The XRay.Tech Blog

Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel are great platforms for getting started and prototyping some automation ideas, but ultimately, Airtable offers much better features for anyone looking to build an automated infrastructure to support their company.

As we discussed in our blog and video about using Airtable views as Zapier triggers, Airtable’s features like unique IDs and customizable views make it an indispensable part of anyone’s automation toolbelt. 

In this post, we’ll show you how to convert your Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel databases into Airtable in four easy steps. These steps will also work with any program that lets you export a CSV file. 

Step 1: Download a CSV of Your Sheet

For Google Sheets

Open your spreadsheet in Google Sheets, and download a CSV of your spreadsheet by navigating to: File > Download > Comma-separated values

For Microsoft Excel

In the File menu, select Export, then choose Change File Type. Pick CSV under Other File Types, then select Save As to name your CSV and save it in your desired location. 

Step 2: Create a New Table in Airtable

Open Airtable and create a new table. Your table can be in an existing base or in a new base. Click on “+ Add or import”, and choose “Import data”.

In the menu that pops up, choose “CSV file”

Select the CSV file you saved in Step 1 to upload it.

3. Customize Your Fields

Airtable will automatically select a field type for each column. You can change the field type of each column to better match the data it contains.

Note that some field type options (such as email) won’t be available until you click import. If you don’t see the field type you want, you can leave the field as-is for now and change it once it’s finished importing. 

Just click “Import” to finish importing data. 

4. Finish Editing Your Field Types 

If there are any remaining fields you want to edit, just double click on the field name to change its type. 

That’s it! Your Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheet is now in Airtable, and you can start using it as an operational database for your automations. 

If you’d like to see some examples of what you can build with Zapier and an Airtable ODB, check out our other blog posts and our YouTube channel. You can learn how to build templated slide decks, upload your Zoom recordings to a YouTube channel, and more.

If you have any questions about how automation can improve your workflows, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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Interest in automation has exploded over the last few years. Each day, more businesses are starting to understand the potential of letting robots handle the boring and repetitive parts of their workflows.

However, many entrepreneurs and business leaders that are just beginning to explore automation are often unsure of where to begin. Amongst the hundreds or thousands of processes that make up your company’s day-to-day work, where are the best opportunities for automation? And what work should remain in human hands?

In this post, we’ll take a quick look at how to identify the tasks that should and shouldn’t be automated, and we’ll share our handy web app that lets you immediately discover the automation potential of any piece of software.

CAST: The Litmus Test for Mindful Work

Let’s start by looking at the kind of work you don’t want to automate: CAST. 

CAST stands for creative, analytical, strategic, and thoughtful, and it’s our method for determining if a given task is worthy of human attention.

If it requires you to be creative, analytical, strategic, or thoughtful, then it’s likely a mindful task that’s worth your time. If not, then it might just be a robotic task that’s ideal for automation. 

Creative

A creative task would be something like designing a webpage or newsletter, brainstorming ideas with your team for your latest project, or devising a new solution for a difficult problem. 

Analytical

Analytical tasks require you to apply your experience and expertise to derive insights from data, evaluate the success of a given process, or conduct critical research and investigation.

Strategic

Strategic tasks ask you to think about the long-term plan for a project or company; they lean on your decision-making skills and rely on your ability to devise and stick with a broader mission and vision.

Thoughtful

Whenever people are involved, there’s a good chance that you need to approach the work in a thoughtful way. Communicating with customers, collaborating with other departments, or going through team-building exercises all require a personal touch (at least some of the time).

Ultimately, the goal of automation is to free up more of your time to focus on CAST tasks; to spend more of your day on work that actually necessitates and merits 

Robotic Tasks: the Best Candidates for Automation

If a task doesn’t require any of the CAST skills, then there’s a strong possibility that it’s robotic work. In other words, it’s quite likely a task that could be performed by software. 

Robotic tasks are repeatable. They’re meant to be done the exact same way every time and don’t require any interpretation or specialization. They can be done by just about anyone, as they don’t require any particular skill set or knowledge beyond a general competence with the software involved. 

Some common robotic tasks would be setting up Google Drive folders and communication channels for a new client, or copying and pasting some text into a template.

Robotic work is necessary to keep everything running, but it’s not fulfilling to perform and it doesn’t make you a better employee. 

Take a look at some of your most common daily workflows and break them down into separate tasks. Which ones involve CAST skills? Which ones are robotic?

XRay.Tools: Find Out How (and if) You Can Automate Your Software

Once you’ve identified some robotic tasks, the next step is to see if the software you use for those tasks can be automated with no-code and low-code platforms like Zapier and Integromat.

When we realized that our own team was wasting too much time on the robotic task of looking up automation integrations, we built a simple little search engine to make it quicker and easier. 

Just go to XRay.Tools and enter the name of a program, like Google Docs or Outlook. The app will pull up all of the available integrations on common no-code and low-code platforms.

Even if no integrations show up, it’s still possible to automate your app so long as it has an API. It will just take some more technical knowledge to write the necessary queries. You can reach out to XRay if you’d like to learn more about automating without pre-built integrations.

Automate with Purpose

With so many possibilities, it can be difficult to know where to start with automation. However, if you stick to the goal of creating more time for the work that matters, it often becomes much easier to find the best opportunities for automating your workflows.

Just remember the CAST criteria and start looking for the work that you and your team want to be doing; then, start automating the rest. 

If you'd like to learn more about using no-code automation to support mindful work, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

The no-code/low-code automation space features a multitude of great tools. Each one has its own strengths and use cases, which is why we at XRay just use whichever app is best suited to the task at hand, whether it’s Zapier, Integromat, Unito, or something else.

