6 hours a week. That doesn’t sound like too much — until you realize it’s 7 full 40-hour work weeks every year, gone to repetitive admin tasks. Here’s how we got them back.

The situation

Since DeskGuru launched in 2020, the “Guru” at DeskGuru (Sanne) has been been almost exclusively spending time on the “real” work for clients: online ergonomic workstation assessments and visiting clients.

I’ve been doing almost all of the “behind the scenes” work: administration, invoicing, marketing, basically everything that Sanne doesn’t do (I guess that makes me the “Desk” in DeskGuru?).

I partnered with Lucas & Teun from L&T Studio to systematically automate the tasks eating up my time (and brain!).

What we did

Step 1: decide what to automate

Simple: if the time to build and maintain an automation is less than the time it saves over 6 months, automate it.

Two hours a week on a task? That’s 52 hours over 26 weeks. If we can automate it in under 52 hours (including testing & maintenance) – it’s a no-brainer.

Turns out, a lot more qualified than I expected.

Step 2: set up server

We set up a server at a user-friendly, affordable, reliable and European web hosting company: Hostinger. And we installed some tools like n8n there.

Step 3: automate

Calendly data processing: Every week I’d export data, paste it into a spreadsheet, and manually clean it up. Now we automatically import Calendly data, clean the data, and push it to Google Sheets automatically. Time saved: ~1 hour per week.

Report delivery: After each session, Sanne’s report used to be manually exported as a PDF and emailed to the client. Now it’s fully automated. 5 minutes per report × various reports per day = very significant!

The results

The setting up, tweaking and testing took a lot of time from me, and this was at times frustrating. But in less than 6 months, we fully earned back the investment. And now all is running very smoothly.

I’m always looking to optimise stuff, but I must admit I also thought: what’s a few minutes every day? It really adds up if there’s many little things you have to do! Now that everything we want has been automated and is running smoothly, I spend about 6 hours less time each week on boring administrative tasks. That is 7 entire 40-hour work weeks!

Want the same for your business?

Lucas, Teun and I are confident we can help almost any business claw back time from boring, repetitive tasks. We’d love to meet you for a free intro session to map out what’s worth automating.

Get in touch via bart@ordoabchao.eu!

Disclaimer: This post includes a referral code to Hostinger. If you get an account with them, you get 20% extra discount. And I get a little bonus.