Alright, diving back into this mess. You might remember I talked about trying to fix that horrible manual process before. Let’s call that attempt ‘rut 1’. It didn’t exactly stick. The whole thing fell apart after a few weeks, back to square one, drowning in spreadsheets and copy-pasting like a mindless drone. So, this is my log for ‘rut 2’, trying to actually make it work this time.
Why the First Try Failed
Looking back, I think I got too ambitious. Tried to make it do everything, connect to systems it didn’t need to, build this perfect automated beast. It was fragile. One little change in the input data, or an update to something else, and boom, broken. Spent more time fixing the fix than doing the original task. Honestly, I just gave up on it for a while. It was easier, mentally, to just do the dumb manual work than fight with my own broken tool.
Tackling Rut 2 – The Simpler Approach
This time, I went in with a different mindset. Keep it simple, stupid. That was the mantra. I didn’t need perfection, I just needed better than manual.
- First, I really sat down and listed the absolute core steps. What really needed automating? Cut out all the ‘nice-to-haves’.
- Then, I looked at the tools again. Last time I used [Some Tool], this time I figured I’d try [Another Simpler Tool/Method]. Seemed more straightforward for just grabbing data and reformatting it.
- I broke the task down into tiny pieces. Get the data. Clean this specific column. Merge these two files. Format the output. Tackled each one separately.
- Lots of testing. Run the first step. Check the output. Looks okay? Move to the next. Hit a snag? Go back, fix it, test again. Rinse and repeat. This was tedious, not gonna lie. Spent a whole afternoon just figuring out why dates were messing up.
How It’s Going
Well, it’s running. It’s not elegant. It probably has bugs I haven’t found yet. But, it takes a task that used to eat up 3-4 hours of my week and knocks it down to about 15 minutes of setup and run time. That’s a huge win in my book.
I had to make some compromises. The output isn’t as perfectly formatted as the hand-done version, but it’s good enough. There’s less error checking than I’d ideally want. But you know what? It works consistently so far. Ran it three times this week, no explosions.
It feels good to have clawed back some time and sanity. It’s a reminder that sometimes the second attempt, stripped down and focused, is the one that actually gets you out of the rut. Still needs monitoring, maybe some small improvements later, but for now, Rut 2 is a success. Way better than Rut 1, that’s for sure.
