I'm the laziest person in the world. I LOVE it when I can make the computer do the work for me. For example, I have all kinds of macros set up on my computer to type words for me faster than I could type them myself. So I'm a huge fan of automation.

But sometimes it's just not necessary or appropriate or cost-effective to automate things.

For example, one of the more common requests I hear from my clients is to automatically email a report that the AMS generates, say, a daily report on new members. Now, many AMS systems can do this with little effort. But even if the system didn't, how difficult is it for the user to set a daily reminder on her calendar to run the report each day, or as needed?

Obviously if automating something is easy and cheap, by all means, do it. But too often the tendency is to spend a lot of time or effort trying to automate something that can just as quickly be done manually. As I sometimes like to say to my clients, "That's why you're getting paid."

So don't expend too much effort on trying to automate something that's just as easily done manually. I guess you can file this one under "Just because you can doesn't mean you should."