Work automation. Tools and benefits

How do you stay both mindful of maintaining your work-life balance and also brilliantly efficient at your work? The easiest and most effective solution is work automation. The development of new technologies has made it possible to automate some of our daily tasks, at least the repetitive and routine ones. This helps you speed up and streamline your work, giving you extra time to pursue your own passions or spend some quality time with your family.

Benefits of work automation

It’s safe to say we have all had (or still have) to deal with menial, uninspiring, and time-consuming tasks which only encourage monotony to creep into and take over our daily work. Automation of those unremarkable tasks can help you gain more space for the interesting and creative things in your life.

Automation saves you a lot of time while increasing your productivity and consistency of your results. It also minimizes the risk of human error which translates to lower costs. A skillfully automated workflow improves communication within your team, and lessens the mental toll and stress related to the job – all positively affecting the wellbeing of employees and the quality of their work.

Tools for work automation

Hive

Hive integrates all your apps and communicators (e.g. Asana, Slack, Zoom) and simplifies working as a team. The Hive Automate option lets you connect even more apps to automate your workflow and effectively create a plan of action to tackle each task. 

Zapier 

Zapier is a popular tool which speeds up and streamlines task performance while keeping human input to the minimum, thus reducing the risk of ‘human error’. All you have to do is establish a ‘trigger’ - a condition which has to be met for a chain of automated actions to be launched. 

Airtable

An app to help you create, edit, and share databases with others in the cloud. Its main advantage is the intuitive and simple interface, reminiscent of Excel or Google Sheets. Airtable is made up of only a few elements: 

• Bases – groups of data, 
• Tables – a space to create and store data; each base can contain multiple tables, 
• Fields – vertical columns in a table, 
• Records – items in tables, 
• Views – a function to let you filter data: instead of looking at the whole base, you can set only 1 view containing the information you need: you can create multiple views in each table. 

ClickUp

ClickUp is a multifunctional cloud tool to thoroughly simplify working in a team and managing projects. It lets you draft documents, communicate, set goals, plan your next moves, track progress, create reports, collaborate in real time, and automate routine processes through the ClickUp Automations option. 

Jira

Jira is a tool best known amongst IT professionals (it was designed with this industry in mind), but is also being used in other teams. It helps you plan and monitor projects, as well as report on and manage your tasks. Jira is relatively easy to use: it’s prime focus is the Issues tab which can include any aspects of the project, be it tasks or documents. By sorting the issues into groups, you can effortlessly plan tasks for your whole team, monitor their progress, and use the custom Dashboards. 

Artificial Intelligence 

Employing artificial intelligence is becoming the norm in many occupations. It’s not surprising at all – AI apps are being developed and perfected as we speak to help you get the bulk of your work out of the way. Here are some of the most popular and effective AI tools you should check out: 

• ChatGPT – a content generator you can use to write a variety of texts, create translations, and answer questions; 
• Midjourney, Stockimg AI, DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion 2 – image generators; 
• D-ID – lets you create a character and have it read out your own text; 
• BetterFeedback AI – a tool for analyzing client needs, trends, opinions, and insights; 
• Import.io - enables quick data extraction from websites; 
• Stackla – an engine that helps manage, optimize, and publish user-generated content (UGC); 
• LivePerson – facilitates communication between brands and clients using bots which analyze customer behavior and provide speedy answers to their queries. 

AI-related musings can often lead you to ask “is AI going to take my job?”. Is this a legitimate fear? Not necessarily. Instead of dwelling on the grim visions of the future, we should learn to communicate with AI to make full use of its advantages and possibilities.