Automate Your Busywork

Appendix

To follow are a plethora of ways individuals and organizations can reduce their busywork. And a note to individuals: check out some of the options pitched to the employer, since you might want to recommend these functions to your organization. For example, if you're tired of tallying your expenses from business trips, you can request that they set up a travel and expenses management system. Then you can use a smartphone camera to scan receipts and map travel expenses to your individual travel ID and let the system take it from there.

There are a few caveats to keep in mind.

First, it's impossible to reliably recommend specific tools and apps because they emerge and disappear at a dizzying rate. So be sure to research your options via the keywords supplied at the end of each description. Note too that many of the solutions available are designed to integrate with other tools, so it's good to do thorough research before committing—especially if there's a cost for the software.

Similarly, given how fast technology develops, some automations that you'd need to actively implement today will likely get added to future releases of tools you already use—such as your smartphone or operating system—or could be simplified and standardized into a new tool you could adopt. Software inevitably becomes more sophisticated over time.

Following along those lines, even though this is a fairly comprehensive appendix, it's by no means exhaustive. You can automate countless different tasks ...