Phil Windley’s post on building tools for personal productivity struck a chord with me. I thought all software developers built tools to automate repetitive or recurring tasks, maybe I was wrong.

For me, the ability to build software has become like the ability to use a computer. For instance, I needed to import the content from a large number of web pages. I could have sat and spent hours copying and pasting the content, but instead I spent the same amount of time building a tool to do the work for me. No time saving there but inevitably I was asked to do much the same thing a week later and it took only a few minutes to do the work. Hours of valuable time saved in the end. I think the key thing to remember is that these personal productivity tools do not have to look great or be completely bug free, the app that I built in the previous example could only be configured by modifying the source code, but it doesn’t matter.What is important is how valuable your time is. If you are a skilled software developer, time spent doing copy paste operations is not good value. If you are employed then your company is probably (hopefully) paying you more than the office junior who would be equally capable of doing the work.

Another example is a task that occurs on a regular basis, I used to be involved in managing a corporate intranet, we would get requests from teams within the company to set up new areas of the intranet for projects or teams. This happened at least once a week. We had already spent some time on the intranet architecture and process for creating new areas so that it could be done in thirty minutes to an hour. That adds up to approximately one and a half working weeks over the course of a year, time that was not accounted for due to the task being considered menial.Our solution was to create a request form into which the requestor would fill all of the required information to set up the intranet area. We would get an email alert with a link to a page where we could review (and amend if required) the information and then click a button to approve it. The tool that we built would then create the intranet area, apply any requested security, install content management tools as required and then email the requestor with the approval notice and user manuals to guide them through creating their content. The task had been reduced to a single click and the effort was worthwhile. We had limited ourselves to a maximum of 8 days to automate the system (equal to approximately 1 year worth of performing the task manually). It took us 1 week to build the system so we saved half a week of time over the first year and much more over subsequent years as the frequency of the requests increased on a yearly basis.