Daily Dose of English 54
Automation
Daily Dose of English 54
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about automation. Automation, that's kind of a big word. How many letters is that? 10 letters? Okay, that's not that many letters, but that's a pretty good number of letters. And automation isn't that common of a word, but it's becoming more and more common and you're very likely to come across it at some point in your English learning career. Automation is what we call it when something becomes automatic. And automatic is when something is done on its own. So for example, an automatic car refers to an automatic transmission, which means that you don't have to change gears in the car to go from first to second, second to third, third to fourth. The car does it on its own. It's automatic. There's tons more versions of automation. And nowadays, the most common way that we hear the word is in making jobs more automatic. So automation in, for example, a warehouse or in delivery. There's a lot of things that are automatically done as part of a supply chain, for example. A supply chain is how something that you buy online comes to be yours, essentially. So when you click on something on whatever website and you say, buy now, the entire process of things that happened from this item that you purchased being non-existent to suddenly being in your hands is a supply chain. And a lot of that is automatic. Right, so let's think about, I don't know, let's say you're buying a phone. When you click buy now, there's an automated system that takes your request and it sends it to some warehouse and it says, okay, we have this phone, so now let's print out a label and let's make somebody put the label on it and let's put it into the truck and then all these steps that go from clicking buy on the phone to the phone arriving is the supply chain. There's also a supply chain for the phone to be made, right? Phones don't grow on trees, they are made by people. We have to find the glass and the metals and do all of the difficult work to create circuit boards and integrated circuits and all these crazy things that happen to make a phone relatively cheap. If you think about all of the work that has gone into a phone, They should be really expensive, but they're not that expensive. Almost everybody has a phone, which is just kind of crazy. And automation is a huge part of that. Automation and then economies of scale, but we can talk about that in another one. You can look up that if you want. So automation is a big thing in the modern world. However, I wanted to talk a little bit more about it, I guess personally, because I think automation is really interesting and fun for a regular person. And a great example is actually what I just did, not 10 minutes ago, is I was working on a bit of an automation for these episodes. because my goal with this channel, with this entire English comprehensible input channel is to make it as easy as possible for me to do so that I can make a lot of content and not waste my time on doing things that I don't want to do. So as an example, editing isn't something that I want to do. I want to record these episodes and get them to you, but I don't want to edit them. I don't want to upload the audio to Google Drive. I don't want to put it on YouTube. I don't want to do all these different things because they're tedious is a good word. Tedious is something that's not fun and it's usually really repetitive. So you're doing the exact same thing again and again and it's boring. Right, and so if I had to name every single episode, right, daily dose of English episode 54, automation, da, da, da. If I had to do that every single time, it would be tedious. And so I have a couple of different ways that I've automated the process. I have some automations. The first automation is that I have a process. This is not really an automation, it's just a checklist that I follow when I record these episodes, right? And so I start with, choose to come up with the idea, then I write down the idea in a Google Sheet that I have, and then I record the episode, and then I, all these different steps that I do, right? That's not really an automation, but it's helping me with my other automations. The actual automations that I do have are in my, I have a Google Sheets that I have everything stored in, and it automatically makes the copy for me. Copy is a word that describes The text that you see on videos or advertisements or anything like that is called copy. I don't really know why, but if you look at the description of this video, you're gonna see some copy there. That copy, I didn't literally write because my spreadsheet created it. It looked at the episode date or whatever and it was like, okay, I'm going to make this correct, that sort of thing. So I actually, I don't even look at the date that an episode goes live. I just copy and paste and I trust that my automated system is doing it correctly. And I can trust it because I made it and so I know what it's gonna do. And so that spreadsheet is very, very valuable for me in terms of producing content more easily and quickly and for the future. You might not know this, but I'm actually recording this episode way before it actually releases. I am currently in April and this episode is releasing in May. So that's a little bit of a secret there behind the scenes. But I'm able to get a lot of these done quickly and not necessarily lose quality because I have these automations. Another automation that I have is a script. A script is a simple computer program that just does a list of steps, like it just does things in order. And so I just set up a script that will help me to process these episodes by essentially doing all the things that I would have done anyways, but automatically. So for example, it, wait, what does it do? It makes the audio louder, right? So it boosts the audio so you can hear me better. It removes something, it processes the subtitles, it makes an MP3 file, it uploads those files to Google Drive, and it does all these different things without me actually doing anything. I just click the button and say, do this thing, and it just does it all for me. And that way, I only have to do a couple of things beyond actually recording these episodes. And that's my whole goal. I'm able to record an episode of Daily Dose of English like this and get it published and ready to go in less than 15 minutes. And most of that time is me talking, which is exactly what I want. because that's the only way that I can make enough English content for it to actually be useful, is by reducing the amount of time that I spend on other things. At this point, I'm going to be producing a fairly large amount of content in just a few months because I focused on automation and process. However, automation and process isn't for everybody because it's not always the easiest thing to do and understand and it's not always that useful. A lot of people shouldn't spend their time trying to automate things because it's too difficult to learn how to automate something and then to implement it to their system. you might have a thing that you do every single day, but automating it wouldn't actually help you. Maybe it just, it helps you save five seconds per day, but if you wanted to automate it, it would take hours of your time. And so it's not really a bad thing to let it be a not automatic thing. So a normal thing, I guess. However, it's really helpful for me for two reasons. One, I do this a lot, right? And so it's not just saving me five seconds, it's saving me hundreds of hours of effort. And two, I find it fun and interesting. Like it's a Sunday for me, and I spent 30 whatever minutes out of my Sunday to do, like to help work on my own automation, which is interesting and fun to me. Not everybody feels that way, which is totally reasonable and fair, but I like it. Anyways, I think that's enough for this episode. I've talked long enough about automation, and I actually have to go run the automation to get this episode processed and up onto YouTube so that you can listen to it in your ears. So I hope that you enjoyed this episode talking about automation, and I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Bye-bye.
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