The DRY principle, or why repetition is a mistake
There's a fundamental software principle we love: DRY, for Do Not Repeat Yourself.
It was formalized in 1999 by two software development experts.
The idea is simple: when a developer repeats themselves, they waste time and increase the risk of errors.
For example, on a website, if all buttons should be pink, the developer defines one single pink button component.
Every new button uses that component instead of being rebuilt by hand.
Result: fewer mistakes, and much more speed.
Apply DRY to your work
Since you work mostly on a computer, you can apply the exact same logic.
As soon as you notice you're doing the same action again and again, ask one simple question:
can this be automated?
Automate forms and passwords
The first obvious automation area is forms - especially passwords.
Everyone has lived this.
You try to log into a site, you forgot your password, you click "forgot password," then you lose five minutes in a painful process.
Password managers solve this once and for all.
They have several major advantages.
First: you never have to memorize passwords again.
You remember one master password and the tool handles the rest.
Second: it's much more secure.
Each site can have a unique, complex password instead of one generic password with variants.
Third: these tools auto-fill forms.
First name, last name, address, email, phone number, birth date, credit card - everything is filled for you.
And of course, they also work on your phone.
Automate repetitive company workflows
Beyond forms, many processes follow a simple logic:
if condition A is true, then do B.
For example, if you receive an invoice by email every month, and you need to acknowledge receipt and file it in a specific folder, your computer can do that for you.
Today there are tools that can connect to your apps - Gmail, Outlook, Google Sheets, Dropbox, even Instagram - and run actions automatically.
Concretely, you can build automations like:
automatically add a task to your to-do list when you're assigned something,
send a thank-you email when someone submits a form,
automatically block calendar time around a business trip,
or get an automatic reminder for someone's birthday.
These automations take a bit of time to set up, but the ROI is massive.
Schedule meetings without useless back-and-forth
Another area where automation saves a lot of time is meeting scheduling.
Without a dedicated tool, it often turns into long email threads to find a common slot.
Those exchanges can be replaced with a single link.
The other person sees your availability, picks a slot, and automatically receives an invite with a video link.
It all happens with no extra action from you.
These tools also make it easy to cancel or reschedule, and can even require an agenda before confirming.
If you schedule an average of three meetings a day, and each scheduling thread costs you five minutes, you save fifteen minutes every day.
Text expanders: the ultimate automation
The last automation tool deserves special attention: the text expander.
It turns short keyboard shortcuts into full text - emails, sentences, or paragraphs you write frequently.
It's incredibly powerful for avoiding rewriting the same content over and over.
We cover it in detail in the dedicated page text expander: never type the same text twice.
Identify what deserves automation
The most important thing isn't the tool, it's the mindset.
Spot the tasks you do often: low thinking effort, high time cost.
Those are the best candidates for automation.
Investing a few hours to automate one task can save you dozens of hours over the long run.
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