You Ask, I Answer: Favorite Tools for Automating Tasks?

In today's episode, Anne asks, what are the main tools you use to automate tasks? Gosh, well, there's a lot to choose from. But the two that I use the most that are the most efficient at automation, uh, one is called the Z Shell. Uh, this is a uh shell operating environment for any Unix-like system. So uh Macs, for example, you can use it on a Mac, you can use it on a Linux box.

And the Z shell is a command line. So on that command line, you can uh give short commands to tell your computer to do stuff, make a folder, delete something, etc. Um, but you can also create little scripts. And I have a gazillion little scripts to rename files, to move files from one place to another, to uh gather up different file types and put them in their appropriate folders to uh organize and sort through lists uh and text files and stuff, uh convert from one format to another using tools like Pandoc or FFmpeg to uh convert a piece of video to a piece of audio. Um the the Unix design philosophy in general, which incorporates things like the bash shell, the Z shell, the and so on and so forth, are all about having lots of little best in class utilities, a utility that does one thing but does that one thing really, really well.

Compare that to monolithic um applications, which try to be you know uh a little bit of everything, like the Finder, for example, on a Mac, or just the Windows operating system on a PC. It tries to be a bunch of things, and then it's not really good at any one of them. Whereas in the Unix world, it very much is here's this utility, and this is all it does. And you can chain utilities together with a shell, like uh piping commands together or piping outputs to other locations, uh, invoking um pieces of software like Python or R from the command line. All of those are things that I use a lot for automating tasks because I want to be able to uh perform lots of interesting granular little tasks and sort of chain them all together so that I don't need to have I don't need to reinvent the wheel every single time I perform some kind of task.

I can simply uh pull out the utilities I need, chain them together with commands, and we're off and running. The second major tool that I use for heavy automation is the R programming language itself. So the R language and uh the companion R Studio development environment. R is a statistical language, but as with so many things, it has ballooned to incorporate things like machine learning and computer vision and all sorts of stuff. But I use it so much for connecting to different marketing automation systems, marketing systems like Google Analytics, HubSpot, etc., and pulling data from all these different sources into one place where I can do analysis on that data.

Because the channel, the challenge we have with so many of our marketing systems is they don't really talk to each other. But when you bring all your data into one place, you can use language like R to code and uh unify all that data. I was doing some of this last week for a client where they had data in spreadsheets, had data in Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, you name it. And using R, I was able to massage all that data together, get it unified into one view of the data, and then perform an analytics and analysis and and you know visualization from that. So those are the two main tools that I use to automate tasks because they're just so incredibly powerful, they're flexible, and by and large, they're free, right?

Most of the utilities in the Unix operating system are built into the OS. And certainly a system like Linux, free. Um the Mac operating system, which we all think of, you know, the same sort of graphical environment that Windows has, but underneath there's a Unix-like operating system. And so it's incorporated there as well. And even in Windows, if you bring up a command shell, there is a uh a Unix-like system in some cases, um, the sort of the native Windows command language, or in I believe it's Windows 10 and after, you can actually get the Ubuntu uh Linux subsystem entirely within Windows, right?

So you can have that command line system with all the same commands right within Windows. To become proficient at these tools does take time because the documentation isn't always great. Um, and it is written for is written by technical people, generally for other technical people, but um all the documentation tends to be very thorough. And once you get in the habit of of learning how to these two different you know automation environments work, you get more productive immediately because once you write a piece of code, as long as it works, you don't have to write it again, right? Whenever you approach that same task the next time, you just hit run and it does the thing again.

That's the beauty of automation. That's what makes a code-based automation system so much better than a lot of other tools, because the amount of rework you have to do if you do it well is minimal. When I need to process my Google Analytics data, I just type in, you know, my R script, the my my script name, hit go, and it does its thing. And then I check in on it, you know, an hour later and it's it's done. I don't have to do any additional work.

Um whereas a lot of other scripting systems, they are not as hands off once you're done. There's still like running a macro inside Excel. You still got to fire up Excel, you still got to do it, you know, a few steps to get it to run. That said, there's nothing wrong with those systems. Any automation is better than none.

So wherever you can find automated ways to reduce the amount of time that it takes you to do repeatable tasks, do it. Do it by whatever means is available to you because saving time is saving time. Even shaving a few seconds off a task. If that's a task you do every day, that time does add up. So really good question.

Um there's a lot, there are a lot of tools out there that you can use to automate tasks. Uh, check to see what's built into this the tools and the software that you already own. Um, because you'd be surprised at just how robust they are. Thanks for asking. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.