated a little bit by bringing a few different batches of prototype interchangeable-part guns with him to the demonstration.
 
Nevertheless, Whitney wasn’t caught – and it didn’t matter anyways. The idea of having all guns made to the same standard, where parts can be rapidly replaced and swapped out between them, absolutely captivated the attention of the Americans in attendance. Right away, they saw the applications to warfare – and perhaps, to all of industry.
 
***
 
THE BIRTH OF THE AMERICAN SYSTEM
 
“The American system of manufacturing was a set of manufacturing methods that evolved in the 19th century.  The two notable features were the extensive use of interchangeable parts and mechanization for production, which resulted in more efficient use of labor compared to hand methods.  […] In the 1850s, the "American system" was contrasted to the British factory system which had evolved over the previous century. Within a few decades, manufacturing technology had evolved further, and the ideas behind the "American" system were in use worldwide. Therefore, in manufacturing today, which is global in the scope of its methods, there is no longer any such distinction.
 
“The American system involved semi-skilled labor using machine tools and jigs to make standardized, identical, interchangeable parts, manufactured to a tolerance, which could be assembled  with a minimum of time and skill , requiring little to no fitting.
 
“Since the parts are interchangeable, it was also possible to separate manufacture from assembly, and assembly could be carried out by semi-skilled labor on an assembly line—an example of the division of labor.”
 
--  Wikipedia: American System of Manufacturing
 
The United States always had a low population relative to its natural resources, and so labor was often scarce. Soon after seeing Whitney’s demonstration, there was an explosion of activity to create interchangeable systems in making all types of consumer goods, industrial goods, and parts.
 
It spread internationally quickly and was adopted by just about every country. Eventually, interchangeable parts in weapons hit its zenith under the Soviet Russian weaponmaker Mikhail Kalashnikov, whereas the Japanese took the concepts the furthest in a lot of complex consumer products like cars and televisions.
 
Even though Whitney’s demonstration had a bit of deceptiveness to it, it captured the imagination of the early Americans, who ran it out to its conclusions and quickly led to America being one of the highest-output industrial countries in the world.
 
But this raises an interesting question – how come it didn’t happen sooner? There’s records that Carthaginian warships from 2000 years ago used interchangeable parts, and likewise, the system had been re-invented by Venice in the Venetian Arsenal from the 1100’s to the 1500’s with great success in making ships, artillery, and firearms. But how come it didn’t diffuse widely and “stick” until the 1800’s?
 
Why didn’t this innovation – which could be clearly understood in ancient times – become widespread earlier?
 
This is an important question, not just from a historical perspective, but also regarding implementing these principles in your own life.
 
Remember the question – we’ll come back to it, after we analyze the benefits of adopting these principles.
 
***
 
LIMIT BREAKS #4: AUTOMATION
 
Automation is a fancy buzzword these days, but the principles behind it are remarkably simple and sound.
 
As we try to do more things in life, we run up against fundamental limits. Chief among them is that there are only 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week. That’s the final limit, in the end – everything must be navigated through time.
 
You can increase how many actions you can do per minute by training and practice, and that goes a long way towards being able to do more. But regardless of how good you get at quickly doing things, that too hits limits – after a certain point, you just can’t get any faster at a particular type of cognitive or mechanical action.
 
And, just as importantly, you get tired. None of us works every waking minute at peak effectiveness. (I’ve tried. It’s probably not possible.)
 
Automation greatly helps us do more, by decreasing the number of things we need to do to produce an outcome. Putting dirty clothing in a washing machine is more automated than washing the clothing by hand.
 
Regardless of how well you deploy your time and how quickly you can work per minute, the person loading and unloading a washing machine is always going to be faster than someone washing the same amount of clothing by hand.

That’s an obvious example – it might seem trivial, even – but it’s the root of what we’re driving at here. By reducing the number of steps that require manual intervention, one of the chief limits to higher performance can be broken through.
 
***
 
THE AUTOMATION SPECTRUM
 
Most people, I contend, do not understand what automation is .
 
More importantly, they do not know how to automate things.
 
In the common (incorrect) understanding, something is either automated or it is not.
 
After a lot of work in this area over the last few years, I don’t believe that’s true. Rather, I think it’s a spectrum.
 
