Have you ever felt that you are always doing the same thing - over and over again?

And it's manual, tedious, laborious and sometimes, even downright mundane?

If so, chances are you are trapped in the vicious cycle of your operations, whereby you are a slave to your work.

What does this mean?

You would like to do stuff that holds higher significance, and yet you are constantly held back by the routine drudgery of repetitive tasks. And after some time, you realize the word 'freedom' means little to you. Because you are experiencing little or none.

However, fret not. Even in this world, where a 40 to 80 hour work week is the norm, there is a solution at hand to shatter this restrictive barrier. And it's automation.

How important and prevalent is automation to our life? Very. Look around you, and you are likely to see automation in action.

Name me some examples, you say? Here goes.

When you drive up to the gantry at the car park to insert your cash card before the barrier is raised, that's automation.

When you enter a building, and the door opens up for you on its own, that's automation.

When you are at the traffic light, and the red signal turns green, that's automation.

There.

The truth is automation is hugely important to us as an individual as they are to businesses. In fact, it is even more so for the latter.

Tim Ferriss, the best selling author of the book 'The 4 Hour Work Week' swears by the use of automation to free up your time to live the life you want it to be spent.

Bill Gates, founder and Chairman of software giant Microsoft says, 'The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.'

The good thing is 99% of the things you are doing now (on a computer) can be automated or semi automated.

The goal is to totally remove the need for your intervention. Or at least to minimize it.

The benefits for automation are multifold.

Automation, more specifically Business Process Automation (where computers are involved) helps boost efficiency and increase productivity. It also reduces human error and speed up your speed of operations.

For the individual, it may mean hundreds of repetitive keystrokes, mouse clicks and file actions saved.

For companies, it may mean thousands upon thousands of manpower and man hours reduced. And that means much lowered operational costs and expenses. This ultimately translates to higher profits.

Imagine going out for a meal, and knowing that your job is being done on autopilot - in exactly the way you want it. It can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be.

When an automated task is in action, it never has to

1. Take medical leave
2. Surf the internet.
3. Talk on cell phones in the break room.
4. 'Hang out' with friends.
5. Leave to go shopping for an hour or two.
6. Make a math mistake.
7. Perform slowly and inefficiently.
8. Produce results late.
9. Need bonuses, incentives, meetings, or corporate 'pep rallies'.

It not only saves cost for you. But it also enhances your capability to do more work with the same resources. It acts as a force multiplier. Now you can do much more - with so much less.

Things like bottlenecks, less-than-smooth integration of various applications, costly errors, delays and back-breaking work will be relics of the past.

Medical doctors can now spend more time working on patients instead of messing around with tonnes of documentations, with many of them involving repetitive data entry.

Likewise for researchers and scholars, who can spend more time on things that matter more - doing research.

As do salesmen, IT managers, administrators, accountants and many other professionals, who are currently held back daily repetitive work.

They can now do the things that matter more - things that are of higher strategic value. Like making more sales. Or even spending more time with your family.

To put into perspective how much more you can do with automation, think about this.

You only have 86,400 seconds per day. But probably less than half is done on work. And the rest is time wasted due to inefficiency, distraction, sleep and other matters.

But computers never sleep, lose focus or have to take a toilet break.

You got that power. That's automation for you.

Jag Foo is the principal consultant of Automation Edge, which specialises in using business IT solutions
to help businesses cut cost, boost productivity and increase sales - the automated way.