Automating Boring Stuff

Over time I’ve become quite interested in automating mundane tasks. In a way, I’ve always been lazy - looking for ideas to make work feel lighter and faster.

Up until 2024 this required technical expertise but now stitching together an automated workflow is infinitely more accessible. I discovered this while drowning in interview summaries during a consulting engagement.

The Problem

In the initial phase of a consulting engagement, I am often meeting tons of people in the client organization. On a particularly large file, this number was 500+ with around 5-10 interviews being conducted everyday.

I got the responsibility to summarise these using an LLM and then report out for broader visibility. As you might imagine, this was unglamorous and quite time consuming. Not to mention, very inefficient with my time/availability being the bottleneck.

Solution

I had been playing around with tools like Gumloop and quickly discovered Microsoft Automate. It's an underrated tool and incredibly useful for teams already within the Microsoft environment.

Using Automate, I put together a simple workflow:

• Data Ingestion: Interview notes auto-saved to a SharePoint library with metadata (date, interviewer, persona).

• Trigger: Power Automate monitors the library and starts processing when a new document is uploaded (you can configure this a few different ways).

• Analysis: The raw notes are passed to gpt-4 using an API with a detailed prompt outlining areas of interest.

• Output: gpt-4 produced a JSON output that is split into different themes and written into an Excel table.

  • This part was a bit tricky, but I used ChatGPT to write basic code and troubleshoot.

• Report: Created a PowerBI dashboard linked to Excel, outlining key themes, stakeholder info, etc.

I had to do a few rounds of testing to ensure the prompt worked, the output was where it was needed, and the connection to BI was stable. After some iteration, this ended up saving me 2-3 hours every day over the course of 6 months, which is roughly 300 hours!

This freed up mental space for deeper work instead of manual coordination. I have been able to replicate this for other use cases in hiring, project management, and client communication.

Note that for this to work, the process should be repeatable and consistent with minimal edge cases. My rule of thumb is that if you can map the process within 30 minutes, its a good candidate for automation.

If you are non-technical reading this, I highly encourage you to check these automation tools. They seem intimidating at first, but in a couple of hours you’ll get a hang of it.

Happy Automating!