Every year I'm responsible for a portion of the Database Weekly newsletters. I used to do half, but right now Kathi, Grant, and I are on a rotation. Our boss puts out a schedule each year, which tells me the weeks for which I am responsible. Each January I then set up a recurring appointment for Mon/Wed/Fri on my weeks to remind me to curate articles and write an editorial.

Each year I also think about whether or not I can automate this. Last year I spent a few hours looking into the Exchange APIs for creating appointments, at the C# code, and PoSh (which is a nightmare). I spent a few hours, got frustrated, and gave up, just manually creating appointments.

This year I took a slightly better approach and tried to figure out how long it takes to create an appointment. I got a stopwatch and went through the process. Each recurring appointment takes about 30 sec to create and (a repetitive) 15 clicks. I have 17 weeks, so this is about 9 minutes (rounding) to get this done.

That doesn't seem worth automating. In a decade, I'd spent 90 minutes doing this. I'm not sure I could automate it in 90 minutes. I might learn a new skill, but I don't do much calendaring, and honestly, I'm not sure I could do something I'd think would be reliable, portable to others, or even useful in other ways.

Throughout my career I've had a lot of tasks like this as a DBA or developer. They are often short tasks, things I do fairly rarely, and are not tightly defined. Often I just do a little manual work rather than spend too much time trying to automate things. In my life, I've found similar tasks, where I'm not sure the time spent building automation or the maintenance requirements over time, would be worth the effort.

I am, however, a big proponent of automation, and I think there are many places where the time spent is worth the effort. Periodically cleaning log files from servers, running data loads of know files, DevOps CI and CD processes, and more are worth the effort. Many people need these processes running often, and the work to get automation running becomes a time saver.

Not everything needs to be automated, or even should be. Certainly, when the manual time or effort requirements are small, it pays to do a little analysis. If you disrupt the way humans do their work, then be sure your solution saves time or effort. As technologists, we often reach for the scripting/programming tools to solve problems, but be sure that you include a little thought before you start coding to be sure the process is worth automating.