I have a task I do every week that I could probably stop doing entirely. I've thought about automating it, but I still haven't made the time to do it.

At least I'm not alone. Most small business owners I speak to are sitting on a pile of repetitive admin work that could be automated, and most of them are still doing it by hand. Not because they're technophobes or the tooling is expensive, just because spending a couple of hours on an automation sequence seems like a lot more work than a daily 10-minute task.

Here's how we fix it.

What actually qualifies as automatable?

The easiest test: if you can describe the task in a sentence that starts with "every time X happens, I do Y", it's probably automatable.

  • Every time someone fills in my contact form, I copy their details into a spreadsheet
  • Every time I finish a job, I send a follow-up email asking for a review
  • Every time I raise an invoice, I add the amount to my cashflow tracker
  • Every time a client sends me a file, I move it into the right folder
  • Every time I list a new property, I need to post it on social media

None of these tasks require your brain. They require your hands and your time. And those are two things you're already short of.

Why most of us haven't automated these tasks yet

There are a few reasons this keeps happening. Or not happening, as the case may be.

The first is that the task itself doesn't feel painful enough. Each individual instance only takes a couple of minutes. The cumulative cost is invisible. You don't feel the 45 minutes a week you spend on fiddly admin, you just feel vaguely tired by Thursday.

The second is that every automation tutorial on the internet seems to assume you already know what a webhook is. There's a gap between "this looks useful" and "I know how to set it up", and for most small business owners, nothing bridges that gap.

The third is that tools like Zapier and Make (or N8N if you're a true nerd) have historically been confusing to get started with. They're better than they used to be, but still daunting if you've never used them.

Where to start with simple automations

Pick one task. Not the biggest or the most impressive one. Just pick one that's slightly annoying and happens more than once a week.

For a lot of businesses, that's a form-to-spreadsheet or form-to-email workflow. Someone fills in your contact form, you need to know about it. Zapier can handle that in about ten minutes. You don't need a developer. You just need to follow a few prompts.

Once you've done that, you might start seeing your admin differently. Instead of "a thing I have to do", it becomes "a trigger and an action". And suddenly the list of things you could automate gets a lot longer.

The tools that are actually worth knowing about

For connecting different apps together, Zapier is the easiest starting point. It's not free at any meaningful level of use, but the paid plans aren't expensive. Make is more powerful and more complex, which is worth it if your workflows involve multiple steps or conditions.

For document and email automation, there are tools built into the platforms you're already using. Google Workspace has a lot of this built in, and it's underused. If you're on Microsoft 365, Power Automate is the equivalent.

For AI-assisted tasks, things have moved pretty damn quickly. There are now tools that can draft routine emails, summarise meeting notes, and categorise enquiries without you writing a single line of code. I use Claude Code daily in my workflows, and it has helped me streamline a lot of what I do.

What to be realistic about

The second thing you'll learn about automation is that it isn't a one-time fix. Your tools update, one of your integrations might break, and sometimes the workflow you set up six months ago stops working because the app changed its interface. You need to check on your automations occasionally. Don't just set and forget them.

And it's worth mentioning that not everything should be automated. Tasks that require judgement, relationships, or context belong with a human. The goal isn't to remove yourself from your business, although that would be nice. It's to stop spending your limited attention on things that don't need it.

The real cost of doing nothing

Every hour you spend on admin that could be automated is an hour you're not spending on client work, on growing your business, or on having a life outside it.

That sounds dramatic, but if you run the numbers, that two hours a week of automatable work might add up to over 100 hours a year. That's...a lot.

Shameless plug: I do automation work for a handful of small businesses. If you need someone to set this stuff up, get in touch.