I Have Just (Partially) Automated Myself Out of my Job.

Here is why you should do it too. 

Automation is a very "crowded" playing field: Politicians, Newspapers, Magazines, Satire Comedy and maybe your Company too, are all talking about Automation. 

Experts are out there eviscerating the matter and shedding the light on possible future scenarios. Politicians are out there, most often playing with people emotions and fears to later cash in on it when it comes to elections. The truth is that this is a very complicated matter, especially on a Macro level. 

Nonetheless, be it complicated or not, when it comes to automation, we shall apply the same saying that was previously used for politics:

 "If you don't deal with Automation, Automation will deal with you".

As usual, when I get to share on Linkedin, it is because I feel to have had relevant experience.  

 I have just completed a three weeks project that allowed me to automate myself out of one part, of my job: I have just made so that a series of routine tasks that would have normally required my weekly or monthly input, will from now on happen by themselves. Let's say I have just shed out 5% of my previous work tasks/responsibility.

Am I afraid? NO.

Do I think I am making myself redundant? NO.

We could say that I have just freed some of my mental "RAM" space, as well as some precious TIME to accomplish other tasks where there may be a chance to add more value overall. Until February, I would have found myself filling up a weekly and/or monthly report on our company website Performance (Google Analytics) or on our Direct Online Sales (through a personalized Booking Engine).

Extrapolating the data, crunching and formatting it so that it could be easily read and compared over time by me and the rest of the management team was a long process and I felt useful doing it.

But I came to the conclusion that where I could really make the difference was in analysing such data and coming up with Action Points or Consideration to facilitate the work of the company board.

So I have spent some time setting up relevant dashboards on Google DataStudio and now my data of interest propagates autonomously through the software and my graphs and visuals of choice update themselves automatically.

Main take away point: free yourself of all the tasks that CAN be automated, and get yourself to work on what CAN'T be automated. Filling sheets with data CAN be automated and done by AI but delivering relevant analysis on those same data as wells as action points and consideration is still best done by a human. By You.

Don't wait for your company to discover that you spend your time on redundant tasks: clean up your daily schedule before someone else decides to do it for you.

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Topping up my personal experience, this week, one of my favourite Late Night Shows (Last Week Tonight by John Oliver - HBO) has made Automation the centre of their show. John made some valuable points through the show :

• Automation is not going to stop.
• This is not a new topic. People feared "Automation" already when the steam engine was invented and when the tractor was introduced.
• A job automated is not a job gone but a job changed (Eg. the introduction of ATM has not brought a reduction of bank employees, but actually a net increase).
• Most of what we do today (SEO?) were not even imaginable 50 years ago. In the same way, what we will be doing 50 years from today, it's not even imaginable.
• We have to rethink the way we define "Careers". Likely, by the time we get to our retirement days, we will not define ourselves as having been one thing (Bank teller, SEO or Graphic Designer) all our working years, but more likely we will be defined by a range of activities that we have done through our working years --> we have to be prepared for this.

If you want to reduce the chances of being "touched" by automation in your work, make sure that you are involved with:

"Non-routine tasks, that requires social intelligence, complex critical thinking and creative problem solving".

John Oliver, at the end of his video, suggested that we shouldn't anymore ask kids "What do you want to become when you grow up?" but rather 

" What are the 5 things you want to be doing when you grow up?".  

I agree. And you?