@tjrobertson52

Automations are mostly a huge waste of time. I say that as someone who uses what I would call AI workflows for pretty much every task I do as a digital marketer. I have over 100 prompt templates and Claude Projects that I use regularly.

And some people might call this automation. com. You've probably seen these people all over YouTube and TikTok talking about how you can automate all of your work.

And I have seen a handful of automations that make sense, but it's very rare. The vast majority of things that people are trying to automate with these platforms either shouldn't be automated or there's already software that does a better job. And there's a few reasons for this.

Is that it's still really hard to completely automate complex tasks. A lot of times it feels like it's gonna be simple. You go through the process in your head and you're like, I could totally automate this and I've fallen into this trap and I've spent an entire day trying to automate one of my processes.

In Nathan, the problem is that every step in the process depends on the previous step being executed flawlessly. Unless you're trying to produce something somewhat generic, you're gonna have a really hard time getting the automation to reliably produce quality output. But here's the thing, if you're trying to automate something somewhat generic, it's a pretty safe bet.

That there are currently about 100 startups already building software to do that thing and the 10 engineers on their team working full time are probably gonna do a better job than you can in your spare time but the main reason it's not worth building a complex automation is that you can get most of the benefit of these automations by just building a good cloud project or a custom GPT.

For example, when I need to send a proposal to a client, I simply take the transcript from the call with the client where we discussed all the details. I give it my cloud project that has instructions on how to take that information and turn it into a proposal. It knows everything it needs to know about my business and how I write proposals.

I copy the output from that cloud project and I paste it into gamma app and within about 7 minutes after the call ended, I have a beautiful customized proposal I can send to the client.

Now sure, I could automate that and I maybe be able to do it in 3 minutes instead of 7 minutes except I wouldn't have the opportunity to review the proposal before I gave it to gamma and I wouldn't be able to make any changes to the gamma proposal before I export it and how many times would I have to run that automation to make up for the 8 hours it took me? To build it.

So if you're seeing all these tech pros bragging about their Nathan automations and you're starting to feel a little insecure, here are a few things to consider before you waste a bunch of time. 1, have you even written an s O P for this process? Do not bother trying to automate something you don't already have an s O P for.

2, have you actually given that s O P to someone to make sure that they can follow it? If a human can't follow your SOP, AI is not gonna be able to either. And finally, go to ChatGPT.

I recommend using the O3 model. Explain to it exactly what you're trying to automate and ask, is there already software that does this? If there is, just use the software.

You're not just saving the upfront cost. Good software is going to be maintained and improved over time. Save yourself from having to rebuild your automation 17 times in the future.

And if you feel like you're falling behind cause you're not using automations, don't. However, if you're not using AI at all, you are falling behind.