Chapter 2 of 15

Automate Everything

Productivity is achieved by doing less stuff

The next most important thing to know about your job, after learning that you don’t know how good you are at it, is that you should always do as little of your job as possible. If you can automate something, you probably should.

There’s a famous xkcd strip about this:

Randall Munroe’s math here is a little weird because he is a cartoonist and doesn’t have a normal day job, and who spends five years doing one thing? So I made my own version:

how much time do you save by automating something

So, for example, if there’s something you do every day that takes you 5 minutes to do, you can spend 3 hours coming up with an automated way to do that thing, and it’s still worth the time you saved over the course of a year. That’s an unexpectedly huge amount of time!

Touch typing

Can you think of a task you do every single day that takes about an hour? The answer is typing. If you type at about 30 words per minute, which is a pretty average speed for a typist, and you could speed up to 40 words per minute, which is still pretty average, and you assume you spend most of the day typing, which is pretty reasonable for a developer, you’d save roughly an hour a day out of an eight-hour working day. Over the course of a year, that would save you 1.5 working months.

Think about that: if you joined a startup with 12 months of runway and spent the first four weeks doing nothing but learning to type faster, you’d still come out ahead over the course of the year compared to remaining a slow typist. Four-finger typing is not enough. Learn to touch type, and get fast at it. Make it the very first thing you do. Everything else will be magnitudes faster because of it.

The myth of the 10x programmer

There’s this myth in the tech industry of the “10x programmer” — somebody who codes ten times faster than everyone else. Nobody programs ten times faster. Some programmers are dramatically more productive than others because they’ve eliminated all the friction in the work day. They’ve automated away everything they can possibly get rid of. All they do is novel tasks.

So think to yourself: what else I can I get faster at? What else can I automate entirely? What can I shave down from 20 minutes to five? LLMs are especially good at this kind of stuff. So get creatively lazy.

Some candidates for getting faster at stuff

Your text editor: I know, I know, nobody edits text by hand anymore, the coding agent is doing all of that for you. If you’re really never, ever looking at code, then that’s great for you. But I haven’t seen that happen in real life yet. If you spend any time at all in a text editor, get good at it. Get fast at it. Customize it to your preferences to minimize clicking and typing. You spend hours and hours a day in your editor. Pick one and get good at it.

At this point somebody is going to suggest that the best text editor is vim and I am here to tell you that this is bullshit. Vim is a terrible text editor. You know why they think it's great? Because they have spent 30 years learning how to use it. If you pick any text editor and spend 30 years in it, I promise you will be at least as fast as somebody using vim, and you also won't have to spend your first year learning how to quit.

I used to include the command line in here, and also git, but with coding agents they can take care of nearly all your command-line needs for you these days, so I’ll think of some stuff later and add it in. That’s the advantage of web pages. Some day I’ll delete this paragraph and it’ll look like I thought of it all at once.

Next up, let’s learn how to communicate effectively.