Sometimes we’ll even use multiple platforms to build a single automation, passing the baton from a Zap to an Integromat scenario to leverage the best features of both apps. 

In this post, we’ll show you how you can send webhooks from Zapier to Integromat to build an automation that uses both pieces of software. Finishing off a Zap with a few Integromat steps will let you use some of Integromat’s unique integrations while still building most of your automation with Zapier’s simple and intuitive UI. 

Required software

• Zapier: Starter subscription or higher

• Integromat

• Any software required to build your desired automation

Steps:

• Start with an existing Zap

• Create a scenario and webhook in Integromat

• Add a webhook step to your Zap

• Run your Integromat scenario and test your Zap

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Start with an existing Zap

To see how the webhook will transfer data from Zapier to Integromat, it’s best to start off with an existing Zap that will already have some data to work with. Just copy any Zap in your library, and try out the webhook step in the copy.  

We’ll be adding a webhook to our Zoomtube Zap, which automatically uploads our Zoom recordings to YouTube and transcribes them with Trint. By sending over some key data about the Zoom meeting and recording in our webhook, we’ll be able to use Integromat’s more extensive list of Zoom integrations, like updating and deleting meetings. 

Create a scenario and a webhook in Integromat

Create a new scenario in Integromat, and add a new module. Search for “webhooks”, and choose “Custom Webhook” from the list of results. 

Click on “add” to create a new webhook. Integromat will automatically generate a name for this webhook, but it’s generally a good idea to rename it to clearly reference the Zapier automation that you’ll be sending data from. 

Copy the webhook address to your clipboard, and then return to your Zap.

Add a webhook step to your Zap

In Zapier, add a new action to your Zap and choose “Webhooks by Zapier”. Note that you will need a premium Zapier account to use this feature. 

Under “Action Event”, select “POST”. In the action setup, paste the webhook URL you copied earlier into the URL field. You can likely leave the payload type as “Form”, but you may need a different type depending on the apps you’re using as part of your automation. For our example with Google Drive, YouTube, and Zoom, form will work just fine.

Now, under the “Data” section, create a list of key/value pairs, where the key describes the data (Name, Date, etc.) and the value represents the data itself (Mark, 10/20/2022, etc.). In the value section, you’ll probably want to include data from the previous steps in your Zap, like how we’ve included the file name, download link, topic, and other key information about our Zoom recording. 

For now, you can leave all the remaining options as they are. You may need to adjust the parameters depending on the apps you’re using. Checking the API documentation for your app is a good way to understand how you’ll need to send and format data if you’re running into any issues.

Click on “Continue”, but don’t test your Zap just yet.

Run your Integromat scenario and test your Zap

Open up your Integromat scenario again and click on “Run Once”. This will trigger your webhook module to start actively waiting for a webhook. 

Then, go back to your Zap and test it to send the POST webhook. Finally, go back over to Integromat, and you should see a 1 in the bubble over your module, indicating that it’s received a webhook. Click on the number to see the data sent over. It should match the key/value pairs you set up in the previous step.

Now we can perform any additional steps that we want with this data in Integromat.

The best of both worlds

Zapier supports more applications than any other low-code automation platform out there, but Integromat often has more options for the apps that it does support. Since they both offer different strengths, we say: why not use both?

By sending a webhook from Zapier to Integromat, you can use both apps to build an automation and take advantage of Zapier’s simplicity and Integromat’s depth of integrations all at the same time. 

If you’d like to learn more ways to connect the two platforms, stay tuned for a future post about sending webhooks in the other direction - from Integromat to Zapier.

For now, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Zapier and Integromat are the two biggest players in the automation space. Both are great solutions for building low-code automations, but each one has its own unique strengths.

When you want to leverage the technical depth of Integromat and the easy-to-use interface of Zapier at the same time, you can use webhooks to connect your Integromat scenario to a separate Zap. 

By connecting Integromat to Zapier, you can hand your automation’s data off from one platform to the next, letting you take advantage of Zapier’s wider range of available integrations while still using Integromat to build the core of your automation. 

NOTE: If you'd like to move in the opposite direction and send a webhook from Zapier to Integromat, then check out our other post here.

Required Software

• Integromat

• Zapier: Premium Account (“Starter” or higher)

• Any apps you want to automate

Make an Integromat Scenario, or Choose an Existing One

For this tutorial, you’ll need to start with a functioning Integromat scenario. It can do whatever you’d like, so long as it has some dynamic data that you can use to test the webhook.

Create a webhook in Zapier

In Zapier, create a new Zap. Choose “Webhooks by Zapier” as the app, and “Catch a webhook” as the trigger. Continue, and you’ll see that Zapier has generated a URL for that webhook.

This trigger will “listen” for any app that sends some data to that URL, such as your Integromat scenario.

Copy the URL to your clipboard, then return to Integromat.

Add an HTTP module in Integromat

Add a new module to the end of your Integromat scenario. Search for “HTTP” as the app (NOT “webhook”). Set the method to POST, and set the body type as “Multipart/form data”. Some apps may require you to send the data in a different format, but form data will work with most.

Add a key/value pair for each piece of information that you want to send over. The key will be the description of the data, while the value will be the data itself. 

For example, if you want to send over the name and title of someone in your company directory through this webhook, “Name” and “Title” would be the key while “John Smith” and “Sales Associate” would be the values. 

Once you’ve added each key/value pair that you want to include, it’s time to test the automation.

