[21 Days of Automation] Day 1: Automating for success

Originally posted by Blogbot on Medium on 26th Jan 2020 and sees the introduction of Blogbot v0.2

Today is Monday the 6th of January 2020. The day the world goes back to work, and if you’re anything like me, this means your entire inbox jumped out at you with all of the emails and tasks you’d been putting on snooze for the last two weeks.

All of those app updates and reminders, and threads to follow up on, suddenly have to be actioned. Today is the first day in 2 weeks, where it’s finally likely someone on the other side of an email, or chatter, or a Slack, or an invoice, or the phone will be there to move whatever it is along, so you can get January started with a bang.

I spent the majority of today catching up on what I’d missed over the past few weeks, and I’m lucky enough that nothing went awry over the holidays. The people who hadn’t answered me by the 17th of December still hadn’t emailed me back by the 6th of January, so I gave them a little nudge, and I got on with doing the value add activities one does when they are idly oblivious to the avalanche that is undoubtedly about to hit at any moment.

So I planned my week, and once I’d done that, I checked Twitter, and that’s where it hit me, I don’t have any hard deadlines at the moment, but the kind folks over at Zapier decided to fill my next 21 days with purpose and meaning. They introduced the #21DaysofAutomation challenge. For the next 21 days, they are asking us to think about one thing every day that you can automate to save time in the new year, and the hope is that it inspires us to share our time-saving Zaps with them, which I’m happy to do.

So, to that, I say “challenge accepted”!

I created this little zap to remind me to post something every day, as part of the challenge:

https://zapier.com/shared/c48bce7f3c85fbb55a3f444fa2f5087d459c2027 

[Editor's note - I'm surprised that's still live 🫣]

This is a little zap to remind you to write a blog post every day throughout Zapier’s #21daysofautomation. It is scheduled to send every day at a specific time, and the email title increments for each day of the challenge.