I'd rather work with automation than people

I'd rather work with automation than with people. Sounds harsh, but it's true. Especially when your time is limited and you simultaneously want to remain entrepreneur, caring parent, and human. Anyone now thinking that's a misanthropic stance hasn't understood what I mean by it. It's exactly the opposite. It's a decision in favour of the people I really want to spend time with.

My day, like every day, has 24 hours. Of those, around 15 go on care, family, sleep, and a few basic needs. That leaves 9 hours for two businesses, customer meetings, learning, strategy, admin, podcast, writing, breaks. Honestly counted, that's 9 hours for roughly 20 hours of work I'd otherwise have. This arithmetical error can't be made up by motivation. You can only make it up through better decisions. One of those decisions is: automate what can be automated, and let humans do the work only humans can do.

What automation actually means in my life

I'm not talking about an IFTTT setup or a smart Zapier board. Automation in my daily life means: invoicing, bookkeeping prep, GDPR-relevant processes, lead intake, infrastructure monitoring, recurring security scans, content publishing across multiple channels, backup checks, reporting to my tax adviser. All of that is work I used to need humans for or invested hours in myself. All of that today sits in scripts, pipelines, workflows, small AI agents.

That sounds like more than it is. In truth it's a collection of rather unspectacular small helpers that have done their job for years. They rarely grow larger. They get reworked occasionally. But they're there, they're reliable, and they only send me a message when I really have to decide something. That's the most important part. Good automation respects my attention.

Why people are expensive in comparison — rightly so

People are expensive, not because they cost a lot, but because they should cost a lot. A conversation with a customer, a colleague, a friend isn't incidental. It deserves my full presence. I can't half-talk to someone while still monitoring a backup in my head. If I do that, both lose: me and the person on the other end. That's why I try to remove from my daily life everything that doesn't need humans, so I can share the rest with them all the more sincerely.

Ironically, I get pushback on this stance occasionally. "You're too efficient, that's inhuman." I tried to take that pushback seriously for a long time. By now I no longer take it seriously. I rarely really know the people who say it to me. The people I really work with, family or professional, report the opposite: they notice that when I'm there, I'm really there. That meetings with me are prepared and worth something. That I write back when something needs writing back. That I'm reachable in a crisis. That's the human currency that interests me. Protecting it costs automation.

The special case: caring parents

For caring parents this logic is even harsher. Anyone who, on top of a pathologically narrow time window, also runs a business or holds down a job at all can't afford human arbitrariness. By that I don't mean rude customers or chaotic colleagues. I mean: any form of work that someone gets to "at some point", that gets "sorted out by email", that goes "let's see". That doesn't work in such life situations. It burns energy that's missing at home.

That's why I have processes that get negotiated in other companies as a clear rule at mine. Enquiries go through a form. Invoices are sent automatically. Appointments get booked, not emailed. No human has to do that. Every human gains by it, including the ones on the other side, because they don't wait three weeks for a confirmation.

My stance, condensed

I'd rather work with automation than with people when it comes to repetitive work. And I'd rather work with people than with automation when it's about real collaboration. What annoys me isn't the person on the other end. What annoys me is when a person does things a machine would do better, and claims time for it that would be much more important elsewhere.

Anyone finding this sentence cynical rarely has a child who wakes up at night because of pain. Anyone finding it pragmatic probably knows the feeling of finding at the end of a day that you've "worked" eight hours without making a single real decision. Automation, done well, gives those decisions back to you. For me that's not inhuman. That's what technology can do best.