We often think about optimizing our day, our work life, our home life. And by optimizing we thing or improving how we do things.

Here’s something else to think about: how many things to you do every day? How many of those things could you automate?

A good place to start is email. Most of us start the day by sorting and processing the email that came in since we left work the day before. Could you setup rules to automatically sort emails, automatically forward emails to the right people? The amount of time you will invest in setting up the automation will pay for itself in no time.

Here at Websystems, we receive payment confirmations via email and we need to sort those emails in the morning. It doesn’t seem like a time-consuming activity (it takes Sylvain about 20 minutes every morning to sort payments). However, if we count 20 minutes per work day, the total is 80+ hours! That means that Sylvain spends over two weeks a year just sorting emails.

Implementing an automated system to sort the payment emails would take a few days of development work. Those 2 or 3 days of extra work form the developer would add 2 weeks of productive time to Sylvain’s year.

It’s not always about doing things better. Optimization is also about automating the right things.