Quick – name the most boring things you encounter on a regular basis.
I’ll wait.
If your list includes being stuck in traffic, standing in line, waiting on hold, receiving junk mail, and enduring slow internet connections, you’re in good company. In a survey of 2,000 U.K. residents commissioned by an online gaming firm, these were the top five picks. Other, perhaps more surprising responses included horse racing, selfies, and singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran.
Work was also cited as a major source of boredom. Twenty-two percent of respondents said they felt bored for up to two hours of their typical workday. That’s 25 percent of the average day!
No matter how exciting your job, or how engaged you feel in your role, we all face less-than-thrilling moments at work. And when boredom hits, I believe we have two choices:
The best-case scenario? Don’t choose at all. Use both options to create a powerful, two-step process that can crush tedious tasks and help you to maximize your professional potential.
Productivity experts constantly espouse new strategies to help us fight procrastination. It’s like swatting an ever-present fly – but somehow, the buzzing irritant forever evades us. No matter how many lists, Pomodoro timers, tools, bribes, and gimmicks we try, the urge to scroll social media – or even to rearrange the sock drawer – inevitably wins out over tackling a monotonous task.
Instead, think of boredom as a signal. If something feels dull or unpleasant, it’s time to take your feelings out of the equation and decide, in advance, exactly how and when you’ll get it done. In other words, you need to automate it.
In my book, Automate Your Busywork, I share how automation has been the foundation of my career. It’s enabled me to build and grow a product that now has over 25 million users, and a company that employs almost 650 people around the world.
Automation fueled my entrepreneurial path – and it’s the beating heart of our product, which equips organizations, businesses, and individuals to automate their workflows without learning a single line of code. Sure, you can automate the boring stuff with Python, but you can do the same (and more) with Jotform.
The list of tasks you can quickly and easily automate grows with each passing day. There are thousands and thousands of possibilities; the only limits are your imagination and, at times, your persistence.
But if you’re ready to unlock more freedom, creativity, strategic thinking, and time to focus on the work that truly matters to you, here are some great ways to start.
Boring is personal. A task that elicits eye rolls for you might feel fun, or even invigorating, to someone else. But if we consider the most mind-numbingly tedious work facing today’s professionals, it’s tough to beat one category: Managing information and digital files. Give the following automation strategies a try instead.
Note – most of these automations are powered by Jotform, because it’s the product I know best. I’ve also included some other tools that can streamline and simplify your boring tasks.
Automate forms, surveys, and data collection
Jotform enables you to automatically prepopulate the fields in forms you send out to increase completion rates and reduce human error.
Instead of manually entering the form data you receive into a spreadsheet, use Jotform to create an online form that connects directly to your spreadsheet software. Any third-party information will automatically be added to the connected sheet or database.
Create aggregated, automatic reports from online surveys. Gather feedback from customers or clients, and then let Jotform comb through the data to produce a report.
Take your reporting a step further with Jotform Report Builder. Create and share organizational reports at set time intervals, based on real-time data.
Automate your attachments, files, and folders
Streamline how documents are routed, tracked, and saved across your organization – regardless of its size. With Jotform Approvals, you can build a document and file approval workflow that’s triggered by a single action, such as sending or receiving an email.
Use Microsoft Power Automate, Zapier, or IFTTT to save attachments from incoming emails into a designated folder or document library, so you can find what you need, when you need it.
Tools like Power Automate, shell scripts, and yes, Python, enable you to read files and check conditions, such as the date you last opened the file, a download date outside a specific field, or a duplicate file. Any files that don’t meet these conditions are automatically deleted.
Monitor contracts, and update marketing systems
Eliminate paper documents from your contract management process. Jotform has a variety of contract templates with editable fields that authorized users can update, based on the details of a particular agreement.
Wouldn’t it be great to see all the contracts you’re managing in a single dashboard? Jotform Sign automatically creates a database and groups contracts by tab: canceled, declined, waiting for others, and waiting for my signature. A built-in audit trail also makes it easy to track the status of each contract.
Use tools like Mailchimp, Make, or Zapier to connect webinar attendance lists to your email marketing system and automatically add new attendees to a database.
Tools like Zapier and SQL equip you to find and delete unsubscribed users across multiple systems, by setting up a custom automation with webhooks (automated processes that enable web applications to communicate with each other in real time).
Use Jotform Workflows to create and send digital forms for clients or co-workers to review. Recipients can either sign and approve the online form, or return it with a request for more information.
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These are just a few of the boring tasks that automation can take off your plate. Start with simple processes, like building a web form and linking it to a database, and move on to more complicated flows as your confidence grows. We can’t eliminate all the boring things that pop up in daily life, but if you have a manual or repetitive work task, you can definitely automate it.
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