Task Mastery: Sarah’s Favorite Automations
By Sarah Rushakoff
I’ve always liked taking things apart and figuring out how they work. When I was a kid, I used to take apart the family’s ever-silent rotary telephone to figure out how to make it ring.
Workflows and processes can be disassembled the same way, even though they don’t have mechanical pieces to rearrange. Recurring, repetitive, and tedious tasks are particularly fascinating to me. I love to figure out ways to make them happen behind the scenes while I do things that require more effort, skill, or time.
When I’m trying to come up with creative solutions, my mantra is, “I can’t be the first person to have this problem.” It takes some digging around, but it’s usually possible to cobble together pieces of other people’s solutions to solve the issue in a satisfying and functional way. If you’re really lucky, you’ll find a perfect solution you can use as-is, because someone already made it!
A Very Specific One
Confession: I live my life on Google Calendar. I just checked and I have 11 calendars visible, including personal, shared, and subscribed. So when I needed to block off time in my work calendar because my colleagues needed to see when I was unavailable, I wasn’t sure how to do it. But, I told myself, “I can’t be the first person to have this problem.” After some searching, I found a few resources that did exactly what I needed.
The first couple of things I found were paid services like Zapier, Reclaim, and Foresight. I’m happy to pay for something really useful, but I prefer looking for a DIY solution that’s free! I poked around some more and found a pretty recent, very relevant blog post by Janel Loi. Using her instructions, plus referencing a few other sources, I was able to use Google Apps Scripts to block off time in my work calendar. It works super well, and it even hides my personal event details so my coworkers don’t find out I needed to make an appointment with myself so I’d remember to eat.
Using a tool like Google Apps Scripts requires a certain amount of confidence with monkeying around in Javascript. It’s not difficult to do, but it can be overwhelming if that’s not in your comfort zone. If that’s true for you, check out the ready-to-use options above, and do some poking around for yourself. You might find a free trial of something new that does just what you want.
The Big Ones
The applications I consider my “heavy hitters” are ones like Hootsuite, Trello, and Google Drive. They aren’t automations in themselves, but these big guys have incredibly robust controls and settings that make my job a lot easier.
Hootsuite is what we use at Campfire Collective to schedule and manage most of our social media posts. Full stop, I couldn’t do my job without the ability to draft and schedule posts in advance. There are many other standalone social media management tools, including Sprout, Buffer, and Agorapulse. Many social media platforms offer their own management and scheduling tools through their app or website. You’ll likely end up using a combination of several resources.
Trello is a project management and task-scheduling tool. It helps us stay on top of personal tasks and larger projects that involve multiple team members. The automation options in Trello are powerful and intuitive, but I admit I’ve gotten lost in the weeds messing around with them instead of doing what I was supposed to do in the first place. Similar project management platforms I’ve used before are Asana, Toggl, Workamajig, and Basecamp. The one you end up using might depend on what your company or client already has set up.
Google Drive is what we use for cloud storage. It’s pretty easy to use, and most people you end up working with will be at least a little familiar with it. Why am I including it in a list of automations? Because you can sync part or all of the shared drive to your computer’s hard drive if you want. That way, when you save a file to the drive, it ends up on your computer… and vice-versa. It does take up storage on each device, but it can be really helpful if you switch often between devices to do different tasks.
The Ones of Which We Do Not Speak
Social media platforms make a lot of data available to developers so they can do cool things with it. Examples are most of the things I’ve already described in this blog post. Like when you can use your Google account to log into other websites, or how Hootsuite can “talk” to the social media companies in order to publish posts, or how you can play a YouTube video in your Facebook feed. Basically, whenever companies play nice with each other to offer a service, that’s because their APIs allow it. Don’t come for me if this explanation isn’t technically perfect, I’m just a marketing guy, not a software engineer.
Access to APIs can be put to uses that are a little more mischievous, but just as helpful! I use apps and tools that do things like manage follower/following counts and automatically download images from Instagram. Other less scrupulous folks might use bots to artificially inflate follower counts and make spam comments. I recommend you stay far away from those more nefarious automations.
For Everyone
What about that old phone? Eventually, I figured it out: it was missing the little hammer that made the noise! My dad had removed it years before so the phone wouldn’t ring in his ear from his bedroom nightstand. No amount of my tinkering would have made that phone ring again. If you spend a lot of time looking for a solution and come up empty, remember that sometimes there’s not a fix.
Each choice has benefits and drawbacks, which can change unexpectedly because some tech team made improvements to their platform. Your ingenious, perfect idea will need periodic double-checking to ensure consistent results. That helpful sync can slow your device down so much that it’s not worth running it. You might get so wrapped up in your processes that you forget there needs to be a product.
Do some searching and try out some new tools. Ask your friends and coworkers to share their tips and tricks with you. And when you figure out what works for you, tell the world! Or at least tell me. I want to know!
