Things You Can Automate Right Away
Technology continues to become more powerful, making it easier to automate your work and personal life. Automating your workflow can make you more efficient and productive. It also eliminates downtime, reduces errors, and saves money. At the end of the day, you will likely notice that you have more time and energy to dedicate to other aspects of your life based on what you automate. And who doesn’t like the sound of that?
When you’re first starting out on the quest to learn how to automate your life, you may not know all of the tasks you can automate right away. Luckily, we’ve got a great list of things to automate for your professional and personal life.
1. Speed Up Email Processing
Drowning in an ocean of unread emails is a common nightmare for many professionals. Luckily, you can improve email productivity and decrease the time you spend in your inbox each day by using automated tools that filter spam, categorize incoming mail based on customized rules, schedule replies, and more.
To automate work when sending emails, you can create templates for regular inquiries requiring minimal personalization. This is a best practice for email productivity because it takes far less time and brain power to start with an email template than write every single message from scratch. Many email clients and email services even provide a space to save email templates so you can quickly locate and utilize them.
You can also compose emails in advance and schedule delivery times to optimize engagement rates, send them at times that make more sense, and increase your workflow productivity by churning out multiple email messages at once.
Efficient workflow automation can be achieved with the right tools. Consider using your email provider's features to set up rules for sorting, archiving, or even deleting emails. For advanced management, Clean Email, a powerful inbox cleaner app, can be your go-to solution.
Regardless of your email provider, Clean Email streamlines email management with its rich feature set, automating repetitive email tasks, which saves time and reduces email anxiety. The app’s Auto Clean feature makes it easy to program email rules. It broadens your customization options, allowing you to define rule criteria and specify applicable actions with ease.
For instance, create a rule to handle seasonal sales emails: mark them as read, archive automatically, delete those over two weeks old, or use the Keep Newest feature, which discards older emails from the same sender upon the arrival of a similar new one.
When you automate email tasks with Auto Clean, you can establish a productive workflow that cuts down on the number of emails you have to read through each time you check your mail. Further, Clean Email's mobile apps for iOS and Android offer on-the-go convenience, enabling easy email management, inbox decluttering, and control over your communication.
Leverage the app's Smart Folders - 33 pre-set email filters for easy categorization by topic. This simplifies checking finance-related emails, managing social notifications, swiftly dealing with online shopping correspondence, and more.
Finally, you can automate work tasks within your email by using Clean Email’s Cleaning Suggestions. The app makes suggestions based on similar messages you have previously cleaned or similar messages other Clean Email users frequently clean. This helps save time both with reading messages and with sorting messages later.
2. Harness Automated Workflows
You can automate your work with software solutions designed to increase workflow efficiency. But what types of tasks can you automate to increase productivity in the workplace, and how can you streamline processes with these automated workflows?
The easiest way to do this is through app integration. You can link related applications so data gets transferred seamlessly. You can use project management apps to simplify task management and make to-do lists that include workflow automation when completing certain tasks. These project management apps often will also provide automatic reminders when deadlines approach and generate daily to-do lists for each team member based on the projects and deadlines.
You can also use things to automate communication. For example, you can program auto-responses for email communication, social media messages, and other forms of electronic communication. By automating communication through chatbots and auto-responses, you can save time and ensure you aren’t wasting energy on questions that AI tools can easily answer.
3. Automate Payment Processing
Finances can be complicated. However, payment processing isn’t excluded from productive workflow automation.
On the business side, you can establish several workflow productivity measures that run automatically, including:
- Auto-invoicing: Schedule recurring invoices automatically via billing software such as Zoho Books, Xero, and Clear Books.
- Direct debits: Enhance customer convenience while reducing late payment cases.
- Digital receipts: Reduce paper use while enabling easier tracking and organization.
When it comes to personal finances, you can also automate your monthly bill payments using a credit card or other online payment system. Sometimes your bank will even support payment automation for utilities and other recurring payments. This lets you set it and forget it, which will avoid missed payments, late fees, or other nuisances.
4. Safeguard Your Data
While you are automating your life, don't overlook the importance of automating essential security measures to safeguard sensitive information from threats like data breaches. This is especially important if you are using several third-party applications to automate your work or do anything involving your finances.
The best thing you can do to safeguard your data is to set up automated backups for all your devices so you never lose your data. Many cloud storage options work well for this, including Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud, but it’s up to you to decide which cloud storage option will best meet your needs.
You can also use Clean Email’s Privacy Monitor feature to automatically check if your email credentials were compromised in any known email data breaches. All you have to do is log in to your Clean Email account and choose Privacy Monitor in the left menu bar — the app will then show you any recent data breaches your email was involved with. The app will provide detailed descriptions for each potential breach so you can see what type of data was leaked and will recommend the next steps to protect your personal information.
Finally, utilize password managers to ensure the best level of security for your accounts. Password managers make it easy to use unique, complex passwords for each online account without burdening your memory. 1Password, NordPass, and Bitwarden are all great options for this. Additionally, protect against compromised passwords by enabling two-factor authentication for an extra layer of security.
5. Plan & Schedule Social Media Posts
Whether you are trying to automate work tasks or streamline your personal efforts, social media has several productivity automation possibilities.
Some recommendations include:
- Composing all of your posts for a calendar month at once.
- Scheduling social media posts in advance using tools like Buffer, Hubspot, or Hootsuite.
- Programming chatbots to auto-respond to social media messages and comments.
- Setting up your brand preferences and some templates in tools like Canva to streamline social media graphic creation.
Identifying Further Automation Opportunities
Although the above ideas are a great start to automating your life, they’re far from all the possibilities. There are hundreds of ways you can maximize your productivity potential with workflow automation — you just need to identify the places where automation can help.
To identify areas where you could stand to cut back time, you can spend a week using time-tracking tools like Clockify or Toggl to identify recurring tasks that are time-consuming but require low creativity. Based on the data, you can search for tools to automate these tasks or search for solutions that will save time.
Additionally, you can talk to people in your network or follow people on social media who work in your industry to see what productivity tips they recommend. LinkedIn and Twitter are great places to look for this type of advice.
When you automate work and engage in other productivity tips, you can set the tone for work each day and avoid stress and burnout as time goes on. This gives you more energy and leaves enough brain power to do the heavy-lifting tasks that simply can’t be automated.