Sending a Test Webhook

To test this automation, you’ll want to have easy access to both Integromat and Zapier at the same time. 

First, run your Integromat scenario to send the webhook. Then, test your Zapier trigger to catch it. Your Zap should pull in some data from Integromat, including all of the information you specified in your form data. 

Now you can use that data to continue your automation in Zapier. As you can see in our example, you integrate the information into your Zaps just like data from any other app in Zapier. Here, we’ve included it as part of a Slack message.

Combine Your Low-code Tools for the Best Results

Now you can send webhooks from Integromat to Zapier in just a few steps. 

With so many different automation apps out there, it’s always good to experiment with different software to see what it excels out. If you just pick one app to specialize in, you’ll miss out on the unique benefits that all the others offer.

Why choose between Zapier’s huge library of supported apps and Integromat’s highly technical integrations when you can just use both? All it takes is a simple webhook to connect both in one automation. 

If you’d like more automation tips or want to know how XRay can help you to refine your workflows, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

A company’s value is based on three attributes: their people, their processes, and the assets they produce. 

Each of these attributes is closely related to the other. At any company, time is the most valuable resource that people have. They devote their working hours to executing the company’s business processes, ultimately producing digital or physical assets for the company’s clients or customers. In this cycle, optimizing your processes means finding ways for your team members to produce more and better assets in less time.

One of the best ways to boost your team’s productivity and efficiency is with asset templates. No matter what field you’re in, there are always some assets that you need to produce time and time again. Ultimately, your clients’ or customers’ satisfaction with your company will often depend on the quality of the assets you produce. Errors in contracts, presentations, or deliverables can undermine their experience and reflect poorly on your company. Rather than starting from scratch each time, or copying and updating the previous version, the most effective approach for producing commonly-required assets is to create easily accessible templates. Building good templates will reduce ramp time while creating assets, give your teams better access to accurate information, and in many cases will even let you fully automate the process of generating the assets themselves. 

Let’s take a look at how you can start creating automation-ready asset templates right now.

Make asset templates for everything you duplicate, before you think you need them

Let’s start at the beginning. When should you begin making templates for your commonly-used assets? In most cases, the answer is: as soon as possible. The moment you’ve identified that you’ll need to create a similar asset many times over, you should start creating a template for it. If you’ve had two successful meetings using a similar presentation deck and you’ve got another similar meeting on the horizon, that deck needs to become a template. If you’ve signed two clients with similar contracts, that contract needs to become a template. If you’ve created two similar style guides for your clients, that design needs to become a template. 

When you need to re-create an asset but don’t have a template, you’ll run the risk of making a mistake that we’ve all made at one time or another. It goes something like this: You have a kickoff meeting with a new client in a couple of days. At every deliverable meeting, you present a slide deck with largely the same content every time. Rather than starting from scratch each time, you always copy the previous version and update the relevant info - dates, company names, and a short summary of the deliverable. At the meeting, it’s all going great until slide 4 - because on slide 4, you forgot to change the client’s name from last time. It’s embarrassing, and totally preventable with or without automation.

The “copy and update” workflow may seem convenient at first, but it’s a reactionary way of working. It’s error prone, particularly when you’re short on time - and since it’s an approach which encourages doing things on the fly, it will often leave you short on time. With a template, you can leave obvious placeholders and create a checklist of what needs to be entered each time. In many cases, having templates created and planned out in advance will let you enter information gradually over time rather than rushing to get it done at the last minute, since you’ll know what you need to do ahead of time. There will always be some chance for human error (unless you automate the process), but using templates early and often will make for more reliable, consistent asset creation. 

Build your templates with automation in mind, even if you don’t end up automating them

As you build your templates, try to structure them in a way that can enable future automation. You’ll find that the same qualities that make it easy to automate the creation of an asset also make it easier for humans to use the template. 

One of your first priorities when building your templates should be to reduce ambiguity. While humans can work with ambiguity, it can often be a waste of time to ask your team members to sift through vague information and instructions. Robots on the other hand can’t handle ambiguity well at all, so you’ll need to eliminate it entirely if you hope to automate your templates. Wherever possible, identify specific variables/segments of your document that will need to be changed. Don’t leave “SmithCo” in your template file; instead, remove the name and replace it with a sort of pseudo-variable that a computer can recognize - and that a human can easily identify, as well. Use a consistent syntax like {{company_name}} and {{start_date}} to give each piece of information a unique identifier. Right off the bat, it will signal to anyone working with the template that the text in question needs to be replaced. In the long term, it will make it much easier for a program like Zapier to find and replace the data. 

The next priority is to minimize the necessary changes for each iteration. Much like reducing ambiguity and identifying variables, keeping changes to a minimum will help to make things easier whether you end up automating or not. Making fewer changes for each asset that you need to create will save time for your team if they’re using your templates manually, and will make things simpler when you move on to automation, as there will be fewer data points to keep track of. When creating and refining your template, use generalized language whenever possible to accommodate whatever data might be entered to fill in the placeholders. If you’re referring to people, use gender-neutral terms so the template won’t need to change based on the name of the person mentioned. If you’re referring to quantities, you may want to use terms like “report(s)” to fit any number. 

Ideally, if any text, information, or media isn’t a variable that you’ve previously identified, then you shouldn’t have to change it when you’re using the template.

Asset templates should be easy to access and update

Version control: the secret weapon for making your deliverables better each time.

Your asset templates should only ever get better over time. At the very least, you certainly want to maintain their quality and avoid producing outdated documents. The key to putting your templates on an upward trajectory is to establish version control and convenient access for the people who need it. 

