How does automation help you work smarter rather than harder?

Quick answer: automation lets you do boring, repetitive work once (writing the automation) instead of doing it by hand every time, which cuts both wasted effort and the mistakes that creep in when a human is bored or going through the motions — the trade-off is that any bug in the automation now repeats perfectly every single run too, so it still needs testing.

Automation can help you avoid overwork. In my line of work I love to automate — this is ultimately because I'm lazy, and it also helps me with two things.

One: boring work. Who likes to do the same thing over and over again? It's exciting doing something once, sometimes even twice, but by the third time, if it's something boring that you don't find interesting, it's starting to stretch a little bit. So I use automation to get the computer to do that, because computers love doing boring stuff over and over and over again.

Two: it also helps me reduce the mistakes I make, particularly if my heart's not in it or if it's boring and I'm just going through the motions — that's when it's easy for mistakes to creep in. If you've automated something, you know exactly what those mistakes could be and you can correct for them. Computers are great at doing exactly the same thing every single time. This does mean we have to be careful of bugs, because they'll do exactly the same thing every single time too.

But by having automated tasks, our computerised friends can help us do the boring stuff so that we can do exciting stuff, like thinking. Anyway, happy automating.