Why this is the perfect time to pause and plan your next career moves

New technologies often inspire panic. Seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys wrote that he stopped wearing his watch because he was addicted to checking the time. In 1936, city administrators in St. Louis, Missouri tried to ban car radios for distracting drivers and causing accidents. And in 1982, CBS anchor Dan Rather reported that video games had become a national epidemic, with groups of children noisily playing PAC-MAN in arcades and laundromats.

Automation is among today’s most prominent tech targets. Many people worry that AI and automation tools will destroy jobs and undermine education. “Students are using it to write their assignments,” writes Kevin Roose for The New York Times, “passing off A.I.-generated essays and problem sets as their own. Teachers and school administrators have been scrambling to catch students using the tool to cheat, and they are fretting about the havoc ChatGPT could wreak on their lesson plans.”

Schools and colleges have been among the first organizations to confront how automated tools like ChatGPT could change how we work, create, and study. Some teachers want to ban the free bot; others are using it to sharpen critical thinking skills. Either way, it’s leading educators to re-consider what it means to teach and to learn.

As the automation revolution gains speed, I believe we should all take this moment to pause and reflect:

What are you building? What do you want to accomplish? What’s your core mission?

Whether you run a business or work inside an organization, this is a great time to re-examine your path and, if necessary, adjust course.?

Writing my upcoming book, Automate Your Busywork, transported me back to another crossroads earlier in my career.

My startup, Jotform was just two years old when Google burst into the digital forms space. I was stunned – and more than a little scared. After a lot of sleepless nights, I asked myself: What if we applied the same automation-first mindset embedded in Jotform to our daily work? We could use automation to clear away tedious, repetitive tasks and recover more time to focus on building an exceptional product.

Embracing automation has enabled me to create a company I love – and one that now employs 619 talented people and serves over 20 million people around the world.

But, however you navigate the coming changes, I urge you to stop and take a moment to reflect.

Here are three ideas to consider during that pause.

1. Explore and test-drive the tools?

Automation is here to stay. Even the most sophisticated tools are getting easier, more accessible, and more integrated in our lives. I also know that embracing automation can require a significant mental shift. That’s why it’s important to step into the sandbox and dig around.

Harvard Business Review contributors David De Cremer, Nicola Morini Bianzino, and Ben Falk encourage professionals to get comfortable talking to AI, for example. “As AI becomes a partner in intellectual endeavors, it will increasingly augment the effectivity and creativity of our human intelligence,” the trio explain. “Knowledge workers therefore will need to learn how to best prompt the machine with instructions to perform their work.”

Automating daily workflows can also pay dividends. Repetitive, manual tasks that don’t need your ongoing attention are ripe for automation – and a great way to hone your automation-first mindset.

For example, try scheduling tools that eliminate the back-and-forth of planning and re-booking calendar events. Use voice recognition software to take meeting notes and create audio transcripts.

You don’t have to tackle massive projects to reap the benefits of building simple, automated workflows that run in the background of your busy days.

2. Challenge your assumptions

Graphic design is a creative process that can also be technical and tedious. Tools like DALL-E2 – which generates images from natural language descriptions – can give designers a quick way to explore new ideas or mock up samples for sign-off. This is just one automation example from thousands of possibilities in fields including communication, finance, HR, marketing, IT, and more.

Automation can minimize so many of the processes and practices we’ve long considered inevitable. From large-scale systems to daily tasks, watch for moments of friction throughout your day. Behind that friction often lies tasks that could easily be automated – leaving you free to address more meaningful work.

3. Embrace continuous learning

Continuing education used to mean studying Latin or earning a certification. Those pursuits remain valuable, of course, but increasingly, automation is a skill we all need to master.

I also urge you to see it as an opportunity. Consider what you want to spend more time doing and what you’d like to eliminate. If you’re a founder, automation can empower your teams to work in their sweet spots. And you can focus on steering your business in a direction that excites you.

If you work solo or inside an organization, automation can help you shape your work into a more satisfying form. A reporter could spend less time churning out data-driven update articles and more time interviewing and crafting features. An HR specialist could automate repetitive onboarding processes and engage more deeply with new employees. Learning to automate your busywork is a process of continuous learning.

At the same time, it’s okay if automation leaves you a little bewildered. Even technology columnist Roose admitted that writing about automation in schools “made him a little sad.” As Roose writes, “I love school, and it pains me, on some level, to think that instead of sharpening their skills by writing essays about ‘The Sun Also Rises’ or straining to factor a trigonometric expression, today’s students might simply ask an A.I. chatbot to do it for them.”

The Road Ahead

Experts and citizens alike also continue to express concerns about the potential for automation, especially generative AI tools, to cause harm. I respect this trepidation – and I think education is always the best defense. The more we all know about the tools that are seeping into our lives, the better equipped we are to harness and shape them. Instead of panicking about new technologies, let’s think big and welcome the possibilities they represent for all of us.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to check out my new book,?Automate Your Busywork: Do Less, Achieve More, and Save Your Brain for the Big Stuff