There are 2 must do steps before jumping into building any automation. They are:

1. Identifying tasks that if automated are going to have the biggest impact in your business.
2. Mapping out the flow of these tasks.

If you do not do these initial 2 steps you are not going have the foundation to build a successful automation.

Step 1: Identifying tasks that if automated are going to have the biggest impact in your business

Firstly, identify the most time consuming tasks in your business that you are currently doing manually.

You want to automate these first, so you have the highest possible ROI when you set the automation up.

Given you are likely very involved in your business you probably know exactly what tasks I am talking about here, but if you are still unsure here are two options to identify the tasks worth automating.

So how do you start measuring the time spent on manual tasks?

**Option 1: ****Hand out a word document to all your team members, to track the amount of time spent on each task.

If this sounds like micro-managing, then you could also send out a poll asking your team which manual tasks they spend the most time on and collect the data that way.

Option 2: Use one of the time tracking software’s below:

Toggl Track: for a free time tracking app.

Timely: for automated time tracking for large teams.

Memtime: for simplified automated time tracking.

Step 2: Identifying tasks that if automated are going to have the biggest impact in your business

Now we have found out which of your processes take up most of your time and have a rough strategy on how to automate them.

It’s now time to map all this out so you can clearly see every step of the process. This will be the blueprint to the automation you are going to be building. A tool I highly recommend for this is Whimsical.

Now you are ready to build you automation!