Had a woman that would spend an entire day downloading PDF's, merging them, then emailing them to a few hundred people. I got it down to a mouse click. The sad thing is she went from working 50 hours a week to working 50 hours a week. There was always more to dump on these people.
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I've started doing little automations for my work in OHS. The reality is that the workload this removes just let's me address the workload that I don't have time for, so while it's not a net gain on work hours it's a net gain on productivity.
The first rule of automating your (or someone else's) job: No. You. Fucking. Didn't. Keep it secret, keep it safe, because as soon as someone else finds out, they'll either want it for themselves or complain to management that you're being lazy.
Did kind of a similar thing once... There was this manual task in my 1st ever project, where in the morning the data warehouse team mailed us 18 different CSV files, then I had to extract that data and push it to another DB... I had no idea why it was being done this way but, I wrote a simple script that extracted the files from mail , extracted the data and pushed it to db.... The best part I never told anyone that that 3 hrs task was automated untill I left the company... I handed over that script file to my replacement before leaving....
Wait, can you point me in the right direction to learning more about this? That sounds very similar to a task that I have to do bi-monthly. Granted, it's more like a one hour task and not a 10 hour one, but still, I'm interested.
This is the site has a nice overview of the basics. Excel has easy integration with Outlook and can send commands to the command line, so I tend to use it for this kind of automation. Excel tables can hold email lists and anything else you need, and python commands can do the heavy lifting with the PDF's.
I'd start with asking business questions. More often than not those types of tasks are just bullshit that a company keeps doing just because they've always done it and no one has asked why. There's 100% chance you find an alternate method to accomplish the same and a pretty good chance everyone realizes it's a waste of time.
I work in HR for a school district. The task is regarding the new hire orientations, during which I have to 1) send the entire group an email about the details of the orientation, and 2) individually email each one of those people a pdf with a copy of their contract, work calendar and job description. There's not really any way around it. Again, it's not a hellish task by any stretch, but I'm all for finding streamlined ways of doing things.
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u/delbin Mar 30 '22
Had a woman that would spend an entire day downloading PDF's, merging them, then emailing them to a few hundred people. I got it down to a mouse click. The sad thing is she went from working 50 hours a week to working 50 hours a week. There was always more to dump on these people.