The Power of Automation: Transforming Mundane Tasks into Increased Productivity

Imagine how liberating it would be to have more time for the things you love. With automation, you can transform mundane tasks into increased productivity. Streamline your work and eliminate errors, leaving more room for what really matters!

We all have recurring tasks to perform in our daily lives, whether for work or personal reasons. These tasks can quickly become tedious and cause us to lose precious time. But did you know that it is possible to automate them? In this article, we will explore different ways to automate recurring tasks to increase efficiency and productivity.

The advantages of automation

Automating recurring tasks has several advantages. First, it saves time by avoiding manually performing repetitive actions. Additionally, it reduces human errors that can occur during these tasks. Finally, it frees up space in our brains to focus on more important and stimulating tasks.

Automation is particularly useful for repetitive tasks that can quickly become tedious and boring. Examples include data entry, document processing, sorting, and filtering information, which can be automated. Word processing software, spreadsheets, and database management programs offer automation features to facilitate the completion of these tasks.

How to automate these tasks?

Whether you use a Linux or Windows OS, there are tools available to create automated tasks. In this article, we will detail the configurations to create our own automation.

Windows

On Windows, we can use the Task Scheduler software, which allows us to automate many processes. We will see in more detail how to run a Python script.

To create a task, simply click on the Create Task button in the top right corner.

Create a task

This will take us to the screen where we can name the task and select some parameters such as its execution level or configuration.

Home screen to create a task

Next, we will choose the task trigger mode. Simply click on Triggers and select New:

Trigger a task

We can then select a trigger method. Here, we will choose Scheduled Time, as we want our task to run every day at a certain time.

We can then configure the frequency and schedule that suits us.

Selecting the task execution mode

Now, we will choose the script we want to execute. To do this, click on the Actions tab, then on New:

Create an action

All that remains is to write the path to our script:

Select the script

In this tab, we can select several conditions to run our task, like:

• How do you want it to run
• On which network
• Others

Condition page

It is still possible to adjust the task to our liking by selecting different parameters in the next tab.

Settings page

In this page, we can select several actions for our instance, like:

• Stop the task after it runs longer than
• Allow the task to restart if fails
• Others

Once we have confirmed the creation of our task, all we have to do is wait and admire our script running on its own.

Mac/Linux

On Mac and Linux, there is a tool called cron. It is already pre-installed on most machines and allows you to schedule tasks.

To check if cron is installed, simply run the following command:

crontab -l

If cron is not installed, you can do so with this command:

sudo apt-get install cron

Once cron is installed, we can start using it by running the command:

crontab -e

A cron is composed of 2 things:

• a schedule
• an execution

The schedule

To go into detail, the schedule is composed of 5 variables:

• the minute
• the hour
• the day of the month
• the month
• the day of the week

Example of schedule:

# this script will run every day at 2am
0 2 * * *

# this script will run on the 3rd of the month at 3pm
0 15 3 * *

# this script will run every Tuesday at 10am
0 10 * * 2

There are also different options. For example, if we can run them every 3 days (0 15 */3 * *) or every hour between 3pm and 6pm (0 15–18 * * *).

Once done, we can check our schedules on this site Crontab Guru.

Conclusion

Automating recurring tasks is an effective way to save time and increase productivity. By using available tools and methods, you can free up space in your brain to focus on more important and stimulating tasks. So what are you waiting for to automate your recurring tasks?

I hope you enjoyed this article and it will give you the desire to create your own scripts to automate your daily tasks.