Have you heard of Is It Worth the Time? xkcd comic?
Basically, it tells you how much time you can spend automating or optimizing some repetitive or routine task before it becomes not worth it.
I find this comic convenient for clearly showing what’s worth optimizing and what’s not. However, it’s not very practical. The values it provides aren’t usable in real life, and its assumptions feel too extreme—like assuming you’ll repeat a task regularly for five years. This is especially unrealistic for work-related tasks.
To fix the comic, let’s assume we won’t be repeating a task for five years straight. Instead, we need to estimate how much time the task will take in the future to decide its worth. Here’s a simple logic: if we’ve done the task for months, we’ll likely continue for months; if it’s been a few days, we’ll probably continue for a few more days, not years. With that we can assume that, on average, we’ll repeat the task for roughly the same amount of time we’ve already spent on it. Simple, right?
The formula becomes straightforward, but I’ve added two more tweaks:
- I divided the automation time by 2 to give us a 50% profit margin on automating the task.
- I adjusted the calculator for an 8 working hours a day, not 24.
The resulting formula is: A = F * L * S / 2
Where:
- A — How much time we have to automate the task before it's not worth it
- F — Task frequency
- L — How long we've been doing the task already
- S — How much time automation could save
As you've seen already, I've built a calculator for this, so feel free to play around with it at the top of this page but keep in mind that it's never good to optimize a thing that should actually be removed entirely.
Questions asked:
- How much time is worth spending on automating a task?
- Is it worth automating small repetitive tasks?
- How do I decide if automation is worth it?
- What's the formula for calculating automation time?
- How do I know if a task should be automated or eliminated?