How to Force Automation

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The key? External Incentives. (Photo: Ric e Ette)

Let’s face it, when you don’t have a “reason” to automate your daily business tasks, it’s not easy to do.

I recently bought a one way ticket to South America. I intend to travel through South (and Central) America for several months. However, I do not intend to terminate my current projects/businesses.

The knowledge that I am leaving soon is forcing me to come up with solutions for automating my necessary tasks.

Some Tips:

Switch to technologies that allow for automation ~

• WordPress: One of my projects requires me to post short updates to a blog daily (not this one). I originally had this blog set up on Weebly.com. As of now, Weebly does not have an option to schedule posts for future dates, so I moved the blog over to WordPress, which does have the feature (see below). I was able to schedule daily posts well into the future, alleviating my need to do it manually.

• FutureTweets: If you are looking for similar functionality for your Twitter account, try FutureTweets or Su.pr. Both services let you schedule tweets for future dates and times.

Hire Virtual Assistants ~

• I’ve come to believe that there are very few tasks that I cannot train a Virtual Assistant to do. Try hiring a Virtual Assistant through Elance or AskSunday. It’s a good idea to start with some smaller trial tasks to see how well you work together. Luckily, Elance ranks different groups of Virtual Assistants based on reviews and client satisfaction. I’ve found this to be extremely helpful!

Set up email auto-responders ~

• It’s time to lower expectations for your email response rates. Let people know that you won’t be responding to emails as frequently.

Without the threat of leaving my normal routine, many tasks were just too easy to do myself, manually. My external incentive for automating my daily tasks is simply that I have no intention of spending every day on my computer while I’m traveling.

If you really want to automate your life (business tasks, income, etc.) pull the trigger, buy a plane ticket, and automate out of necessity.