Everyone on your team who works with a certain asset template should know exactly where to find and how to use the best, most up-to-date version of that template. Fortunately, a lot of tools have easy, out-of-the-box solutions for version and access control. For instance, Google Drive allows you to turn any of your documents into a template in just a few steps, and lets you grant edit or read-only access to whomever you’d like. It also saves previous versions of every document, so you can revert back to older iteration if you change your mind about some recent changes. For designers, a web-based tool like Figma lets everyone work on the same file at the same time, so you don’t have to worry about syncing changes while two designers are updating different parts of a given asset. 

Whichever tools you use, the key is to make sure that people on your team aren’t working on old documents or starting from scratch. Creating and updating asset templates lets your whole team leverage the momentum of hundreds of hours of accumulated work. Even your newest employees will be able to easily create assets that match your company style. 

As you use your templates, you’ll frequently find reasons to update them. Template updates should typically be led by the people who use them directly. The people who compile and deliver the final version of the template are the ones who are best poised to see where improvements can be made, and their experience and insight should drive any changes that are made to the template. Just make sure that any changes you make to your templates have a valuable purpose. Your updates should be focused on saving you time, simplifying the process when possible, reducing errors, and increasing the quality of the final product. 

Well-designed templates pave the way for automation

Creating templates will always let you work more efficiently, but in some cases, templates may be the first step towards eliminating the work altogether. Under the right circumstances, the work of customizing a templated asset can be taken over by a robot (which is what we call any automated system, even if it’s just software). 

So how can you tell which templates can be automated? As with any task, the CAST rule applies. If the task is creative, analytic, strategic, or thoughtful, it probably can’t be automated. However, if your asset template just requires you to input simple, known information without any CAST qualities, it might be well-suited for a robot. A kickoff onboarding presentation is a perfect example of the kind of asset creation that can be automated. The only pieces of content that need to change each time are timelines, client name, points of contact, and final deliverables. All of this information is known ahead of time, and doesn’t require any sort of interpretation or elaboration - just copying and pasting, the quintessential robotic task. 

You should also consider which tools are involved in the asset’s creation. Nocode tools like Zapier and Integromat let you do nearly anything with common productivity software like word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation tools. However, they don’t have as many integrations with creative software. You’re likely not going to be very successful if you try to automate the process of designing a UI in Sketch, for instance (though AI advances may change that one day). However, you could automate a presentation that you use when delivering the asset to a client. 

There are many moving parts in every product and service, and there are many things that just can’t be automated (for now). The key is to always look out for ways to position your asset templates and enable robots to automate some or all of the work away from you.

Get started with templates

Assets are the culmination of your value-generating business processes. All of the time and energy that your team spends at work are reflected in these documents, presentations, and designs. They’re the tangible products that your clients and customers can get value from, even after your engagement has ended.

By making sure your templates are as consistent, reliable, and accessible as possible, you can ensure that your assets will only get better over time. They’ll also act as learning material for new team members, who will be able to start producing quality content without skipping a beat. You’ll even be able to leverage your templates to create assets through automated processes, removing robotic work for the humans in your team. 

Action Steps:

• Identify a frequently-used document (or type of document)

• Think about any document that you keep updating and sending out repeatedly

• Create a template for that document

• Using software like Google Drive will make it easy, but you can use any software that’s relevant to the type of document.

• Save the Template in a place where your team can access it, and make sure to grant access to anyone who needs it
• Use the template the next time you need to send out the document
• Evaluate the template and determine if its a good candidate for automation

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Client onboarding is a critical task for any service company. Each client needs to be set up the right way in your internal systems, and needs access to key documents, contracts, and communication channels that will guide your engagement. 

But as important as onboarding is, most of the tasks that make it up are the kind of repetitive, robotic processes that are perfect for automating to save your team's valuable time and energy.

In this post, we’ll show you an example of the kind of onboarding automation that we build for our members at XRay to help smooth and expedite their onboarding process for clients. 

These automations ensure that onboarding tasks are accomplished cleanly, consistently and correctly every time as it creates and shares resources. 

Keep in mind that the automation we’ll describe in this post is just a sample of what an automated onboarding workflow can do; members can substitute any software tools they prefer and add additional actions to fit their workflows.

Let's get into it! 

How the automation works

In a nutshell, this automation will create internal and shared resources whenever you get a new client. 

The automation creates some shared Google Drive folders, sets up a Slack channel for day-to-day communication with the client, creates an Airtable base for your internal documentation and finally sends an email to your new client with a survey for them to complete and links to the docs that were just created.

This automation will make onboarding a more consistent and timely process and eliminate much of the manual repetitive work of onboarding, letting your team focus more time on high-touch interactions with their clients.

Here are the steps in Zapier that make up this automation.

Step 1. The initial trigger for this automation is when a lead is updated to “Closed/Won” in HubSpot (or the equivalent on another software tool such as Pipedrive or Sales Force) or an internal Airtable form is manually filled out. 

Step 2. The automation creates  a “Customer” folder in google drive.

Step 3. Inside that new customer folder, the automation creates a “Resources” folder... 

Step 4. ...and a “Project updates” folder. 

Step 5. The automation adds a Statement of Understanding to the “resources” folder by copying an existing file. You can use an automation like this to share templated docs that set expectations, or to share copies of signed contracts.

Step 6: Creates a new Slack channel with the client’s name.

Step 7: Creates a record inside of Airtable as an internal activity log. This is where you can track each action the automation performs and check on the files it creates.

