Painting ridiculous furniture and why automation is awesome
I’m quite enthusiastic about automating processes that are capable of being automated. Not only does it frequently save time, but even in cases where it doesn't, consistent outcomes justify the investment of effort. Every so often, I find myself needing to revisit this principle, and I was recently reminded of its importance while painting a chest of drawers.
Make it stand out
I bought a second hand, pine wood chest of drawers to store all the stuff that inevitably comes with having an infant in the house. Due to a small amount of scope creep and gold-plating in the design phase, I found myself spending literal days trying to paint a wavy rainbow design (see image). It definitely doesn’t fit in with the Hampton style of interior design!
At the start I had considered using my wife’s CNC machine to cut stencils on sticky vinyl which could be stuck to the surface. Thinking that lining up the positive and negative side of the stencil would be too difficult I decided against the stencils and thought it would be easier to “just” paint the lines freehand. There was plenty of time to regret this decision as thin paints and poor brush control left me doing days of rework to get some clean boundaries between the colours.
In hindsight, if I had put the effort in upfront to make some stencils and place them accurately, I would have saved days of time and the result would be far cleaner. Putting an unexpected five coats of one colour would have been a breeze if I didn’t need to painstakingly trace the boundaries with a small brush on each coat. The coats would also be more uniform using the one brush instead of cutting in with small brushes and the edges would be sharper as every coat would hit the line exactly.
Automating computer tasks is similar to this. It seems so easy to take a table and clean the data by hand: delete the duplicate records, fix misspellings, and interpolate any missing data. What could go wrong? It’s just an hour or so of work! But inevitably a question will come out about some outlier that you’ll need to trace back; the data will get an update requiring a repeat of your analysis; or 6 months later you’ll be asked questions about how the process worked. If we automate the data cleaning process it will be traceable, repeatable, and easy to rerun.
Another process ripe for automation is copying and pasting data from one system to another. It’s so easy to copy the wrong field, miss the hotkey and paste old data, or miss-click the target field. Computers are really good at copying and pasting information so for the accuracy alone automating such tasks is worth it. For those that cannot be automated, such as submitting BAS statements to the tax office, I make checklists to ensure it’s repeatable. If I could automate my BAS statements however, I would in a heartbeat!
If you have a manual process that you would like help automating, let us take a look (Hello@NorthCardinal.com.au). You might just find it’s easier than you think!