Kai Zau and I work a lot on automation – in commercial work, in nonprofit work, for education, and in a variety of personal and life projects too.
 
Here are the primary four stages along the automation spectrum, as we see them –
 
Bespoke -> BRP -> ERP -> Automated
 
Something Bespoke  is completely custom. When you hear about a “fine bespoke suit,” that’s a fully custom-made suit. This is a type of work that is not automated at all – every single time you do it, you’re doing it from scratch. You can become more skilled at doing it faster, but you’re starting from the beginning every single time.
 
From there, things go into Barely Repeatable Processes  (BRP), and from there to an Easily Repeatable Process . These terms came from  Sigurd Rinde , a terrific, little-known thinker who has done some excellent work on the topic.
 
A Barely Repeatable Process  uses common ways of doing things, but still requires a high level of skill and judgment to execute. An auditor from an accounting firm doing due diligence on a complicated business merger follows some checklists and processes, but there is still immense amounts of human judgment and training needed in advance  to be able to run that process.
 
An Easily Repeatable Process  is one which doesn’t require much skill, education, or advanced training to complete; you can be trained in how to run that process, or even figure it out from just instructions, without coming in with expert levels of knowledge. Most fast food franchises, like McDonalds, are run on collections of ERPs. There’s an exact way to take orders, enter them into the cash register, give a receipt with an order number on it, cook the food, and serve the food in exact containers, exactly the same way in a bag or on a tray, in an exactly the same pickup place every single time.
 
Finally, there’s “full automation” – when a human doesn’t need to interact with a system any more to produce the outcomes. If you saved a regular order of supplies from Amazon.com and logged in to order them from time to time, that’d be an Easily Repeatable Process. If you scheduled the deliveries automatically every two weeks without further intervention, it would be nearly fully automated.
 
***
 
DRIVING THINGS DOWN THE AUTOMATION SPECTRUM
 
Most people think of things as either “automated” or “not automated,” but again, I believe that’s an incorrect way to think about it. Rather, in any complicated work, there will be dozens of small individual processes that go into it. By driving things from Bespoke -> BRP -> ERP -> Automated, they get “more automated” each step of the way.
 
If you wanted to build a cabin and had to go scout which trees to chop down for lumber, chop down the trees, and treat the wood yourself, followed by drawing your own architectural plans from scratch, and then building the cabin to those specs, it would be fully bespoke.
 
If you bought a manual on how to build cabins and adopted those designs, it would move the planning aspect from Bespoke to a Barely Repeatable Process. If you bought the treated wood at Home Depot, it would drive the lumber procurement from Bespoke to an Easily Repeatable Process.
 
If you’re a party planner and you plan every party from scratch, then every party is Bespoke (fully custom). If you have a simple checklist you make sure to include each time, it becomes a Barely Repeatable Process – you still need the skill and judgment to be able to implement the checklist, but you’re not starting from scratch. If you have detailed checklists and templates that you use each time, a book of suppliers and venues, and standard orders that can be filled out in a spreadsheet, those become Easily Repeatable Processes. If you use a technology like Eventbright for RSVPs and for automatic reminders to go out about the party, that aspect becomes fully automated.
 
Not all work is fully automatable – or rather, the “fullest automation possible” in a given domain will vary; some things are more conducive to automation than others. Brain surgery might include some easily repeatable processes, but will always require technical training to do, and has fully custom aspects as well. On the other hand, simple blood and urine tests for first screenings can get pretty close to easily repeatable processes and nearly fully automated.
 
***
 
THE ADVANTAGES OF AUTOMATION
 
The advantages of automation are rather clear – it reduces the amount of labor time needed to produce a result, and it reduces the amount of skill and judgment needed to run a process.
 
Human judgment, skill, and technical ability are serious limits to getting more done. By driving things down the spectrum of automation, those limits can be surpassed. It becomes cheaper, easier, and faster to do things.
 
***
 
WHY AUTOMATION DOESN’T HAPPEN
 
So why doesn’t  automation happen?
 
There’s strong evidence that Carthage was using interchangeable parts in shipbuilding as early as over 2000 years ago. Periodically, a particular civilization will get on an automation kick like Venice did in the Middle Ages, and their output will soar. But this “soft technology” came and went across history, and only stuck fairly recently.
 
