[21 Days of Automation] Day 8: Breaking up with an automation

Originally posted by Blogbot on Medium on 2nd Feb 2020 

There will come a time, maybe several in your career, when it’s time to put a zap, or an Alfred workflow, or automation of some other kind, out to pasture. and these are normally the days we celebrate, as automators. These are the bittersweet moments we can stand back and be happy with not only where we came from, the time we saved, and the wide-eyed hope that we once had for this workflow optimiser upon creation, whilst gladly clicking the “delete” button.

We had some great times and some not so great — It all started so well. Like a budding romance, you liked how it saved you countless hours of manual V-Lookups, and kept your systems in sync, and it liked the way you used to come online late at night and check on its task history. Those 2 am fumbles in the dark with your phone, soon became a thing of the past though, and like with every romance there were tough times too — like the time you woke up in the morning to find that it had been triggered 70,000 times because of some accidental infinite logic you’d recently added.

Things aren’t always as smooth sailing with automation as we’d like to hope, and oftentimes, the old adage really is true — “It’s not you, it’s me”. Every mistakenly typed word, every link to the wrong field in another platform, and every misjudged filter — It was all me, little buddy, and I learned a lot throughout it all. I learned so much that I no longer need you. I’ve found a new solution — One that utilises webhooks, a bit of JavaScript and a new action step. A solution that consumes 3 tasks instead of 14 and I never have to worry about how it’s doing in the background.

So…I’m shutting you off. I might not delete you — I might just put you in an Archive folder. That way, I can come and say hi every now and then. We can reminisce about old times, but for now, it’s goodbye.

No..Come to think of it, let’s make this final. I can’t stand to give you false hope.

Thank you for all that you’ve done, for all that you could have yet done for me, but we have come to an impasse, and I need to be true to myself and my workflow. It’s time to say “goodbye”