Here’s a short story on how I got to this point and why I can help you automate things and free up more of your time.
In my first job, we had several tasks that had to be repeated periodically. Some processes had to be done daily, and we worked in shifts. The “late shift” used to go until midnight or even until 2 in the morning. It was my first job in IT, and everything was exciting. The fact that I worked until midnight every second week didn’t bother me. But then as time passed and some of these tasks became boring, I started to look into ways of automating things. Every day I added some new automation wherever I could use code to create something.
When I was finally done, the “late shift” ended between 18:00 and 19:00 instead of midnight. Looking back now I am stunned at how things were done because that’s the way it was always done and nobody ever questioned if anything can be changed or improved.
I could now tell you that I created a company specialized in automation and became a huge success, but my career went down a different path, going on to become a software engineer for several year. But then in the end, deciding to start my own business and here I am now.
Here is one of those “boring” tasks from my old job, be prepared to be reminded of times before the internet was a thing and floppy disks were still the main way of transporting data.
The boring floppy
One of them was copying data to floppy disks to all clients and sending them these floppies via post. If you have no idea what floppies are or don’t understand why they just didn’t download the things online, I welcome you young people but you have to know there was a time before the internet. If you know all of this, sorry for making you feel old. But back to my first job. This task of copying this data to the floppy looked like this:
- Insert floppy
- Enter the command to copy data
- Wait
- Wait even longer
- Take the floppy out and put it in an envelope
- Start over
This process was going on for years and it took what felt like for ever. Especially the Waiting period was just driving me crazy. There had to be a better way because this task just seemed dumb and a huge waste of time. I understood and agreed that the clients needed to get this data on their floppies, but the whole process of doing this could use improvement. I was lucky I had the freedom to just do things and not be shut down for being a lazy teenager.
run things in parallel
Since the waiting period was the one that I hated the most it became my first target, then it was just so clear: just use two drives. This was a simple but effective improvement, use two floppy drives, and write a small script to interchange between them. The process now looked like this:
- Start script
- Insert floppy disks in both drives.
- Press a key to start the copy process to one drive
- Wait, still waiting …
- Take out the floppy and press a key to start the next copy
- Put the floppy into an envelope
- Insert floppy to the empty drive
- Meanwhile the second copy job would be done.
While at first, it seems like there was little improvement, it was a big step forward once the first copy was completed. The time I needed to put the floppy into the envelope and load the empty drive was used to copy data to the second drive. These small automations and workflow improvements added up so much that they reduced working hours and also costs by a lot.