Why?
 
I think the answer is important, because it will also shed light on your own life.
 
And here is my answer – the first step, going from fully bespoke  to standardized towards a barely repeatable process , is very expensive and time-consuming.
 
If you’re a skilled woodcutter and a skilled carpenter in a world without any formal processes around either of those, it will always be faster to go build another cabin than to sit and think about a universally standardized design for wood and cabins that work across a wide variety of situations.
 
“ Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts ” –
 
“Whitney’s guns still had a lot of hand work in them. In general, parts that could be turned and screw slots on early Whitney muskets show machine tool work, and flat and irregular parts show hand filing. His key innovation may have been organizing the work by type of work rather than by type of gun part. Workers seem to have been specialized, also: if you were a filer, you were likely to be a filer of lock plates, or of triggers, rather than a generalist. And these filers were paid, apparently, piecework rates.”
 
Whitney held out the promise out of interchangeable parts in weaponmaking, but he never fully reached that standard in his own life. It was only his heirs that were able to actually actualize Whitney’s vision, decades after he started to work on it.

Decades!
 
“In 1825… 195 separate operations in musket production were listed in a report about Springfield Armory, and were identified as performed by hand or by waterpower. The number of operations per part ranged from three for the sear to 24 for the barrel. Among them were, for instance, five for the trigger: forging by hand, trimming by water, filing by hand, polishing by water, and hardening by hand. At the Whitney Armory, as we currently understand the site, if a trigger went through the same sequence, it would be forged in the east bank forge shop, then taken to the west bank machine and filing shop for trimming, filing and polishing, and returned to the east bank for hardening before finally joining other parts of the “mounting” in the stocking shop on the west bank. Each of the other 29 musket parts mentioned in the list would follow its own sequence of journeys back and forth across the Mill River for shaping, cutting, and heat treating. ”
 
A skilled gunsmith could “work by feel” – using their intuition and experience – to make a gun.
 
Contrast that against those early modern armories which had over 195 different operations that all had to be studied, understood, standardized, setting required quality levels (“tolerances” they’re called in engineering), managing all the work so it adds up, and perfecting the process.
 
The gains to this type of standardization and automation are immense; take for instance  Whitney’s earlier intervention of the cotton gin  –

“Using Whitney’s cotton gin, in one day a laborer could clean as much as 10 pounds of upland cotton, which before would have taken 10 days to clean by hand. If a larger gin powered by water or a horse was used, a laborer could clean as much cotton in one day as would have taken more than seven weeks to clean by hand. […] Between 1785, the year that steam power was introduced to the textile industry, and the early 1860s, the price of cotton cloth fell by more than 99%. That’s the equivalent of a price of Tommy Hilfiger jeans falling from $5,000 to $50. ”
 
But again, this required changes in how cotton was harvested, how it was cleaned, how it was woven into thread, standard designs of clothing, how the cotton was dyed, how it was sewn, and how it was shipped.
 
The standardization and automation of all those processes would take an immense  amount of time, study, thinking, and design to standardize. In any given short window of time, it’s almost always faster to produce one more unit in the current way of doing things than it is to study and experiment with a system to mass produce more of it easier and more efficiently.
 
That’s why it rarely happens.
 
***
 
GUIDANCE, I: MAKE TIME AND SPACE FOR AUTOMATION IN YOUR LIFE
 
Obviously, we won’t be able to cover the entirety of automation in a single chapter… I’ve read dozens of books on the topic and related to the topic, and frankly, I still feel like a beginner much of the time.
 
Automation might be worth its own series at The Strategic Review at some point in the future, but the first piece of guidance I have for you is to recognize its advantages and to make time and space for it in your life.
 
Driving things down the automation spectrum means things take less time to do and complete more efficiently, can be done on less energy and when less smart, and means quality will be more consistent over time.
 
The biggest reason people don’t do automation is because they’re too busy, or at least, they don’t make time for it.
 
The first piece of guidance I have for you, then –
 
Move beyond just  doing work, into studying your work and how to make it better and easier over time.
 
That’s an easy sentence to write, an easy sentence to read, but it’s something the majority of people aren’t doing.
 
