No matter what kind of automation you want to leverage, there’s two ways to apply any of the automation types we’ve covered so far:

Personal productivity — automation to help you work as fast as possible, spend less time on less important stuff and more time on more important stuff
Team productivity — automation to help your team move as fast as possible, enabling everyone to spend less time on unimportant stuff and more time on what’s truly important for the team, projects, and overall business

But what does productivity have to do with automation? It all has to do with time.

Automation is always helping someone, somewhere save time.

And while we’ll let you do the work of determining what productivity truly means to you, we’re going to take a guess that you’re more productive when you’re able to do more of the most important work.

And therefore, less of the unimportant work. Minimizing the amount of time spent on irrelevant or low-value tasks is what automation is all about.

With project automation (aka workflow automation or task automation), you can directly impact the productivity of:

Project stages in a workflow. Save time kicking off external processes based on the stage of a project by automating the steps in the workflow.
Creating the same tasks over and over again. Re-creating specific tasks can also be a huge time-drain - both personally, and for teams. If you get the same type of repetitive and need to create the same tasks over and over again based on the type of project, you can use automation to handle this automatically for you based on specific conditions.
Communication & notifications between teams. Save time checking in, getting updates, and manually notifying other members when something is ready for review, completed, or needs an urgent update.
Task updates, creation & recurring tasks. Save time manually managing boards, tasks, and other project essentials based on any kind of trigger — like moving something to the “Done” stage or automatically creating sets of lists or spinning up an entire new board with specific tasks.
Multi-team or cross-functional team projects. Save time notifying, assigning, managing, and syncing up with other teams in different departments or business units.

From the perspective of personal productivity, you can leverage automation to help you:

Get notifications when projects or tasks are completed
Automatically assign yourself to tasks or projects in your project management tool
Complete several tasks at once (like scheduling a meeting on your calendar)
Unblock other team members when specific tasks or projects become blocked

In some cases, we’ve seen automation save people dozens of hours over the course of a week. And depending on the type of business you run, that easily equates to dollars lost on rudimentary tasks or a drop in billable hours.

By leveraging the right tools, you’ll be able to combine several redundant tasks into one simple automation.