Automation

Everything is all about efficiency these days. Organisations, businesses and technologies are all constantly looking for ways to introduce efficiencies in their people and processes alike. One of the ways to accomplish this is by introducing automation.

Now, could we pick something up in our daily lives to make ourselves better? Let’s discuss this in this week’s facet of life.

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

– Victor Hugo

Automation is indeed the name of the game today, regardless of what you are talking about.

Technology started as a field that would allow companies to “automate” manual tasks like data entry and maintenance. This industry has taken on a much larger role now, where the technology has started to move faster than the businesses in some cases.

And with the advent of artificial intelligence, tasks which actually required human intervention are now being completely automated, to the extent that companies have sacked entire departments, since working with AI is much cheaper than working with a team of people.

Even healthcare has not been able to remain untouched from this phenomenon. While hospitals also leverage the benefits of technology, the work of doctors has also started to be outsourced to technology. Hospitals today advertise themselves as the first in an area to perform robotic surgery.

Think about it, we live in an age where a metallic arm is more trusted than an actual human being to perform medical tasks.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that automation has proven to be a great strategy, not just in terms of cost savings, but also in terms of efficiency.

Working in technology, I can certainly say that technological automation has most certainly been an amazing efficiency booster for businesses across the globe. And who doesn’t want to be more efficient?

This question got me thinking, is there a way that we can leverage automation in our daily lives to be more productive, better people overall? And an even bigger question is what, if any, sorts of automation do we use in our daily lives?

This is what led me to writing this article.

Now there are pretty straightforward responses for these questions. Our banking operations, healthcare (as we discussed), eating, grocery shopping and almost everything you can think of has actually been touched by the automation revolution. But as I implied, these are obvious responses.

In our daily lives, we do have a form of automation that we experience. This automation is called a routine.

So much so, that the word routine was actually co-opted by the technology industry as well.

I wrote an article a while back named Routines, where I pretty much tried to connect the purpose of having routines, primarily from the standpoint of essentialism. The article talks about routines providing us incentives to look forward to something. and how they kill the monotony of living.

Think about it, almost every activity we do, except for well, exceptional days, we do in a pretty routine (no pun intended) fashion. Brushing our teeth, showering (well, most days), going to or logging into work, answering calls, you name it. These are all activities that have been ingrained into us as routines.

This automation, these routines, help boost efficiency for us, in which they help subvert the phenomenon of decision fatigue.

This way, our minds don’t have to make so many decisions, and saves its powers for more taxing tasks.

Now, routines can be both good and bad.

On the good side, routines help us free up mental space to do our daily jobs better, by judiciously conserving resources by automating regular activities.

On the other hand, if the regular activities aren’t conducive to our well being, despite us being aware of the consequences, we tend to return to them on a very regular basis.

Let’s say you love using your phone (well, who doesn’t, am I right?), whenever there is mental space available for you, waiting rooms, travel, in between work calls, you will return to your phone. The same goes for other more destructive habits, like alcohol, cigarettes and recreational drugs.

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