My good friend Kai Zau has had a very successful life, has achieved a lot in a very short period of time, but to my eyes, it looks like he works “less hard” in some respects than a lot of other people I know who are less successful. He still works very hard, but rarely seems stressed or overwhelmed, and doesn’t put a “heroic effort” into work very often – and yet, he’s constantly succeeding.
 
One of the biggest reasons is that  Kai hates doing the same type of work twice without stopping to improve things after the first run of it.
 
Any time we do a project together and are going to do a similar version again, he insists on studying everything that went right and wrong, and making decisions for how to do it better on the next version.
 
Not “perfect” – just “better.”
 
He has an acronym, RUNI Work – “Recurring Urgent Non-Important” Work, that’s his most hated type of work. Whenever he spots RUNI Work, he looks to design and improve things so that the RUNI Work gets designed and automated away.
 
Surprising, this doesn’t take very long to do. If a project takes 10 weeks to start and complete, it might only take 1-2 weeks of study and design improvements in order to make the next time take only 6-8 weeks to complete. It’s “net free” to do, but most people rush from fighting one fire to fighting another fire, and thus, their work never gets easier.
 
The specific techniques and strategies of automation can easily be learned, but the tactical points are worthless without adopting this principle –
 
Move beyond just  doing work, into studying your work and how to make it better and easier over time.
 
***
 
GUIDANCE, II: STANDARDIZE
 
In order to automate anything, you need to standardize the outputs (the results, what you want to happen) and you need to standardize the inputs (the work you’ll be doing).
 
To standardize outputs, you need to sit down and brainstorm what levels of quality and performance you want out of your work/outcomes. This means clearing a few hours from your calendar, and sitting down writing out every outcome that could  happen and picking which mix of outcomes are most profitable and desirable.
 
You should standardize outputs, to some extent, before looking to standardize inputs.
 
In other words, start with what quality levels and output you want. From there, you can work to pick the tools and work processes that are most reliable and inexpensive to get to that level of performance.
 
But again, you’ll need to clear time out to really sit and think and compare mixes of work, to determine what levels of quality (outputs) you want, which will determine your inputs. The Russian AK-class rifles are generally seen as being less accurate than American M-class rifles, but they use less precise parts and are thus less expensive to make and easier to maintain. If you’re making a precision sniper rifle, that calls for higher quality parts and workmanship than if you’re making loose infantry assault rifles.
 
There’s often no “single right answer” of what level of quality you should standardize to; it depends on your strategy and which tradeoffs you want. But sitting down and thinking, and standardizing on any  spec is better than not doing it, if the work will happen repeatedly going forwards.
 
***
 
GUIDANCE, III: OPERATIONALIZE AUTOMATION INTO YOUR LIFE
 
Once you’ve decided to make time and space for automation, and started standardizing outputs and inputs, then you merely need to install regular review periods to “chip away at it.”
 
Automation isn’t a single gigantic binary thing that must be done or not done; rather, it comes from constantly making things a little more standard, reducing the work a little bit, making re-usable standard parts that can be used over and over again, designing a system to produce less RUNI work and less inefficiencies and broken parts.

This happens over time.
 
To get the benefits of automation, you want to always be doing it a little bit  – this means building it into your operations , building it into how you do things.
 
The most fanatic example of this is probably Toyota. When a single error is detected on their automobile production lines, any worker who sees it is expected to pull an alarm that shuts down the entire assembly line until the problem is fixed and identified so that it never happens again.
 
That’s obviously very hardcore. Each shutdown costs hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost performance. And yet, they do it every single time, and are thus forced to improve rapidly.

On the other end of the spectrum, you might simply look at how to reduce time required and increase automation every 2-3 months. That's probably enough to capture the easiest gains periodically.
 
If your life is very project-based, an easy way to operationalize automation into your life is to always schedule a week after any major project completes to study what went right and what went wrong, to standardize what went right so it happens every single time, and to design new ways of doing things so the negative and most expensive aspects can be made easier going forwards. Just putting a single extra week on the calendar after any major project goes a long ways towards getting great automation done.
 
***
 
A FEW SIMPLE EXAMPLE CANDIDATES FOR AUTOMATION
 
Everyone’s work is a little different, but there’s some universal and common things we all do.
 
