If you want to be good at automation, you need to be lazy as shit.
I mean this literally and without irony.
The Filing Cabinet Situation
I have ADHD. I’m also on the spectrum. My brain has roughly four filing cabinets: one for patterns and systems, one for things I find genuinely interesting, one for people I care about, and one that is entirely full of fishing data and I genuinely don’t know how to explain that.
Three of the four cabinets are on fire at any given time. The fishing one is weirdly fine.
This creates some professional challenges, the kind that are invisible until something slips, and spectacular when they do.
The Productivity Industrial Complex
After incidents like that, I did what everyone does. I bought the planners. I tried the apps. I read the “ADHD productivity” content, which is largely written by people who want you to try the Pomodoro technique, as if what I need is a tomato-shaped timer.
Every productivity guru says the same thing, fundamentally: be more disciplined. Create better habits. Wake up at 5 AM. Write down your tasks. Review them daily.
I tried it. I’d like to report that it helped.
Discipline is not coming. It is not on the schedule. I checked the schedule. The schedule has a 3 PM block where I was supposed to be building better habits and instead I was researching whether redfish are affected by barometric pressure the same way largemouth bass are. (They are, partially. Moon phase matters more for saltwater.)
At some point I stopped trying to become a different person and started trying to work with the person I actually am.
Engineering Around the Brain
The realization, when it came, was embarrassingly simple: what if I stopped trying to make my brain do the things it refuses to do, and just made the computer do them instead?
Follow-ups. Automated. The system tracks every customer interaction and surfaces the ones that have gone quiet. I never have to remember who I haven’t talked to. The script remembers and tells me.
Customer health. Automated. I open a file, I see which accounts need attention. Nothing is trying to live in my head that doesn’t need to be there.
Whether to go kayaking at all. Also automated. I know how that sounds. I have a whole post about it.
1,300 scripts. That’s where the math lands after nine years of being deeply, personally offended by doing things manually.
The Thing About Laziness
Here’s what I’ve noticed: the people who are genuinely good at automation are almost never the people who love efficiency for its own sake. They’re the people who hate doing things manually. The ones who, when faced with a repetitive task, feel something bordering on genuine personal offense.
“I have to do this again? The same way I did it last time? With my hands?”
That specific outrage is the engine. It’s not a virtue. It’s not discipline or work ethic or a love of optimization. It’s just extreme intolerance for repetition, combined with enough technical ability to do something about it.
I didn’t build 1,300 automations because I’m a diligent person. I built them because every time I had to do something twice, some part of my brain went absolutely feral about it and refused to let me rest until I’d made it not happen again.
That’s not a character strength. That’s just how my brain is wired.
But it turns out that’s the exact wiring you need.
What It Looks Like From the Outside
Running customer success for a $5 million company across five continents, with a brain that won’t check Slack unprompted and has never successfully used a planner: this is what it looks like.
Not because I got my shit together. Not because I found the right system. Because the workarounds compound. 1,300 of them later, they look like a system.
It looks like competence. It kind of is competence. But it’s not the competence anyone told me I was supposed to have.
I’m not disciplined. I’m petty about repetition. I’m not organized. I’m extremely motivated to avoid disorganization. I’m not a high-performer in the traditional sense. I’m someone who found out that externalizing the boring stuff completely frees up the interesting stuff.
Turns out the interesting stuff is where the actual value is. Who knew.
The Part Where This Gets Practical
If any of this is resonating, the entry point is simpler than you think.
Pick one thing you do manually and repeatedly that you hate doing. Not a big thing. The smallest possible version. A weekly report you write by hand. A follow-up email you always forget to send. A thing you check in three different places that could theoretically be checked in one.
Automate that. Just that. See how it feels.
The feeling, if your brain works like mine, will be something close to satisfaction at the cellular level. The specific satisfaction of a problem that used to annoy you no longer existing.
Once you feel that, you’ll build another one. And another. The laziness feeds itself.
1,300 automations later, I’m running a global customer success operation with a brain that’s still on fire in three out of four filing cabinets.
Turns out that’s enough.
The Part Nobody Told Me
The laziness is available to you.
You don’t need discipline to build automations. You need to be deeply, personally offended by something you have to do too often. That specific outrage, combined with enough patience to look up how to call an API, is the whole starter kit.
I’m not the only person who works this way. I’m just the one who admitted it out loud.
Blake Bailey runs Bailey Business Ventures, an AI transformation consulting practice. He is not disciplined. He is petty about repetition. These are, apparently, the same thing.