Automating Manual Tasks

The Trap of Small Tasks

Manual tasks don’t look like a problem.

They’re small, quick, and harmless. Update a record here. Restart a service there. Five minutes at most. At the start, the common thought is: It would take longer to automate this than to just do it.

That’s the trap.

One by one, they don’t hurt. But repeated enough times, they bleed you. Each task forces you to switch gears, check the runbook, to click through the same sequence of steps.

Every time this happens, you lose the thread of what you were working on. Your focus becomes fractured.

The real cost for small tasks piling up isn’t the minutes; it’s the distraction. And once distraction becomes routine, you start to build a culture where being interrupted is normal.

Killing the Roster

At my previous job, this was exactly the problem.

To address this, the engineering team assigned a dedicated team to focus on “killing the roster week”. A team solely devoted to automating the small manual tasks piling up across the company.

Coincidentally, I was part of that team. Our job was simple in description but challenging in practice: find the worst manual tasks and eliminate them.

One task I worked on involved allowing an internal operations team to update a customer’s interest rate. As a developer, the process was straightforward: run a few POST requests, update some parameters, touch the database, and the job was done. Automating it was a different story.

Here are just a some of the requirements we had to follow:

We needed to create a user interface for the operations team.

Access had to be carefully controlled.

The form had to prevent any accidental changes.

Multiple business rules had to be enforced,

and every change needed to be tracked and displayed in the admin portal’s activity feed.

All of this sounds like a mouthful; but for a task performed 20–50 times a day, it was worth it. Automating it removed dozens of repetitive actions from engineers’ plates, freeing up focus for higher-value work.

By the end of each week, the little drags on our time had gone away. As tasks disappeared, the team stopped accepting friction. When a new manual chore appeared, the first question became: why is this still manual?

Culture Through Action

The hours saved were useful, but the bigger change was in the thinking. From that shift, minutes were reclaimed and frustrations were reduced. Each task eliminated quietly reshaped expectations. What had once been tolerated became unacceptable.

Over weeks and months, the team internalized this. Manual work was questioned, attention was preserved, and systems replaced repetition.

The payoff wasn’t obvious while it was happening. Later, it became clear: automation had defined culture as much as it had defined work.