I had a small victory this week in my ongoing effort to automate and simplify day-to-day tasks.  Because shoe inventory is always changing, one of my biggest challenges is keeping all the product links up-to-date.

Up until about 15 months ago, I was doing all this manually, individually checking each link.  It was a very slow, tedious process that was never fully complete.  Then I had a tool developed to automatically tell me which links were broken, which saved a ton of time and money.

The tool uses an Excel file that has to be in a specific format to work properly.  Formatting the data only took maybe a couple minutes, but it was the same repetitive functions every day.  So I was pretty proud of myself when I created and successfully debugged an Excel macro to accomplish the formatting for me.

What used to take 2 minutes now takes 5 seconds.  Why didn’t I do this a year ago?  I think it’s a good example of “being too busy chopping down trees to sharpen the saw.”  I still have to manually fix the broken product links, but at least it’s getting faster.  And before too long I think that task could be automated/outsourced too.

So here’s to more saw-sharpening and working smarter not harder!

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