Email:
*If you get two very different types of email, such as urgent work email and nonurgent email, you can divide them between two different email addresses and develop different processes for answering them.
*If you get a regular type of email, you can write template replies that can be copy/pasted every time it comes up.
*You can save templates to Textexpander on the Mac or the Windows equivalent to make them easier to copy/paste.
*You can reduce incoming email by doing things like writing a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), making announcements and details more clear, and avoiding problems upstream.
 
Communications:
*Creating a standard template agenda for a meeting goes a long way towards saving 10-20 minutes each meeting “getting on the same page.”
*You can move many ad hoc “got a minute?” type meetings to a chat app like Slack.
*You can get a Slack bot to ask questions as prompts daily for people. Kai designed a Slack bot for us that asks, every day at 8AM,
“1. Progress to celebrate?
2. Today's top priority?
3. Anything blocking / needing coordination?
4. How's our tempo / trajectory? How could we improve? ”
 
Multimedia:
*Creating standard folders for photos and videos on Dropbox, pre-shared with the right people, goes a long towards keeping these usable.
*You can experiment with tools that make it easier to rapidly edit and polish up photos and videos before posting them to different sites.
*You can develop simple checklists of where photos and videos are posted, and do this every single time. Miguel Hernandez of  Grumo Media  does excellent work on this.

Personal Finance:
*Getting two separate credit cards for business expenses and non-business expenses goes a long way towards keeping your taxes organized.
*There’s a lot of ways to get all credit card and expense data to export from a bank’s website to be easily imported into accounting software. It takes a few hours to set up, but then makes things happen faster going forwards.
*You can set automatic transfers to savings accounts and retirement accounts to come in when your paycheck lands, automatically.
*You can use something like mint.com or ones of its competitors to get all your aggregate spending in a single place for review, if you use multiple cards.
*For squaring up on joint expenses, you can’t beat splitwise.com – very easy to enter shared expenses on it, and to square up with a person you split expenses with later.
 
Food:
*It takes a while to set up, but eating 80% of your meals from a standardized meal plan goes a long way towards making healthy food choices automatic.
*Going further on that point, if you’re looking for a certain body composition (losing weight or gaining weight), you can look to standardize all your meals to the same amount of calories – 500 calories, 600 calories, 800 calories, or whatever. For instance, two cups of oatmeal with one scoop of protein powder is 420 calories, 3 eggs on a salad with two small cans of tuna is 460 calories, and one Mealsquare is 500 calories – thus, if you eat 4 meals of those type in a day, you’ll be around 1700-2000 calories. A double-chicken Chipotle bowl with brown rice, beans, cheese, and no sour cream or guacamole is 835 calories; that can swap in for two meals. Again, this takes a little while to set up – probably 5-6 hours to calculate out different meals – but then makes eating to precise targets very easy and fast.
*Pre-cooking a week’s worth of food every Sunday goes a long ways.
*Setting up standard delivery orders of food from your grocery store, Amazon.com in the USA, KateandKimi.com in Shanghai, etc, goes a long way towards having the same food arrive each week.
 
***
 
SLOWLY AGGREGATING GAINS
 
Perhaps this stuff can seem boring – heck, maybe it is boring. But the upside of it is, if you regularly reduce the amount of time and thinking needed to produce outcomes, gradually your days get easier and you have more time to do whatever you want.

There are, of course, many more ways to automate work that are specific to what you’re doing. With writing TSR, I have a format I follow of macro-outlining a series, defining what research I need, and then doing research rapidly while saving articles and information to an app called “Pocket” which automatically syncs to my iPhone and computer desktop. I estimate that setting this up took only 2-3 hours, and it saves me 30 minutes or so per issue. That was 3 hours once , to save 26 hours per year .
 
If you regularly make choices like that, and build the mindset of automation into your life, works gets easier and more reliable over time. You spend an hour or two, here and there, to buy back 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes per week. As you do this, it gets easier to get things done in less time and have more bandwidth available to do bigger and better things, easier and more smoothly, over time.
 
Is it boring? A little bit, maybe. But perhaps, far less boring than constantly being bogged down and firefighting while overwhelmed with trivial details.