How Goal Setting Improves Job Performance
Connection Between Motivation and Goals What motivates you to get work done? Perhaps you’d say it’s rewards, compensation, or simply a good personal work ethic. These are all factors that…
How to Be More Organized at Work: The Power of Automation
Automation works. It’s why we’ve seen such transformations as mechanized farming, manufacturing, travel, retail, and advances in countless other sectors over the past century or two. It’s also why there’s so much hand-wringing over the potential of more sophisticated robots to replace a slew of other jobs and functions in the years ahead.
How can automation help you be more organized at work? So far, software and machines have thrived mainly at replacing a particular kind of work: the average-wage, middle-skill, routine-heavy work, especially in manufacturing and office administration. And while AI researchers and advocates foresee much bigger things coming, the more immediate benefits most of us have access to today can help us be more organized at work by handling the tedious tasks that gobble up so much of our time and mental energy.
WHAT TO AUTOMATE AND WHY
That’s good news. According to research by social psychologist Roy Baumeister, it’s those kinds of tasks in particular that are most likely to leave us mentally depleted. “Decision fatigue,” as he calls it, describes the biological price we pay—in energy, focus, and performance—by making decision after decision. In other words, the more choices you need to make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, which eventually starts looking for shortcuts.
That’s as good a case as any for delegating some of your tasks to automation, which can help you preserve your energy for high-quality (and higher-stakes) decision-making. So where do you start?
Look first for the tasks that have become so routine that you can basically do them in your sleep. Less obvious—and trickier to automate—are those that don’t require human finesse but are components of bigger processes that do. Don’t ignore those. There might be pieces that can be outsourced to a robot, so to speak, even if the entire process cannot.
FIVE GREAT AUTOMATION TOOLS
No matter what you do or how you work, these apps have a wide range of applications for most digitally connected workers. Here’s a quick look at their features and how they can save you time and energy.
As you comb through your workflows and look for opportunities to automate, make sure you don’t go overboard. You won’t want to automate any tasks that bring meaning and joy to your work or that let you use your unique strengths. Not everything we enjoy in our lives or work is necessarily a high-order task; just because something can be automated doesn’t mean it should be. The best automation is strategic automation, and the strategy is up to you.
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