Automate Everything, Deliver Early, Run Errands

We were skill maxing from the get go.

During my time at the company — let's call it that — we worked on a lot. I mean a lot. Learned Python and R. The classic 6 Udemy courses enrolled, zero completed. Story of my life. We were given work: analyse this, clean that, prepare this report, analysis of surplus, analyse model variance, help rewrite this function to be faster so we can generate IFRS17-compliant reports, we need a PowerBI dashboard, graphs, etc.

The work was intense. But here's the thing: Brian learned a method. And together we had THE METHOD.

What Is The Method?

Simple. Automate the hell out of anything repetitive and save yourself days — weeks — of work. That's it. That's the whole thing.

They used the typical Agile framework — these folks love their sprints. We'd get a 10-day deadline, submit on day 7, knowing we were basically done on day 1. And then what? We'd go run errands, hit the town, do whatever. We built a reputation by delivering early, by the way. Not as slackers.

People think automation is about replacing humans. No. Automation is about replacing the tedium. The part of your job that makes you ask yourself "So I have to keep doing this? Maybe I can use AI." — that's what you automate. The part where you actually think, solve problems, build things — that's what you keep.

Give us something repetitive, we'll automate it.

Playing the Game

Here's the thing about automating everything: you can't let them know you're automating everything. The hands that feed you need to see progress. They need to see you working.

So we got clever about it.

The Partial Deliverable Trick. We'd set up our scripts to output intermediate results at each stage. Cleaned but untransformed data? Output. Transformed but not formatted? Output. Formatted but without the charts? Output. We had a whole pipeline of artifacts, and at any point we could screenshare and show "look at all the progress we've made." They saw momentum. We saw a script running in the background while we were at lunch.

The Two-Device Meeting. This one was cinema.

One of us would join the daily standup on their phone — from the car, from a coffee shop, from wherever. The other would be on the laptop, screensharing the latest output. The phone person would ask the "dumb" questions that bought us time. The laptop person would present the results and look competent. Meanwhile the phone person was driving to an errand, walking around town, whatever. They saw two engaged employees. We saw a coordinated heist.

This wasn't being dishonest. It was being strategic. The outputs were real. The work was done. We just refused to pretend that staying at our desks for 8 hours was the same as being productive.

So What's Your Method?

I'm not telling you to quit your job and build an automation empire. I'm asking: what are you doing right now that's repetitive? That you do weekly, daily, hourly, that a script could do instead?

The thing most people get wrong is they think automation requires some big up-front investment. "I'll write the script when I have time." But the scripts you write don't need to be perfect. They don't need to handle every edge case. They need to handle your case. Right now. For that one report you're dreading.

Here's my rule: if you've done the same manual task three times, you've already lost the time it would have taken to automate it. The fourth time is just punishing yourself.

Start small. One script. One pattern. One openpyxl workbook. One re.compile(). Build from there. Before you know it, you'll have a catalog of scripts and someone will be asking you to automate things.

Next up: Part 2 — The Toolkit: Regex Pipelines, Excel Injection, and the Arsenal — the specific scripts, the regex date cleaning incident, the Excel formula injection trick, and how we built a whole arsenal of automation tools.