People often ask why I contribute to open source projects or otherwise work on building automated tooling. They see me spending hours to automate a task or fix a bug that take seconds to do or avoid manually, in a way that the original XKCD comic says won’t pay off. The disconnect seems to be that the comic and those people only consider time it saves me, not time it saves the tens to thousands to millions of other people who will use the script or patch or whatever when I publish it. So, here’s a version of xkcd.com/1205 updated for making decisions that benefit a thousand people instead of just one.
I’m just trying to think of anything that I do 50x a day that takes five minutes.
Not since I was a teenager.
Leave my mom out of this.
How many things does anyone do 50x a day, period? Apart from autonomic body functions I can’t think of anything. I probably don’t even stand up 50 times a day.
Sending emails, opening files, checking the database. Those are quite mundane everyday tasks of every office clerk.
Copy, cut, paste, undo. Use those keyboard shortcuts and if you work with documents for a notable part of the day you will save a half day a year or so.
Type
;in JS or C.I’m going to click the [-] thread collapse button on Lemmy 50 times in the next ten minutes.
I click the left mouse button more often each day, also when you work in a production facility you have a bunch of repetitive tasks, automating them is pretty much was humanity did in the last century.
How can we shave a second of the time it takes for you to click the left mouse button?
Automate it.
When you press a button on this revolutionary machine, it will automatically left click for you!
Something we talk about at my job is being able to do stuff in our UI with less clicks, less is better.
Lining up my indent levels.
Write emails? At 250min, or 4 hours it’s either a major repetitive work task or a hobby.
Or if you’re into wargaming or model making, assembly tasks or painting.
Remember though, this is the amount of time savings something has to represent.
So you still have to accomplish the task.
So doubling it: your entire repetitive job. Would have efficiency increased to halve the time. Pretty rare.
I mean, there are some lower hanging fruit.
For example, if it takes 10 minutes to poop, but you can get that down to say, 5, with a decent centerfuge, across an entire company (1000 people, assuming every one is pooping five times a day).
… holy shit. Brilliant.
That area of the chart is for people with really repetitive jobs/hobbies. There are MANY jobs where you do the same 5-10 minute thing 50x a day.