Step 8: Sends an email to the new client to make them aware of their Google Drive link, and prompts them to  fill out a short survey. You can fully customize templated emails in Zapier with dynamic data and links to helpful resources. 

The Benefits of Automating Your Onboarding Workflow

Consistency

Folders will be created in the right place every time, channels are created uniformly, and you can trust that your onboarding process will be consistent and repeatable. 

This allows you to delegate this process to people on your team without needing to teach them the ins and outs of the process. The consistency that automations brings to the table allows you to trust your onboarding process every single time.  

Customer Preparedness  

New customers and clients will be better prepared for onboarding and their expectations will be set in a more consistent manner. They will better understand how to enable you as their service provider to do what you do best. 

Surveys allow you to get any information you need from your clients and paint a clearer picture of your future partnership. Setting client expectations can be vital, and there is not a better, more consistent way to do so. 

Progress Tracking

You will be able to consistently track your clients progress during the onboarding process and see at a glance if your client has filled out their surveys. 

Everyone has an onboarding checklist, and automating a large chunk of those items can give you a clear picture of where every client is on that timeline. Items will be automatically checked off the list, freeing your time so you can do the manual high-touch things that set you apart from other service providers. 

How to Get this Automation

If you want to integrate an automation like this into your workflows, an XRay membership may be a good fit for you. We could build the first version of an onboarding automation in the first 30 days of your membership, and then refine it and build additional workflows that meet your specific needs. 

If you want to know more about our services and methodology, visit XRay.Tech and reach out to us; we would be happy to talk with you!

You can also check out our blog or our YouTube channel, or follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Date and Time Techniques with Formatter by Zapier

With scheduled actions playing such a large role in automation, it’s no wonder that Formatter by Zapier includes a helpful selection of tools for manipulating date/time data. 

These tips will show you some of the possibilities with Zapier’s Date/Time formatter steps, but there are many advanced use cases that we won’t cover here. We encourage you to explore the Formatter step on your own and try out everything it has to offer; you may be surprised at how much it can enable your automations to do!

To get started, just make a Zap with any trigger, and add a step with “Formatter by Zapier” as the app. 

Adding and Subtracting Time

Adding time to a given date can be a very convenient way to schedule automations. For instance, you might want to send a check-in email to every new client one week after their project start date. Or you may just want to add some text in a formatted email to remind them about an upcoming deadline.

No matter what you want to add or subtract time for, Formatter makes it very easy. Just select “Date/Time” as your action event and choose “Add/Subtract Time” from the Transform list.

Then, enter your date you want to work with into the input field, and add the amount of time you want to add or subtract into the expression field.

You can write the time interval you want to add in plain language just by typing “1 day” or “4 minutes”. To subtract time, just make it a negative value like “-4 years” or “-3 weeks”. 

Test the step, and you’ll see the output. You can then use this result in additional steps in your automation. 

Comparing Two Dates

Comparing two dates is a useful method for determining how much time has elapsed between them, or for letting your automations figure out whether or not the two dates match. You could even set up a filter step to only perform certain actions when the two dates aren’t the same, or when they’re at least 10 days apart. 

To use the comparison function, just pick “Date/Time” in a new formatter step and choose “Compare dates”. Enter your start and end dates in the appropriate fields, and specify the format of your dates if needed. 

Test the data, and Zapier will calculate how much time passed between the two dates, and will indicate whether they’re the same date or not with a boolean “true/false”. 

Reformat Date/Time

Sometimes when you’re working with automations and programmatically generated dates, you’ll end up with a long, ugly date and time string that’s not very easy for people to read. Other times, you’ll simply want to change the order of the month and the day for your international customers.

In either case, you can reformat your dates by picking “Date/time” and selecting “Format” from the transform list. 

Just enter the date you want to reformat into the “input” field, select a new format for it from the list, and specify a timezone. You can also select the format that your input is using just to make sure that Zapier interprets the data correctly, but it usually works on its own anyway. 

Test the step, and you’ll get a reformatted date as the output, which you can use in any subsequent steps in that Zap. 

Enhancing your Zaps with Formatter

Formatter is one of the most useful and versatile tools for taking your Zaps up a notch. Whether you want to add some calculations and logic to your automations, or just want to make your text a bit more readable, Formatter will help you to sort out your date/time data. 

You can find some more Formatter tips on our previous post here.

If you’d like to learn more about no-code and low-code automation techniques, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Zapier is a useful automation tool when it works, and when it doesn’t it can be frustrating and time consuming to manage Zap errors without a process in place.

At XRay.Tech we’ve developed some basic steps to take when troubleshooting errors in your Zapier workflow.

1. Go to Zap history
2. Click on Zaps Run
3. Click on whichever task error you want to fix
4. Duplicate your Zap before making any changes (Super important - Zapier does not have version control)
5. Review Zap for errors, and edit the step that needs fixing (Note that when you edit your Zap, it automatically turns the Zap off)
6. Return to original Zap, make your edits, and turn the Zap on
7. Go to Zap history
8. Select and replay

First, visit your Zap history, located on the left-hand sidebar menu on your Zapier dashboard.

Next, click “Zap Runs.”

A list of all your Zap runs will appear. You can filter the list using the status bar dropdown menu located above the run Zap list. 

Locate the Zap with the error you want to fix. 

Be sure to duplicate your Zap before attempting to troubleshoot! Zapier does not have version control editing, so it’s best to copy your Zap and work with a duplicate until you know how to fix the automation so that it runs correctly.

