IIWO / ROUTINE-TASK ECONOMICS
How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you're spending more time than you save?
Based on an xkcd comic
Time saved
Frequency
Time period
Hourly rate
Time saved / year
Which means you could use that much time to optimize the task before you would be spending more time than it's worth
Monetary value
Which means you could spend that amount to optimize that task
03 / CONSTRAINT
Your time is more valuable when you work a lot and have little free time. The value below multiplies the base monetary value by the ratio of work hours to free hours.
Hours of available free time a day
Hours of working a day
05 / PLAYBOOK
Strategies to consider when optimizing routine tasks.
There's keyboard shortcuts that anyone could benefit from. You don't have to be a programmer or a video editor to save time with shortcuts. Even something as simple as Ctrl + Backspace to delete a whole word at once will add up over time.
Using snippets when coding can save a lot of time. I have a snippet for every import I commonly use and also for things like creating a skeleton of a React component.
This is basically snippets outside your editor. A short trigger can write your email address, a common reply, an issue template, or a command you use all the time. It is worth setting up when you keep typing the same thing in different applications.
If you make the same kind of document, project, pull request, or meeting note over and over, start with the structure already in place. A template saves typing, but it also saves the time spent deciding what to put where.
Of course this depends heavily on which software you work in. There's Emmet, which is a well-known extension, but my favorite is Jumpy, which I can use to quickly jump to a different place in the text. Vim has a lot of "motions" that you can use for the purpose of jumping around quickly in the text but Jumpy provides a single quick shortcut to achieve 90% of the motions you could want.
Doing similar tasks together means you only have to get into the right application and state once. It works well for things like processing receipts, resizing images, replying to email, or reviewing a stack of pull requests.
The normal action should give you the result you usually want. Set your editor, browser, and operating system up so the right folder, export format, naming scheme, or window layout is already selected instead of being corrected every time.
Before automating a task, check whether the task needs to exist. You might be copying data between tools that can already integrate, generating a report nobody reads, or fixing an error that a better source setting would prevent.
A macro is useful when the clicks are always the same. A script is useful when the files or data change but the operations stay the same. The best candidates are boring tasks you can describe as a list of exact steps.
A saved second is nice, but avoiding a recurring mistake is usually better. Clear names, validation, presets, and a small checklist can stop the same correction from coming back every week.
A launcher, bookmarks, file search, and window shortcuts save the little pauses between tasks. I use them to get to the next file or application directly instead of hunting through folders, tabs, and menus.
If the same expensive work happens every time, do it once and reuse the result until its inputs change. That can mean keeping a build cache, saving a search, exporting a reusable asset, or leaving a frequently used project ready to go.
Yes, even something as radical as buying a new computer makes sense. The math checks out. You have to load something literally hundreds of times a day and savings of a couple seconds each time adds up quickly.
An average computer should last you at least 3 years. Over that period, 1 second savings 100 times a day at $30 an hour gives you $900 to spend. Can you get a better computer that achieves that saving for that amount of money? I know that I could but if you're already on the latest generation you might not.