Bottom line: the tools changed every few years. The lesson didn’t: automate the job, not the task, and keep a person where the judgment lives.
Where it started: Excel and VBA
I built a stock portfolio workbook with macros that handled data entry, so users could add their numbers without breaking the workbook underneath. VBA taught me the first rule: if you do it twice, write it down. If you do it every day, automate it.
Google Apps Script: the IDSSO daily brief
Running a student org means updates scattered across email, forms, and calendars. I wrote Apps Scripts that pulled news headlines from the web, newly published academic articles, and job postings from my inbox, formatted them into a designed HTML email, and sent it to members and subscribers every day. That was my first daily brief, and it changed how our team stayed on top of events and opportunities.
n8n and AI: my job search
Application volume was my bottleneck, so I built jobmon. It discovers postings, filters them with simple rules, scores what’s left against my resume overnight with an LLM, stores everything in SQLite, and serves a dashboard.
The key design choice: treat scoring as one clear classification call, not an open-ended agent. Simpler systems are cheaper, faster, and easier to trust.
What carried across every tool
- Start with the job to be done. The tool comes last.
- Automate the gathering. Keep people on judgment.
- Small, boring systems beat clever ones you can’t debug.
- Every workflow needs an owner, or it quietly breaks.
What’s next
There’s still a lot of cognitive work left to automate: the reading, sorting, and first drafts that eat our mornings. The Daily Brief is my next step.
What’s one task you do every week that a workflow should be doing for you? Email me.