Hey Makers

I often get asked by friends and family about what Make does and how it could be useful for them. It can be tricky to explain. I mean it’s like having a magic wand that simplifies your life!
That’s why I created this post to share some general benefits of automation.

Automating repetitive mundane tasks brings such joy to life!

With automation, you can forget about repetitive chores and make room for the things that matter.

Besides saving your time, money, and energy, automation can:

give you the chance to focus on creative and more complex projects
allow you to say goodbye to copy-pasting activities and feel more productive
increase efficiency of your processes that can get completed in a shorter time
improve the accuracy of your workflows, eliminating human error

When you’re on the lookout for tasks to automate, keep an eye out for the ones that:

• are tedious and time-consuming
• require too many mouse-clicks
• have a high risk of human error
• happen on a regular basis
• involve a series of predictable steps
  
  

In your personal life, there are tons of opportunities to automate mundane tasks that have the potential to wear you out.

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With business processes, the sky’s the limit when it comes to automation, including:

Marketing: blasting out email campaigns or scheduling social media posts,
Sales: capturing leads, making initial contact, and following up with potential customers.
HR: making the employee onboarding process smoother and gathering employee feedback.

It would be a shame to let repetitive tasks hold you back. Essentially, automation’s here to do the heavy lifting so you can focus on the fun stuff.

Last year was our first Science Fair. My seven-year-old daughter and I decided we were going to do some research on the ladybugs that had magically appeared in our apartment in the middle of February. We went online and learned that ladybugs love old buildings with a southeast orientation, and, on cold days, make their way through crevices into these sunny and warm living spaces. 

When the time came to start the Science Fair project, we looked around to see how we could create it using what we had at home. A cardboard box, some leftover paint, a couple of empty paper towel rolls, and a few clips to hold the rolls in place as ladybug antennae. Glue, paper, and a few failed homemade shrinky dinks, and we were done. It was fun, simple, cheap, and almost zero waste.

A few days later, we took the project to the school gym and were impressed to see how "perfect" most of the other entries looked. Standard trifold display boards, lots of glittery foam letters, and most projects that required store-bought items to work. They all looked great, but to me they were missing the essential: the kids had not "made do" with what they had at home. They had not adapted what was available to them to meet their needs. They had just gone out and bought what they needed.

Since we'd moved to the U.S. from Spain only a few months before, this got me thinking (again) about how decisively our culture affects our behavior—and how this, in turn, has consequences on our planet. 

When tackling the Science Fair project, my priority for our household had been to spend as little money as possible, or ideally none at all. As a mother, I wanted my daughter to execute the project using things she found around the house. In doing so, she would exercise the art of working with limited resources, use her creativity and skills, and ultimately feel self-reliant and empowered.

Both of these facets of my persona (the frugal homemaker and the make-do-loving mother) were responding to my cultural upbringing in Spain, a place where "making do" is not only good, but is expected.  

Having grown up seeing how people transformed what was available to them into what they needed, I had assumed that this was a universal skill, something inherent to humankind. In Spanish, the verb "make do" (apañarse) is a common one; you even use it as a compliment (apañado/a), meaning that someone is resourceful and can do well with what is available to them. So, yes, in my world "make do" was something good. It was only when we stepped into the Science Fair that I came to realize that this was not true for everyone, everywhere.