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Ask HN: What are some repetitive tasks you do at work?

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41–50 of 68 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are some repetitive tasks you do at work?

#41

Honestly? Make “status update” slides. If I had a tool that could take a Markdown list of weekly achievements, turn that into slides, automatically add a schedule or Gantt chart that was adjusted to the current date, and pull from a set of stock boilerplate verbiage to fill it out to the required page count I would pay a hundred bucks for it out of my own pocket. And yes, I do know about pandoc.

I could probably make this in R for you...

Re: Ask HN: What are some repetitive tasks you do at work?

#45

"Uh… we have sort of a problem here. Yeah. You apparently didn’t put one of the new coversheets on your TPS reports." I have to format my daily work log two different ways, one in a PDF and one in a word document.

pandoc will do this for you

Re: Ask HN: What are some repetitive tasks you do at work?

#46

This is a great way to find ideas for a startup btw... the classic one is finding out what tedious stuff people do in Excel all day then simplify and automate. I will say for me I spend probably too long opening a series of programs and getting set up before I can work. I believe there is software for this, but my dream is to have it simple and customizable by project. I would love to be able to open everything to th…

I would absolutely love a keyboard shortcut per project so I could hot swap between services without having to worry about killing containers, building new ones, opening and then resizing/positioning editors, opening (resizing/positioning) spec docs.

I agree this sounds trivial, but the overhead of getting my multi-monitor setup just right when switching to a new service in the codebase is enough to kill flow.

Re: Ask HN: What are some repetitive tasks you do at work?

#47

This is a great way to find ideas for a startup btw... the classic one is finding out what tedious stuff people do in Excel all day then simplify and automate. I will say for me I spend probably too long opening a series of programs and getting set up before I can work. I believe there is software for this, but my dream is to have it simple and customizable by project. I would love to be able to open everything to th…

Can you not solve this by not closing your essential programs and putting your device to sleep instead of powering it off?

PS: Don't do this without battery/ups fallback.

Re: Ask HN: What are some repetitive tasks you do at work?

#50

This is a great way to find ideas for a startup btw... the classic one is finding out what tedious stuff people do in Excel all day then simplify and automate. I will say for me I spend probably too long opening a series of programs and getting set up before I can work. I believe there is software for this, but my dream is to have it simple and customizable by project. I would love to be able to open everything to th…

Can you not solve this by not closing your essential programs and putting your device to sleep instead of powering it off? PS: Don't do this without battery/ups fallback.

I believe his complaint was with multiple projects, each one has it's own set of essential programs, and switching between projects means closing down one set and opening another
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