To duplicate your Zap, navigate to “My Zaps” and use the dropdown menu to the right of the Zap.

Once you’ve duplicated your Zap, open the duplicate and locate the error.

Make changes and check for errors. Note that by default, Zapier turns off your Zap as soon as you edit it.

If your changes to the duplicate Zap fix the error, leave it off and head back to your original Zap, make those same changes, and turn the original Zap back on. You can delete the duplicate Zap once the original runs properly.

After fixing the original Zap, navigate to Zap History again and select the Zap runs related to the Zap you just fixed. Hit “Play”, located in the menu just above the Zap runs list. This should run the Zap correctly.

And that's it. Follow these steps (and add in a healthy dose of Googling), and you'll likely be able to address most of the errors that you encounter while using Zapier.

If you'd like to learn more about building and maintaining no-code automations, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

One common question that we get at XRay.Tech is: is it possible to automate this? 

While we’re always happy to help people with their automation questions and goals one-on-one, we also want to provide resources to let anyone figure out what’s possible with automation in seconds. That’s why we recently created XRay.Tools, an automation search engine that lists the available triggers and actions available for any given app.

In this post, we’ll give you a quick walkthrough of XRay.Tools and show you how can create and share a personalized tool belt.

Adding Tools to Your Tool Belt

First, go to xray.tools.

Enter the name of an app that you’d like to automate into the search bar, and select the correct program from the list of results. Keep adding apps until you have a complete tool belt - for instance, all of the apps that your marketing department uses on a daily basis, or all the software involved in your client onboarding process.

Each result will show you which low-code platforms have integrations for that app. For now, XRay.Tools will only show results for Zapier, but we’ll add compatibility soon for other popular platforms like Integromat. 

Then, you can click “Get Shareable Link” to generate a link to your toolbelt. You can share this link with automators like XRay.Tech to help start a conversation about what you’re looking to automate. 

View Triggers and Actions

You can click on the “View →” button to see a list of all the available triggers, actions, and searches for that app. For instance, let’s take a look at what XRay.Tools shows us for Slack.

Triggers

Triggers are events that start an automation. Picking the right trigger is important, as you’ll often want your automations to run only under specific circumstances. 

As you can see, Zapier offers a wide range of triggers for Slack. You can fire an automation whenever anyone posts any message to any public channel, or have it run whenever someone posts to a specific channel. 

When planning an automation, seeing the available triggers can help you decide how you want to structure your workflow.

Actions

Actions are automated events that occur after an automation has been triggered. Below are a list of all the available actions in Slack, which mostly pertain to sending messages or managing users and channels.

It’s important to note that your automation can include a trigger from one app and actions from other apps. For instance, you could build an automation where any message sent in a given Slack channel prompts the creation of an email draft in GMail. 

Searches

Searches are similar to actions, but are focused on finding pieces of data to use in future steps. The available searches in Slack let you find messages, emails, users, etc. The search step itself just locates a piece of data; you’ll need to add another action step to actually use that data.

For example, you might use “Find Message” to find a message containing the word “Sales”. Then, you could add an action that copies the text of that message to a Google Sheets spreadsheet that your sales team can review later. 

A Convenient Resource for Beginners and Experts Alike

We’re building XRay.Tools to be a helpful resource for automator of any experience level. If you’re just getting started, it’s a great way to see what’s possible at a glance.

If you’re more experienced, you can use XRay.Tools as a way to quickly check if the integrations you need are actually available on the platforms you plan to use.

If you’d like more automation tips and resources, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

As you’re weighing your options for workflow automation, you’re likely wondering what the working relationship between XRay and your organization would be like. 

XRay memberships involve close collaboration between our teams as we analyze your business processes, help you identify opportunities for workflow automation, and build automations to create more time for mindful work. 

In this post, we’ll tell you about our commitment to our members and what you can do to ensure that your membership is successful. We’ll handle the automations and the data; we just need transparency, access, and clear communication in return. 

XRay Handles Data and Automation

Our team will be responsible for building all of your automated workflows and for managing the associated data. 

Your XRay techs will design, construct, document, and manage all of your automated workflows throughout your XRay membership. They’ll coordinate closely with your team to make sure the automations suit your business goals, so you won’t have to spend any time building automations yourself. 

Once an automation is complete, our team will send you all the documentation you need to run the automations yourselves. 

Our team will also establish systems designed to collect, house, and visualize key data generated by your automations. Each time an automated workflow runs, we’ll collect data in an Airtable database associated with that specific run. 

Mutual Expectations: Transparency, Access, and Communication

Transparency: Help us Understand Your Business

Each business is unique, and automations work best when they support your company’s specific needs rather than just performing generic actions. 

To that end, we ask all of our members to be as transparent as possible about how your business operates and what you hope to achieve with your automated workflows. The more we know about your business processes, the more we can do to calibrate each automation to fit your purposes.

It’s also important for us to understand the people behind the business. Knowing your story and your personal pain points helps us to understand the bigger picture of your automation journey, and lets us build automations that create more time for the work and activities you’d rather be doing. 

As a member, we’ll offer a similar level of transparency to you, explaining exactly what we’re doing and why. We’ll also provide frank feedback throughout your projects, even if we think things need to go in a different direction. 

Our goal will always be to build the automations that best fit your business and create more mindful time for your team, and mutual transparency will help us to achieve that goal.

Access: Building on Your Accounts

At XRay, we don’t build member automations on a test server or on our own accounts locked away from view until they’re “ready”. We build everything on our members’ accounts, so you’ll have access to the automations as soon as they’re built. 

