Automate Your Routine Actions: Find Quick-Wins in Your Workflow
Automation is a required tool of modern businesses and future-proof professionals. It multiplies your output and the quality of your work to help you stay ahead of the competition and advance your aspirations.
But one of the questions I get most commonly is, "How do I know what to automate?"
So I'm going break down the attributes to look for in your workflow that indicate an automation opportunity.
Then we'll walk through 25 of the most common automation examples for a better sense of how those attributes manifest, and to inspire your own strategy.
Why Automate?
So why bother with automation? When you consider them in aggregate, the benefits of automation are truly immeasurable.
It multiplies your productivity while reducing demand for your resources.
By avoiding human errors, you ensure the consistency and quality of your work.
Automation allows you to scale without hiring new team members.
And when you delegate to robots, you can focus your goals instead menial tasks.
What Is Automation?
When we talk about automating our workflow, we mean we're configuring a computer to perform one or more actions in response to a specified trigger event. In other words:
"If this happens, do that."
A few quick examples:
If it's the 15th of the month, send an invoice.
If that invoice is unpaid after two weeks, send the client a reminder and notify me in Slack.
If a prospect becomes a client, send an onboarding form.
If that form is submitted, create a database record, relate it to the client, and generate a summary document.
If a meeting is created in Outlook, create a corresponding Meeting in Notion to manage it.
Where to Configure Automations
Generally, there are two types of places where you configure these sorts of automations.
Within Apps
In some cases, you can configure automations directly within the apps they control. And they'll typically let you integrate with other apps you'd use alongside them.
For example, in accounting apps like QuickBooks and FreshBooks, you can schedule recurring invoices and integrate with apps like BILL to log your transactions automatically.
You can configure form builders like Typeform and Tally to send new submissions to your favorite database or spreadsheet app, like Notion, Airtable or Google Sheets.
And within email marketing and ecommerce services, you can automate personalized messages when users take actions like subscribing or abandoning their shopping cart.
Automation Platforms
For apps without native automation support, or for more complex needs, platforms like Zapier and Make are dedicated to automation and integrations. They allow you to construct workflows in a flowchart format, with custom triggers and multiple apps exchanging information.
And if you use an iPhone, you've likely come across the Shortcuts app. That's basically a mobile Zapier or Make, where you define a trigger and then the actions that should follow it.
Crossovers
And then some apps fall in a gray area between both categories. Airtable and Coda are incredibly versatile apps for managing any type of information, and both offer robust automation capabilities with integrations.
In fact, before resorting to Zapier or Make, I always check first to see if Airtable or Coda can do the trick. In many cases, they can—with a much simpler configuration and lower cost.
I have an upcoming edition of the Productivity Nexus newsletter that's dedicated to what you can do with Airtable and Coda without needing the beefier automation apps. So be sure you're subscribed and keep an eye on your inbox.
Find Your Top Opportunities for Automation
One of the biggest hurdles to getting started with automation is knowing what to automate. With a methodical approach, it's easy to identify automation opportunities in your workflow that deliver major gains with relatively little effort to configure.
Outline Your Workflow
To pinpoint them, start by documenting your standard procedures and recurring actions. You can create an actual flowchart or just a simple bullet list. Anthropic's Claude AI chatbot does a great job converting bullet lists to flowcharts using the Mermaid syntax.
And as you think through your workflow, consider the bottlenecks, where the process is held up by tedious manual work or delayed responses. Those are absolutely the most fruitful opportunities for automation.
Signs of Automatability
As you log and later review your actions, you'll want to identify those with attributes well suited for automation. The more of these attributes an action contains, the better candidate it is for automating.
Green flags automation:
Rules — We talked about triggers and actions as, "if this happens, then do that." This sort of logic is the top indicator of a process that should be automated.
Standardization — Any time you are, or could be, populating a template or following a defined series of steps.
Recurrence — Actions that occur at a regular frequency or in particular circumstances.
Repetition — Processes where you perform the same action over and over, especially for multiple items in a list.
Analysis — Summarizing or finding trends in data.
Syncing — Collecting, sending or synchronizing information among people or apps.
Common Automations
Let's walk through some of the most commonly automated procedures for a better sense of where these green-flag attributes manifest. And I'm actively creating tutorials and templates for these and other useful automations, so be sure to the Productivity Nexus newsletter and my YouTube channel. And let me know in the YouTube comments if you have particular templates you'd like me to prioritize.
Accounting
Accounting the ripest function for automations, and one of the best places to learn how to configure them.
No invoice should be sent manually, nor should any reminder.
Every payment you make and receive should be electronic and automatically logged. Any modern business that tries to pay with a paper check should raise a red flag.
