I automated myself
Ten minutes every day for two years
= 10 * 365 * 2
= 7,300 minutes
= 120 hours
= 5 full days
It's official: I finally automated the task that has been the very first thing I've done every morning, every day (even on Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's), for the past 2 years.
In 2+ years at Topline Pro, I've built features used tens of thousands of times: a payment system facilitating transactions between homeowners and service pros across the US; Facebook and Google integrations; original photo tools; pretty much our entire billing system; Bob the Bot, and more. And yet this - a boring cronjob that scrapes + refines leads and (most importantly) does the work that previously I was forced to manually babysit every morning is maybe the most satisfying thing I have ever built.
Collaborating with the operations team to make it a reality -- and to ensure they can use it without engineering intervention going forward -- made it even more fun.
Amjad Masad said it well: Much grunt work in software can be categorically solved with a good abstraction or an automation. Doing the boring work no one wants to do gives you unique insight which you can use to propose new solutions.