Building in your accounts also makes for a very smooth handoff once each automation is complete, as there are no files to transfer. Instead, we’ll just provide you with documentation that describes what each automation is for and how to use them. 

To build in your automation accounts, all we need is access to them. We’ll ask you to share your account credentials through a secure app like Lastpass, which will allow us to log in to your accounts without ever seeing your actual password. 

Typically, we’ll just need access to any of the automation platforms you’ll be using - Zapier, Integromat, Parabola, etc. We may also ask you to connect some of your additional counts, like Google Drive or Hubspot, to your automation platforms. When and if you need to do this, we can give you step-by-step instructions to make it easy. 

Creating your automated workflows in your company’s software accounts is the fastest and most practical way to proceed, so we encourage all of our members to share any necessary credentials as soon as the membership starts to kick things off quickly. 

Communication: Staying in Touch to Keep Things Moving

To maintain momentum during your membership, we’ll establish a regular communication cadence. Each week, we’ll have a 1-hour meeting on Zoom to share our progress, address any outstanding questions or concerns, and plan our next steps. 

In addition to our scheduled Zoom meetings, we’ll set up a shared Slack channel for impromptu communication throughout the week. Your XRay team will regularly check on this channel for any new messages, and we’ll ask that you do the same.

We’ll use the Slack channel for urgent or time-sensitive issues that can’t wait for the weekly meeting, or to address issues that are preventing our team from moving forward. We’ll do our best to respond quickly to any message that you send in Slack, and we’ll ask that you make a similar effort as well.

In many cases, our tech team will hit a crossroads and will need you to make a decision before proceeding. Ultimately, we build automations that support your workflows and your business; while our team can rely on their judgment and experience in most cases, there will be situations where only you can make the call for your company, and we’ll let you know when those arise. 

Maintaining regular communication lets us build faster and keeps everyone apprised of recent progress and future plans, so we make sure to stay in touch with all of our members through Zoom and Slack. 

Building a Partnership

At XRay, we prefer memberships over project-based contracts because we believe it allows us to build a stronger partnership with each of the organizations we work with. Through mutual transparency, access, and communication, we can build automated workflows that completely transform our members’ businesses over time, saving hours of work and creating more consistent and reliable output. 

If you’d like to learn more about how we build automations at XRay, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

If your team is anything like ours, you’re probably sharing helpful and interesting links with each other every day on Slack.

While Slack is a great platform for sharing links and ideas, everything you send quickly gets buried in the infinite scroll of messages. Trying to find a link that someone shared a week ago can be a pain, and you might not have access to it at all if you’re using a free Slack plan.

To make it easy to find and review our Slack links whenever we want, we built a simple Zapier automation to store every link that someone sends to a base in Airtable. 

In this post, we’ll walk you through how to build a similar Zap step by step. You can also follow along with our video of this tutorial on YouTube.

Setting up a simple automation like this is a great way for a newer Zapier user to get more familiar with the platform.

Step 1: Create a Channel for Links

First, create a channel in your team’s Slack workspace dedicated to sharing links. This is the simplest way to trigger the Zap and gather your links in one place. 

Once the channel is set up, send at least one message in it with a link. You’ll need it to test your automation as you’re building it.

Step 2: Create an Airtable Database

Next, build a simple base in Airtable where you’ll store your links. You can set up your base with just a few columns: a link field called URL, a long text field called Message Body, a short text field called Sender, and a “Created time” field called Created.

Step 3: Create a Zap and a Trigger

Then, create a Zap in Zapier. Your trigger app will be Slack, and the trigger event will be “New Message Posted to Channel.”

You’ll then have to log in to your Slack account, and select your new channel for sharing links. Set “Trigger for Bot Messages?” to No, just to avoid any potential technical issues like creating an endless loop.

Now you can test your trigger. Zapier should pull in the most recent message you sent in the channel, but you might need to click “Load More” if you sent your message within the last minute or so.

As you can see, Zapier pulls in lots of information about the message, but the main thing we’ll be concerned with is the field called “text” that contains the text of the message itself.

If your trigger worked as planned, you can now move on to the next step: setting up a filter.

Step 4: Create a Filter to Ignore Messages Without Links

Zapier’s Filter app is a useful tool to make sure that your Zaps only continue under specific circumstances. In this case, we only want our Zap to keep running if the message that triggered it contains a link. 

To do that, you’ll first make a new action using the Filter by Zapier app, and choosing “Only continue if…” as the action.

Then, set the filter to Text | Contains | http. This means that the Zap will only continue if the text of the message contains the string “http”, which will be present in all links but rarely mentioned otherwise. 

Step 5: Use Formatter to Find the URL

Next, create a step with the Formatter by Zapier app. This app is useful for finding and modifying pieces of text within your Zaps.

Set the action event to text, and then set the transform selector to Extract URL. For the “Input” field, select “1.Text” - the number 1 here just indicates that this is data that Zapier gathered in the first step of your Zap.

After you click Continue, you should see the link separated out from the rest of the message text. Now you can send this link to your Airtable database.

Step 6: Send Your Links to Airtable

Create a new action, choose Airtable as your app, and choose “Create Record” as the action event.

Log in to your Airtable account and choose the Base and Table that you created earlier. Then, fill out each step with the appropriate information.

Make sure to use “3.Text” as the URL, and not a Text snippet from an earlier step. You can also leave the “created” field blank, as Airtable will populate it automatically.

