Mini AI Automations

I’ve been reading the book “Buy Back Your Time” by Dan Martell. It is a new perspective to me for how to think about hiring people. Well worth the read if this is something in your wheelhouse.

One of the core ideas in the book is to find the time sucking tasks and focus on removing those first by hiring people to do these (usually) simpler tasks. It’s a great use case for applying AI.

So this past few weeks I’ve been doing an audit of my time to find the 30 minutes here and there that could be automated away.

It got me down the rabbit hole of no-code automation systems and Make.com. With Make, it is easy to deal with the world we live in these days that run on a dozen disconnected services:

Gmail for emails

Google docs for spreadsheets

Notion for business documentation

Slack for team communication

e-commerce platforms – Shopify, Amazon

…and countless others

Writing code to connect with and authenticate all these and then manage all the keys, and understand all the APIs enough to do something quickly is the kind of boring boilerplate code that:

Can often be implemented with Make or Zapier using drag and drop

Can be code written by AI.

With these approaches a number of simple automations can be built relatively easily that can save you hours of time. This week I created an automation to organize ad creatives into Google Drive, and another to cross-post blog posts.

Interestingly, these tools have spawned a new industry of automation consultants who drop into your business to find various processes that can be automated.

Even without a consultant there are thousands of pre-built templates that can be tweaked to match your needs. It’s designed to be a tool that doesn’t require much technical experience to use.

Whatever path you choose, these tools can help whittle away the minor annoying tasks that can suck up time. And for that reason it might be worth playing with. Buy back some of your time with a little automation this weekend.