[varaon]

A second point would be that the time you spend automating tasks has other payoffs, in the form of learning and inspiration.

For instance, I suspect that part of the inspiration for Appointment Reminder came from Patrick's own realization of how valuable the automation of small tasks can be (chasing down missed appointments, in this case).

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To go off on another tangent, this is akin to eliminating technical debt from your workflow. By taking time to "refactor" certain tasks by doing them in a more efficient way, you get a net savings going forward. You can increase your ability to take on new tasks by increasing the efficiency of existing ones.

In keeping with the refactoring theme, if you have tasks that don't scale well, you may need to spend more time on them in a crisis. For example, in the event of a site outage you might suddenly have a deluge of support emails. Having support tickets be automatically created would save you n*60 seconds of copy/pasting.