We're often told about the benefits of automating our repetitive tasks.

If you have mental health challenges, automation can be an assistive technology. For example, it can:

If you have pain points in your workflow, don't just accept them. Modern AI, like ChatGPT or Claude, can do most of the work to create custom solutions for you. You’ll mainly act as its gofer, copying and pasting the code where it needs to go.

People often struggle to see how automation could apply to their workflow. To illustrate, I’ve put together five simple but useful examples. You don’t need to understand every detail of my descriptions—for any that interest you, copy and paste my brief description into an AI tool, and ask it to create your own version. All of these can be created and used for free, and tailored exactly to your needs.

1. Log Interesting Articles I Read

I use a bookmarklet that, when pressed, adds the URL of the webpage I’m reading to a Google Sheet.

Technical part: The bookmarklet sits in my Chrome bookmarks bar and consists of just a few lines of code. The real work happens in a Google Apps Script deployed as a web app. When the bookmarklet is clicked, it sends data to the web app, which then adds the URL to my spreadsheet.

Google Apps Scripts automate tasks in Google apps, like Docs, Sheets, or Gmail.........

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