What Not to Automate
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What Not to Automate
It’s easy to get caught up in the building and start automating things that shouldn’t be automated. A few categories to avoid:
Anything that requires your specific relationship. Automated responses to clients or readers sound automated. People can tell. The warm email that makes someone feel seen takes thirty seconds to write and isn’t worth automating.
Decisions with high stakes and low frequency. If you’re making a decision once a month and it really matters, that’s not automation territory — that’s a judgment call that deserves your full attention.
Things you haven’t done manually enough to understand. Automating a process you’ve never run by hand means you don’t know what good looks like. You’ll build automation for the wrong thing, or build it wrong, and won’t recognise it. Always manual first.
Processes that are still changing. Automation crystallises a process as it is now. If you’re still experimenting with how something should work, automation gets in the way. Stabilise first, then automate.