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You can automate your stuff too. With just a change in mindset and a bit of knowledge, you can see opportunities to free yourself and your team from tedium. Follow these lessons to automating repetitive, tedious work with the command line:
- Install Tech Writer Tools
- Take a guided tour of the command line
- Convert CSV to markdown
- Navigate directories in the command line
- Ouptut and look at text
Tech writers do a lot of repetitive, tedious things. Product name change? Make sure all 500 HTML pages are up to date. Oh, and the spreadsheet of data centers was updated for the 3rd time this week, someone has to copy and paste the third column into the knowledge base article again.
If I got a dollar for every time I’ve said that technical writers have shitty tools, I’d have dozens of dollars by now. I’ve only said that a few dozen times, but that’s still a lot. Maybe I should raise my rates. The problem isn’t the software that we use, exactly. It’s the tedious parts between the software.
Dunno about you, but sometimes I feel like I spend more time fussing and not enough time writing.
Developers have lots of repetitive, tedious things to do too. The difference between us and them? They have the skills to automate their tedious, repetitive stuff so they can code more and fuss less.
You could ask a developer to rig up a script for you. First, you’d have to know what to ask for. Then you’d have to bribe the developer’s manager and wait a few weeks.
Or solve your own damned problem.
I’ve been automating workflows for years for the doc teams I work with. It saves us time and improves the quality of our deliverables. Make the machines do the fussing so you can do the writing.