EPISODE 022 - Organisation: Which tasks can be automated in everyday IT life?

Michael Seidl: Welcome to a new episode of the Get Sh*t Done in IT podcast. My name is Michael Seidl and please excuse my slightly touched voice. I was on a business trip and did a conference and a two day workshop. And so my voice sounds a little bit different this time, but I hope it is okay. So today we want to talk about which tasks can be automated in everyday IT life. And the persons who might know me a bit better, I love to do automation and we do a lot of automation, but mostly for IT departments and companies. But this is not the point I want to talk today. So today I want to talk about weird things, but can be easily activated or done and helps you in your daily IT life. Okay. And I have three points I want to discuss and I would be happy if you comment below the LinkedIn posts or send me an email about your things you're automating. So maybe we can collect some and provide a list, whatever. Let's see. So the first thing is I heavily use Outlook actions or quick actions you have on the top bar. You can create those actions. And I have two actions I heavily use. One is mark an email as done and move to the archive. So if you've, if you listened to one of the last episodes or to my previous podcast episodes, I mentioned that I have a very strict way how to, how emails are protest and used. So I have one button is done and moved to archive. So that means there is no more. to do left in that email or already planted in my single source of shit system. What we use is Notion. So this email is a marked as read, moved to archive and out of my inbox. And the second one is, of course, I get some kind of invoices or some invoices during the month and you have a

Michael Seidl: an invoice system which can take emails and read those emails and import invoices to the system. So for this I have an action to forward an email and their attachments but remove the body from the email and send it to the email address of our invoicing system and delete the email after this. So I don't keep those emails also not in the archive. I really delete those emails once they are processed by the invoicing system. And those buttons I really use daily, more than once a day. It is a simple task, but it really helps me to increase the speed on how to process my emails. And this helps a lot. The second one is a calendar sync with Power Automate. So I have a private calendar and a business calendar. And I also have the possibility that the web service or customers or future customers can book an appointment in my calendar, in my business calendar. So I have to sync my blog time from a private calendar. to my business calendar. And if you do that manually on the creation phase, it might be easy, but if you have to change anything in your private calendar, then you have to change it in the business calendar and so on. So I created a simple power automate, which triggers on a change or on a new action on my private calendar and syncs that information to my business calendar. So at least that the time is blocked privately. So those slots cannot be booked by customers or future customers in my calendar. So that saves a lot of time because if you change something in your private calendar, then you have to redo the same in the business calendar. takes a huge effort and a lot of time. And of course, if you forget to do that, then you will have a mess in your calendar that might some customers book an appointment where you're not available and so

Michael Seidl: So this is definitely a huge increase in saving time and increase of quality. And the last thing is, I think I already mentioned that in one of the previous episodes as well, to have a synchronization with PowerShell in Asia automation to sync my to-dos from Notion to my calendar. So in Notion everything is stored, all my to-dos and so on. And mostly on Friday when I do my planning for the next weeks, I go through my to-dos, my inbox and mark that as to-do in progress. And I have to reserve a block of time in my calendar for this. And this is done automatically. So in the to-do, I decide on what day it is it has to be done. How long does it take? And then have... I built myself three options on how those to-dos are booked. So one is best effort. So it will take the first slot available for this to-do. The next one is least effort. So least possible. I don't remember the name correctly. It is then backwards. So he goes to the date where the to-do needs to be finished and goes to the to the current time and blocks the slot where one is available on the latest possible slots. And the next one is just book. So I choose a day and it will book a slot on that day without taking care about already booked meetings. Those are mostly used when I have travel time. So the travel time is booked in my calendar as out of office, so there is no free slot available. But I know that I have to read something or write something or just think about something. So I know I want to book that on the calendar on that day so we can bypass to check free slots or anything. And this really helps a lot because also when I change something in the calendar or in the to do after the synchronization is done.

Michael Seidl: The PowerShell script in Asia Automation also synchronizes back. So if I change an appointment in the calendar, because I move it to a different day, he's already syncing back those information to the to-do. So everything is on sync. And that's without touching both sides. So that's a huge improvement. So that's my three things I use in my daily life for automation. One of three things of many others. I would be really happy when you comment with your ideas and what you do in automation related to enhance your productivity. And so we are at the end of the podcast. I wish you a happy week, stay productive and bye bye.