And more broadly, building your own accounting system will also help you understand relational databases in apps like Airtable, Notion and Coda. My system in Airtable tracks all of my accounts, transactions, invoices, orders, customers and subscriptions much more effectively and intuitively than clunky apps like QuickBooks.
Customer Journey
No matter the nature of your business or program, you can automatically nurture customers or users through your cycle:
Prospecting — You can automate your prospecting by scraping LinkedIn and other sources for your ideal audience, then personalizing outreach to them.
Inquiry Response — When a prospect submits an inquiry form, you can automatically respond with details. And in general, forms are endlessly beneficial when it comes to collecting information. They require exactly what you need, deter unwanted senders, structure the submitted information, and trigger automations. In a second, I'll break down my FormAQ system that leverages the power of forms.
Stage Messaging — When a lead advances to another stage in Notion, Airtable or your traditional CRM, you can automatically send the message for that stage with personalized variables. One of my clients in New York buys hundreds of diamonds every year. I built an Airtable system for them to manage each opportunity in the pipeline, from the initial inquiry to the final payment. Each of the 15 stages has a unique message that sends automatically, with dynamic content that varies with different attributes of the deal.
Client Onboarding — And when a prospect becomes a customer or participant in your program, you can send an onboarding form, which you can feed into the places where you need the submitted information and perhaps create documents from templates.
Customer Support
If you deal with a high volume of customers like I do, you'll make life better for everyone by adding structure and automation to your support system. I mentioned my FormAQ framework. It's the best way to create that structure:
Only expose a support email address, never your personal email address.
Any time that address is emailed, it should reply automatically and politely direct the customer to your published FAQs.
And those FAQs should be able to address 90% of the emails you receive. If you've been responding manually, you can use Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot AI to find and compose your FAQs automatically.
For any that require additional information, you can link to a tightly structured contact form that conditionally displays the fields needed for the user's request.
And beyond the FormAQ framework, if you use Notion, Zendesk, or another platform for managing support tickets, you can automatically assign tickets to team members based on their current capacity.
Reporting
In one of my favorite quotes, Peter Drucker said, "You can't manage what you don't measure."
No matter the type of work you do, regular reporting is a crucial element of success, and in most cases, you can automate it at every step.
Reporting typically occurs on a regular schedule or at the conclusion of a project or campaign, all of which can trigger automations.
You can automatically aggregate data from disparate sources.
Then with the help of AI, you can automatically summarize it and extract trends.
You can automatically apply that information to a template.
Then distribute it automatically to everyone who needs to see it.
Content Publishing
If content publishing is part of your marketing, much of that process can be automated, especially if you manage it in a platform like Notion, Coda or Airtable (which you absolutely should).
Aggregate inspiration from effective publishers with similar audiences.
Notify teammates when they're on deck for a responsibility.
Automatically prompt AI to adapt posts for other channels.
Schedule posts to go live on each platform.
Automatically repurpose and reschedule content at a future date.
And for email newsletters in particular, automation is incredibly useful for trickling engaging content to a new subscriber or reengaging dormant subscribers before scrubbing them from your list.
Employee Journey
If you manage a growing team, automation can support employees similar to the way it supports customers.
Candidate Tracking — As with every type of information you manage, I strongly recommend tracking prospective hires in a database within Notion, Coda, Airtable, or at least Google Sheets. Your application form can feed directly into it, and as a candidate shifts from one stage to another, the system can automatically send relevant messages and requested needed information.
Employee Onboarding — When you find the perfect fit, you can automate employee onboarding: Send them forms for the information you need, distribute that information where it needs to go, create accounts across your services, and generate documents from templates.
Universal
Scheduling — How much time do you waste exchanging emails to coordinate a meeting time that suits everyone? It's inefficiency at its finest. Most calendar apps — including Google Calendar, Outlook and Notion Calendar — offer a native way to share your availability, and tools like Calendly and Doodle address more complex scheduling needs for groups.
Conditional Notifications — Across all of your software, systems, and procedures, there are circumstances when you'd like to be alerted, like a specified amount of time since a prospect was contacted, that an invoice remains unpaid, or that a task is overdue. For any sort of condition you can define, you can configure an automatic notification by email, Slack, or wherever you prefer to receive it.
Synchronization — One of my core principles of systemization is maintaining a single source of truth for each entity you mange, such as contacts, tasks and events. Database-centric apps like Notion, Airtable and Coda are perfect for managing them all in one place. But inevitably, you're going to be working with and referencing them from other apps. So you can configure automations to update that single source of truth when an update occurs somewhere else.
Inbox Organization — It's known by everyone but underutilized by most: Email folders with automated filters is a simple and powerful way to preserver your valuable time every day. I manage different types at emails at different points in my day, so it's important to keep them out of sight and out of mind until the time I've deliberately allocated for them.
