Is It Worth Automating This Task? The Five-Year Maths
Every time you do the same small thing twice, there is a voice in your head asking should I automate this? Followed by a second voice: but is it actually worth setting up?
The honest answer is a table. Pick the row that matches how much time the automation saves each time, then pick the column for how often you do that task. The cell is your build budget over five years. Spend less than that and you are ahead.
| how often → time saved ↓ | 50/day | 5/day | Daily | Weekly | Monthly | Yearly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 sec | 1 day | 2.5 hrs | 30 min | 4 min | 1 min | 5 sec |
| 5 sec | 5 days | 13 hrs | 2.5 hrs | 22 min | 5 min | 25 sec |
| 30 sec | 4.5 wks | 3 days | 15 hrs | 2 hrs | 30 min | 2.5 min |
| 1 min | 9 wks | 6 days | 1.3 days | 4 hrs | 1 hr | 5 min |
| 5 min | 10 mo | 4.5 wks | 6 days | 22 hrs | 5 hrs | 25 min |
| 30 min | 6 mo | 5.5 wks | 5.5 days | 30 hrs | 2.5 hrs | |
| 1 hr | 12.5 mo | 11 wks | 11 days | 2.5 days | 5 hrs | |
| 6 hrs | 9 wks | 2 wks | 30 hrs | |||
| 1 day | 8.5 wks | 5 days |
How to read it
Time saved down the left is per occurrence, not per day. A hotkey that opens a buried folder saves a minute each time, no matter how often you use it. How often across the top is your actual cadence: Daily means every workday for five years, not "sometimes".
The cell is your build budget. Spend a tenth of it and the ROI is comfortable. Spend ten times it and the automation was a hobby project. Worked example: the "Daily / 1 minute saved" cell is 1 min × 365 × 5 ≈ 30 hours ≈ 1.3 days. Spend an evening building it and you are ahead inside the first year. Spend ten minutes and it pays for itself before the end of the second week.
Greyed cells in the bottom-left are combinations the world doesn't allow. You cannot shave thirty minutes off a task you do fifty times a day. The maths becomes twenty-five hours in a twenty-four-hour day.
The build cost problem
The table looks generous on paper and stingy in practice, because most people leave out the cost of building the automation. They picture pressing the hotkey and the task being done. They do not picture the four hours reading documentation, learning the syntax, writing the script, debugging the part where the keystrokes fire in the wrong order, and getting it to survive a Windows update six months later.
An AutoHotkey script for a one-minute-saved daily task can easily eat an evening. That blows the budget on day one. Most people try this once, get burned, and quietly default to "I'll just do it by hand". (We wrote a longer take in our AutoHotkey alternatives roundup.) The build cost is the issue, not the tool.
What changes when build time collapses
The interesting thing happens when build cost drops below thirty seconds. The table does not change, but marginal cells turn into easy wins. Inside Keyfire, the numbers look like this:
- New hotkey: click the key, pick an action, save. Around twenty seconds.
- New text expansion: type the trigger, paste the expansion, save. Around thirty seconds.
- Three-step macro: pick steps from a list, name it, save. Around ninety seconds.
At a thirty-second build cost, every non-grey cell is comfortably positive. The cells in gold move the most. "5 seconds saved, daily" has a two-and-a-half-hour budget. At thirty seconds of build, that is a 300-to-1 ROI over five years.
Two cells are still not worth it: "1 second saved, yearly" and "5 seconds saved, yearly". Even thirty seconds loses there. The answer is not "automate everything". The answer is "automate everything in the middle of the table", which is most of the small frictions in a normal working day.
Three real-world cells
Three examples that map cleanly to cells above. Each shows budget, Keyfire build cost, and the ROI multiple.
Email signature, several times a day. Typing a full block sig takes around thirty seconds. Read the conservative "30 seconds saved, 5/day" cell. Budget: three days. Build cost in Keyfire: roughly thirty seconds to create the expansion. ROI: around 8,600 to 1.
Open a buried project folder. Four levels deep, about a minute by hand each time, once a week. The "1 minute saved, weekly" cell. Budget: four hours. Build cost: thirty seconds to bind a hotkey to the folder path. ROI: around 480 to 1.
Rotate-and-copy a CAD block 90 degrees. A five-step keystroke sequence in AutoCAD, done monthly when laying out new drawings. The "5 minutes saved, monthly" cell. Budget: five hours. Build cost: about five minutes to record the macro. ROI: around 60 to 1.
The boring example pays best. Five-second saves through a working day add up to more recovered time than the one dramatic macro you build once a quarter.
The bottom line
The maths has not changed since 2013. The build cost has. When setting up a hotkey takes thirty seconds, the question stops being is this worth automating and becomes what else can I set up while I am in here.
The real wins live in the middle of the table, where each save is small and the cadence is steady. Twenty of them stacked is an hour a day. Start with the ones that nag at you: the folder you reach for every Monday, the phrase you type five times a day. Build each one in thirty seconds. Run the maths in six months.
Sources and method
- xkcd #1205, "Is It Worth The Time?": the original 2013 comic that posed the question. CC BY-NC 2.5 by Randall Munroe. We have not reused the image; this article uses the same conceptual table with our own arithmetic.
- Method: we used a five-year horizon of exactly 1,825 days (5 × 365). For each cell, budget = time saved per task × occurrences over five years. Cells are rounded to the nearest natural human-readable unit. A small number of values differ from the xkcd table by one rounding step, which is expected when the arithmetic is redone from scratch.