Decide what's worth it

You now know how to automate a lot of things. That does not mean you should automate all of them. Some jobs are not worth the setup time, and some are so rare that chasing them is its own waste. This lesson is the filter: a quick way to decide, in pounds, whether a given automation earns its place.

Go and get the audit paper from lesson one. This is where it pays off.

Put a pound value on a job

For each job on your shortlist, work out what it actually costs you now. You already have the minutes per week from your audit. Turn that into money:

1. Minutes a week, from your audit (times per week multiplied by minutes each).
2. Times about 4.3 to get minutes a month.
3. Divide by 60 for hours a month.
4. Times your hourly value. Not your lowest wage, what an hour of your time is genuinely worth when you could be selling, quoting, or doing the skilled work only you can do. For a lot of owners that is a good deal more than they first say.

That gives you the monthly cost of doing the job by hand. A ten-minute job done four times a week is about 172 minutes a month, nearly three hours. At even a modest hourly value, that is a real number, every month, forever.

Weigh it against the effort

Now the other side of the scales. Each automation has a one-off setup cost (an hour or two of your time) and sometimes a small monthly tool cost. The decision is simple:

• High monthly saving, low setup, cheap or free tool: obvious go. Invoice reminders and missed-call text-back usually land here.
• High saving but real ongoing cost: still probably a go, but check the tool actually pays for itself. If it saves three hours a month and costs the equivalent of one, that is fine.
• Low saving, fiddly setup: no. Leave it. Do it by hand and spend the afternoon on something that matters more.
• Rare job, big one-off: usually no. Automating something that happens twice a year is a hobby, not a saving.

The honest rule: automate the jobs that are both frequent and low-judgement first, and be willing to say no to the clever ones that do not pay back.

Use the calculator

To make this concrete without doing the sums by hand, we built a tool for exactly this. Put in how long a task takes, how often you do it, and what your time is worth, and it shows you the saving and a clear read on whether it is worth automating.

Try it with your top three jobs: the savings calculator. Run each one through and you will have a ranked list, in pounds, of what to build next. It usually confirms what your gut already told you, and occasionally saves you from an afternoon you would have wasted.

The takeaway

Automation is not a competition to automate the most things. It is about removing the jobs that quietly cost you the most, and leaving the rest alone. The audit tells you where the time goes, the pound value tells you what it is worth, and the effort side tells you whether to bother. Three numbers, a clear decision, no guilt about the ones you skip.

You have your ranked list. The last lesson is how to actually put it live without breaking anything, and where to go next.