5 years until automation

For over 5 years and 122 episodes, every time we released a new episode of Core Intuition, I manually added the episode to the RSS feed using BBEdit. There was enough tedious XML copy-and-pasting that it was silly not to automate this process, but we kept putting it off. Finally last week, we switched over to an RSS feed generated by WordPress.

What surprised me is that until it was automated, I didn’t realize how much time I had been wasting editing and uploading the file manually. It was a small but very noticeable win last week when I could just upload the MP3 and click Publish, and that was it.

I’m not sure what the lesson is here. I never automate a task too soon, but 5 years was a long time. Maybe it’s just this: it’s never too late to get a better workflow.

Manton Reece @manton