Rules for Automating

07/01/15

So, I'm slowly working on three tools to improve my self-improvement capabilities:

All of these tools started as mostly a manual setup, and I am now attempting to automate more and more aspects of all of them. But I need to be careful about this. In the past, I had avoided doing real work by trying to automate that work (and failing to do so). This time, I need to simply make the automation piecemeal by making bits and pieces that actually work and actually decrease my manual workload.

But this means I can use doing things by hand as an excuse to not do the hard-thinking necessary to actually automate things. So, I think I should make a ratio-rule when it comes to tasks I find valuable-to-do, tedious, and I believe they are automatable. Some limit must be placed on my natural inclination such that when that limit is reached, I do some minimal amount of the other thing.

So, for example, I log my receipts by-hand. I think this in-of-itself is actually valuable, as it forces me to pay closer attention to my spending, but I also believe that using OCR to better log my receipts could be quite powerful. I could more easily capture the long ID numbers that accompany the things I buy, and thus store more consistent and valuable information like amount of material bought and stuff like that.

Though, saying that aloud, it may be just as valuable to simnply store a database of these numbers and their related item, and make an interface that makes inputting receipts from all the stores I regularly shop at easier.

Hmmmm....

In any case, it's good to at least devote some time thinking about how to make my manual, tedious tasks more efficient, more fun, or more valuable, and also good to make sure I'm actually getting things done instead of working on code that doesn't work and maybe never will.