Webmasters’, IA’s and other computer power users are continuously facing the reality of scarce resources and little time to manage them.
It is as if people who work with computers are the culprit of “the active users’ paradox”.
If you don’t know what this paradox is, have a look at Bokardo’s post on the subject but it basically comes down to the following:
The “paradox of the active user” is a paradox because users would save time in the long term by taking some initial time to optimize the system and learn more about it.
Paradox of the Active User (Alertbox Sidebar)
If I have a job to do, let’s say create a content inventory, I could go through the website, create the sitemap and content inventory by hand or …
I could learn a bit more about vbscript, excel and visio and create both in one go.
If I automate, I save time. In this case, I can make a better decision on which pages I really have to read. I don’t have to go through each and every page.
There are probably a thousand example like this:
- corporate system admins writing scripts to install PC’s,
- batch files to connect to shared drives,
- managers trying to cramp everything in an excel file and run vbscript reports on the figures,
- me trying to create a script that generates an Umbraco website package from my excel content inventory, which I can import (Anybody? please mail me :-)
Either you do it manually, or you study and automate.
I tend to go for the latter, but that is because I prefer to do new things instead of struggling through the routine of doing something over and over again.
If I calculate the time spent, I end up with the same amount or even more time spent.
Just make sure that this job is not the first or last time you have to do this and in the end you will be spending less time doing routine jobs.