The blog

Struc­tur­ing how we work does entail a cer­tain amount of stan­dard­iz­ing, mean­ing we cre­ate tem­plates and mate­ri­als to reuse rather than rein­vent the wheel every time we do some­thing that we have done before.

We estab­lish and decide to main­tain a cer­tain order, and stick to it instead of chang­ing it every time we need to file some­thing away. If we have writ­ten a good reply to a ques­tion we got, we can reuse the writ­ten response the next time we get the same query. If we devel­op a method for doing some­thing we do often, we will repeat the same pro­ce­dure the next time we do the task instead of spend­ing time and effort on chang­ing the process.

This kind of stan­dard­iz­ing does result in a cer­tain degree of automation.

Refin­ing thoughtlessly?
A mem­ber of the audi­ence for one of my lec­tures asked me a ques­tion the oth­er day which I have nev­er got­ten before: ​”Will we stop think­ing once we have auto­mat­ed tasks? Is there at least a risk that we do?”. He had tes­ti­fied to the ben­e­fits of automat­ing to friends and col­leagues him­self, but got­ten this argu­ment as a response.

I would say the answer is both ​”yes” and ​”no”.

Yes, we will not think as much as before when need­ing to for­mu­late texts we have writ­ten on pre­vi­ous occa­sion (since we have already com­posed that response or for­mu­lat­ed that text).

No, we nev­er ​”stop” think­ing (or being cre­ative, if that is what we real­ly mean), but we do get more time and focus for think­ing about and cre­at­ing the things, texts, meth­ods and more which we have not devel­oped or cre­at­ed before.

Thus, do not fear automat­ing aspects of your workday.

Do this
Through­out the day today, notice or active­ly look for things you work on or with which you could reuse at some lat­er date (to a greater extent than you already are).

Save doc­u­ments as tem­plates for the next time you are going to do some­thing sim­i­lar, cre­ate a ​”quick-step” or short­cut for an oper­a­tion you per­form often, save snip­pets of texts that might be reusable in either the ​”quick parts”-feature you use in Out­look or Word (if you do use them) or in the text-expan­sion tool you pre­fer (such as TextExpander).

Firm up your structure
If you stan­dard­ize, reuse and auto­mate things you cre­ate and do in your work, you will piece by piece mold a sol­id foun­da­tion onto which you can con­tin­ue build­ing and grow­ing. More and more parts of your dai­ly work will run smoother, even auto­mat­i­cal­ly, which gives you the oppor­tu­ni­ty to spend your time explor­ing what­ev­er fas­ci­nates you most in your cho­sen field at the moment. Instead of being or feel­ing weighed and slowed down by rou­tine tasks, you will get more things done with less effort.

What is your way?
What was the task or oper­a­tion you most recent­ly auto­mat­ed or sim­pli­fied? Leave a com­ment below and tell us.