Automating Leadership

I have absolutely fallen in love with a couple of new electronic gizmos in my home. These electronic gizmos have made life easier by automating much of what we would normally do.

We added Philips Hue lights to our living room. These light bulbs are controlled via an app on our phones. They’re also automated.

BB8 from Star Wars standing in front of a tall building

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

This means we can set a schedule to turn on our lights automatically. We don’t have to walk to a light switch as it gets dark. The lights just turn on. It’s like magic. Automation is awesome.

We also added a Klipsch Cinema 400 Sound Bar to our entertainment setup. While not completely automated, it makes turning on the TV and controlling the volume supersimple. I’d almost call it automation.

Then there’s the SocialBee SaaS that I’ve been using. Social Bee automates portions of social media to give you back your time. It’s a godsend. Once again, automation is awesome.

You can even automate your bill pay. This has been a life-saver for Pamela and me. When I can set automatic payments for our credit cards, house payment (before we paid off our mortgage), and more. It comes out and the bills are always paid on time. Automation is awesome!

Automating Leadership

These devices have encouraged me to dig deeper into something I am calling automating leadership.

What is automating leadership? Automating leadership is anything that helps take you out of the leadership equation while still getting the work done.

There’s so much in our day-to-day schedule that can be automated. They are things you may not think of but they can drain your time quickly.

A few areas of leadership you can automate are:

  • Social Media creation:

    I already mentioned SocialBee as a great way to automate your social media platforms. We can easily become overwhelmed with all of the different social media platforms but tools like SocialBee make it easy.

    Put a program in place that can do regular content posts for you. You don’t have to be in front of a computer for a campaign or tweet to go out this way.

  • Grammar checking:

    You’re shooting off emails left and right. You’re also questioning whether you used who or whom correctly. You can automate your grammar checking through a great program called Grammarly.

    Grammarly checks your grammar as you type and once you’re finished. It automates the checking process by highlighting what it sees as wrong.

    By automating your grammar checking, you can feel more confident in your communication and spend less time spell-checking.

  • Your schedule:

    We’ve all got busy schedules. They are filled to the brim. Often, our schedules include recurring meetings that we manually create repeatedly.

    Stop doing that. Instead, use tools such as Gmail’s repeating events or Outlook’s recurring meetings. You will automate the process of creating the same meeting over and over.

  • Running programs:

    One of the most underutilized tools in Windows is the Task Scheduler. The Task Scheduler goes beyond scheduling tasks. I use it to automate the running of programs that I do on the regular.

    Use Task Scheduler to schedule programs to open and run that you use regularly. You will discover there are amazing things you can do with Task Scheduler. Keep playing with it and you will find yourself using it to automate much of your computer usage.

Automating leadership gives you time back in your schedule. It helps you to do the things you would do anyway but without the hassle of you doing it.

There’s one more benefit to automating the things in leadership that you can. That benefit? Things get done whether or not you are there to do it.

Find the things in your leadership you can automate. Put the process in place to get the automation rolling. Enjoy the extra time you now have.

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