I spent 3 hours every Monday copying Airtable data to Google Sheets, sending team emails. Every week.
Built a workflow: 30 seconds, automatic, never forgets. That’s what workflows do - glue between apps that makes repetitive tasks disappear.
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What Is a Workflow?
A workflow is simply a trigger that initiates a series of automated actions without human intervention. For example, a new email arrives which triggers the system to check whether it contains an invoice, automatically save any attachments to Dropbox, add the invoice details to your expense spreadsheet, and send a Slack notification to your team. You set it up once and it runs forever without you touching it again.
Why Bother?
Humans are genuinely terrible at performing repetitive tasks consistently because we get bored after doing the same thing repeatedly, make careless mistakes when our attention wanders, and forget critical steps when following multi-step processes manually.
I used to manually post blog updates to Twitter, LinkedIn, and my newsletter every time I published something. Sometimes I’d completely forget to post on Twitter, other times I’d make embarrassing typos in the LinkedIn version, and the inconsistency bothered me.
I built a simple workflow where a new post going live automatically triggers updates to all three platforms simultaneously. Now I get the same perfectly formatted message delivered to all channels every single time with zero manual effort required. This saves me 15 minutes per post times 2 posts per week equals 26 hours recovered every year, giving me 26 more hours to build stuff that actually matters instead of mindlessly copy-pasting.
Platforms
Zapier is the most popular workflow platform and for good reason since it’s extremely easy to learn, connects to essentially every service you can imagine, and I personally use it for most of my workflows because it just works reliably. The major downside is that pricing gets expensive surprisingly fast where you’ll easily spend $50-100 per month once you have 20+ workflows running.
Make (formerly Integromat) offers substantially more power for complex workflows with its visual builder interface that makes it much better for implementing sophisticated logic like conditional branching and multi-path workflows. The pricing is more reasonable than Zapier at comparable scale, but there’s a definitely steeper learning curve to master the visual paradigm.
n8n is the open-source self-hosted option that’s basically free once you set it up. I use n8n specifically for workflows involving sensitive data or requiring custom code execution because it gives you total control with zero per-task fees once it’s running. The tradeoff is that initial setup takes significant work compared to cloud alternatives.
Other options worth knowing about: Pipedream is developer-friendly with first-class JavaScript support, Activepieces offers open-source simplicity with a clean modern UI, and IFTTT works fine for simple consumer automation but isn’t really built for serious business workflows.
Good vs Bad Use Cases
Good use cases for workflows include: Syncing data between systems like your CRM and spreadsheets, automatically posting content to multiple social media platforms simultaneously, processing incoming webhooks from third-party services, sending notifications when events occur, and creating automatic backups of critical data.
Bad use cases you should avoid: Anything requiring nuanced human judgment that machines can’t reliably replicate, tasks that change frequently where you’ll spend more time constantly updating the workflow than just doing it manually, and absolutely critical processes where failure is completely unacceptable because workflows do break sometimes despite best efforts.
I learned this lesson the hard way when I built a workflow to auto-respond to support emails. It completely misunderstood a customer’s refund request and confidently told them the issue was “resolved automatically” without actually doing anything. The customer was understandably not happy, and I turned that workflow off extremely fast.
How to Start
Pick one single annoying repetitive task that you do frequently and keep the first automation simple to build confidence. For example, maybe you manually add every new customer signup to both your email list and CRM system by copying data between platforms.
The workflow version is straightforward where a new signup automatically triggers adding the customer to Mailchimp and simultaneously creating their record in HubSpot with all the same information.
Start with Zapier’s free tier to learn the basics without financial commitment, and critically don’t try to automate everything at once like I foolishly did. I built 30 different workflows in a single week feeling very productive, then discovered half of them were broken, and spent the next two weeks debugging instead of actually working. Build one workflow at a time and make sure it works before moving on.
Watch Out
Workflows inevitably break for various reasons including APIs changing their specifications, third-party services going down temporarily, and rate limits kicking in when you hit volume thresholds. Free tiers hit their limits frighteningly fast once you start running serious automation, so plan accordingly. Over-automation is genuinely real where I’ve personally spent hours automating tasks that only take 5 minutes per month, so always do the math first to ensure you’re actually saving time. Security genuinely matters because these workflow tools get access to essentially everything in your business stack, so use two-factor authentication everywhere and regularly audit which permissions you’ve granted.
Bottom Line
The rule is simple: if you do something 2 or more times per week, automate it with a workflow. If you can’t automate it effectively, at least document the process thoroughly. If you can’t even document it clearly, that’s a sign you should simplify the underlying process before attempting automation.
Workflows aren’t magic or particularly sophisticated technology. They’re just APIs talking to each other with some conditional logic in between. But they genuinely work and give you actual time back in your day.
That Monday morning data sync that used to take me 3 hours? It now runs automatically while I sleep overnight. I wake up to a summary email with all the results, and by the time I have coffee in hand, the data is already waiting and ready.
Start small by building just one workflow. Get comfortable with the process. Then you’ll probably end up building ten more.