The question isn't "should I automate this?" The question is "what happens if I don't?" If the answer is "nothing important," probably not yet. If the answer starts with "it depends on who's around that day" or "sometimes we forget," then yes.
Five clear signs
- The same mistake happens more than once a month and the cost of each mistake exceeds the cost of automating it.
- One person is the single point of failure. If they go on vacation, something breaks.
- You're copying data between two tools by hand more than 10 times a week.
- Customer or employee onboarding depends on someone agreeing to "do X" in Slack.
- There's a "master document" maintained by one person that the whole team consults without audit.
Three traps where you shouldn't automate
Processes that happen fewer than five times a year, decisions that require fine human judgment, and any flow where the cost of a false positive exceeds the time saved. If you automate that, what you gain in hours you pay in expensive errors.
The best automation is one that eliminates an entire process, not one that speeds it up. Before Zapier, ask yourself if the process should exist at all.
