Stop Working, Start Automating

Why waste your energy on tedious tasks when an app can do them instead?

- CHYELLE DVORAK

Tech used to save us time. Then along came a barrage of email, multiple calendars to manage, spreadsheets to fill—and soon our time-saving tech began taking too much time to manage.

That’s why you’re starting to hear a lot of this word: automation. Popular workplace tools like Trello, Airtable, and Boomerang are adding automation features to their platforms, which promise to save their users time by eliminating mundane, repetitive tasks.

“The future is identifying processes that happen again and again, then building workflows that automate out much of the ad hoc communication and back-and-forth interaction,” says Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University and the best-selling author of Deep Work. “This allows employee brains to spend more time producing value and less time mired in the overhead of such objectives.”