Against automation

June 2024

In my capacity as a guy who writes code, I have always pushed back against automation.

Not because it’s intrinsically bad, not because it’s never useful, but because usually when someone wants to automate something, what they really want is for the thing to be happening at a scale that requires automation.

It’s a fantasy. And I’ve got nothing against fantasies! But they’re not necessarily worth sinking dozens of hours of effort into.

My usual line is “let’s run through the process manually a couple times, document it, then find the parts worth automating.” And the usual outcome is that we don’t end up running through the process at all.

However. It’s worth noting that I am a giant hypocrite.

To date, I have built a total of 16 automations and sequences in ConvertKit. (Sequences are just a particular type of automation IMO.) Who knows how many hours I’ve spent on them. And to date they’ve served … about 60 humans?

Good for them, I guess—they got a series of educational emails, or a few sample chapters of my book.

But realistically, if the net effect was to send a few different emails to 5-10 people a month, I could’ve done that manually. Should’ve done that manually.

So, moving forward, that’s what I’m going to do.

I’ll still take advantage of ConvertKit for providing an opt-in form → “please confirm” → “here’s a link to the thing I offered in exchange for your email address” flow. I need to have some sort of measure in place to ensure I’m not wantonly spamming people with my emails, and I don’t want to be on the hook for monitoring my inbox 24/7.

But as for the followup—all those sequences and the elaborate tagging, custom field adjustment, and conditional logic that comprise them, I’m just gonna do it manually. By typing stuff and clicking “send”.

Hi name_of_human, thanks for opting in for the sample chapters of my book. Let me know if you have any questions.

See, that wasn’t hard to type. I can do that 5-10 times a month without hurting myself.

Even as I make this decision, I can feel the lust for scale creeping in. “What if it gets out of hand? What if I do a podcast appearance and get 50 signups in a day?”

The answer is: I’ll spend 20 minutes sending out messages over the next day or two. It’s fine.

I can’t find a source on this but I’ve heard that Noam Chomsky replies to every email he receives, even if it’s just from some random reddit user. My assumption is that it takes time, maybe lots of time, but he sees it as worthwhile. I think the same is true for me!

So, here’s to dismantling some automations.

Against automation

Next time I write something, I'll let you know.