It took me three weeks to automate every task I performed in my role as Regional Operations Coordinator. The hardest part was accepting that three weeks was generous.

I should describe what I did for a living. Every Monday, I received a spreadsheet from four regional offices. I combined them into one spreadsheet. I then wrote a summary of the combined spreadsheet and emailed it to my director, who did not read it. On Wednesdays, I held a meeting to discuss the summary that no one had read. On Fridays, I sent a follow-up email referencing the meeting about the summary. This was considered essential work. I won an award for it in 2019.

The automation took three scripts, a Zapier integration, and about $8 in monthly API costs. The scripts are more reliable than I was. They do not call in sick. They do not take long lunches. They do not spend forty minutes in the bathroom scrolling LinkedIn and wondering if it's too late to go to law school. They generate the spreadsheet, write the summary, send the email, and schedule the meeting in which no human participates, which, candidly, is how most of the meetings went when I was running them.

My manager complimented the improvement in my output quality. 'You've really hit your stride this quarter,' she said during my performance review. I said thank you. She gave me a rating of 'exceeds expectations.' The expectations, it turns out, were calibrated to the output of a human who spent a meaningful percentage of his workday watching a pigeon outside his office window. The bar was not high.

The scripts have now been running for seven months. I have used the free time to learn watercolor painting, read twelve books, and develop a drinking problem that I'm sure is unrelated. My identity was my job. My job was a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is automated. I am, by the transitive property, unnecessary.

I still attend the Wednesday meeting. Nobody else does either, so it's quite peaceful.