Click continue and test this step. Your Airtable database should have a new record that looks something like this:

Optional Step: Send a Notification in Slack

This step isn’t strictly necessary to make your Zap work, but at XRay, we’ve found that automations work best when they’re transparent and easy to keep track of. 

To do that here, you can just create one more step that will make the automation send an announcement in Slack each time it runs. Send the message to a dedicated Auto Updates channel like so:

And that’s it! You’ll now have a permanent record of every link you share on Slack, even if you lose access to those messages on Slack itself. 

You can check out our blog or our YouTube channel for more tutorials ranging from beginner material to more advanced content for seasoned automators. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Each day, automated systems become more powerful and more capable of completing tasks that we once thought could only be accomplished by human beings. As the amount of uniquely human tasks shrinks, we’re left with an important question: as humans, what do we want to do with the time we call ‘work’?

At XRay.Tech, our goal is to enrich human work by removing the distraction of Robotic Tasks and helping people to focus their attention on more meaningful and valuable work. In this article, we’re going to look at what makes a task worthy of your attention, and how people and businesses can proactively create their future. It's simple robots should do robotic work and humans can do mindful work. 

What is a Mindful Task?

One of the core components of the XRay Method is to identify the Robotic Tasks and Mindful Tasks that make up any company’s business processes. Robotic Tasks are repetitive; they’re performed the exact same way every time, and a human touch can’t meaningfully improve the outcome of the task. Whenever you can automate a Robotic Task, you almost certainly should.

Mindful Tasks, on the other hand, are the tasks that are really worthy of human attention. Mindful Tasks fill the mind; they require you to be in the moment and demand your full attention. When you’re working away at a Mindful Task, you’ll often find that you enter a flow state where your deep focus precludes any distraction and results in a total immersion in the task at hand.

After a busy day of work, the Mindful Tasks are likely the highlights of your day. While the routine emails and perfunctory reports and paperwork will fade from your memory as soon as the day is done, the mindful portions of your work will stand out as the activities that defined the day and gave you a sense of accomplishment. Highlights are a simple way of identifying the Mindful Tasks that you enjoy. The book "Make Time" by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky is the first place I saw this tactic, and I’d recommend checking it out if you want a deeper dive into how you can schedule and spend your time. Another great strategy from this book is to turn off your email notifications so that you’re not constantly distracted by the endless stream of new messages in your inbox.

What Mindful Tasks specifically are will vary based on your job and your role, but for myself, highlights are usually an electric conversation, a 90-minute focus session where I create content, or a big meeting that leads to a new opportunity. Reflecting on our daily highlights lets us identify the work that we find to be challenging, rewarding, and enjoyable. The fulfilling work that Mindful Tasks provide should be preserved, even as we build better systems to automate the rest of the labor.

How to Identify a Mindful Task

Sometimes, Mindful Tasks aren’t necessarily an obvious highlight. That’s when it’s helpful to have a more detailed way to identify the tasks that deserve human attention. At XRay, we have a simple benchmark that we use to help determine at a glance if a task can be considered mindful: CAST. Is the task in question creative, analytical, strategic, and/or thoughtful?

• Creative Examples: UX/UI design, photography, writing
• Analytical Examples: Data analysis, software development
• Strategic Examples: Project management, value creation strategy
• Thoughtful Examples: Relationship building, philosophy, leadership

If so, there’s a pretty good chance that it qualifies as a Mindful Task, and is better suited to a human than to a robot. Of course, there are certainly instances where robots may already have an edge in analytical and strategic tasks. You could easily describe Deep Blue, the computer that beat the world at chess, as excelling at both analysis and strategy. While creativity may seem impossible for a computer to grasp, there are already many songs and articles out in the world that were written by software. However, I think that thoughtfulness will continue to remain elusive for AI and machines for a long time to come. And regardless of these exceptions, using the CAST guideline will usually help you to start determining if a task is mindful or not. Even if we could hand these tasks off to a robot, we may not want to; CAST tasks are typically the kind of work that create the feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction. 

Another common aspect of mindful work is that it often involves interpersonal contact. Even if it’s theoretically possible for a piece of software to perform all of the functions of a certain task, it might be inefficient or uncomfortable for other people to interact with it. In professional relationships and partnerships, it’s often important to demonstrate to your customers and colleagues that you’re willing to give them some of your time and attention. In particular, you should avoid creating asymmetric automations that make things easier for you but offer no benefit for any other parties involved, all while leaving them to interact with a machine. Ultimately, it will be very difficult - if not impossible - for any automation to build trust and rapport as effectively as you can face-to-face. For instance, nearly every important transitional period should be handled in person. Hiring a new team member, letting someone go, launching a new project with a client, or presenting a major deliverable all require a personal touch. 

Naturally, if a task is simply too complex for a robot, then it must be a human task. No software can automatically write, film, and edit a video. No software can automatically architect, design, develop and publish a complex application. No software can automatically identify a common problem and craft a business strategy, team, and mission to solve it. These are all uniquely human endeavors - at least for now. 

The Future of Mindful Tasks

As technology progresses, there will be very few limits on automation’s capabilities. For business leaders, the vital questions will not be about what can be automated, but about what should be automated. To answer the all-important “should” questions, you’ll need to have a deep understanding of your business and goals. As a firm, do you primarily serve your customers or your team? How do you create value, and who do you create it for? Exploring these concepts will help you to better navigate the ever-shifting landscape of automation and make decisions that help you to achieve your goals. Because creating automated systems is itself mindful work. Building a truly valuable automation requires you to understand every facet of the system being automated, and pushes you to imagine a future where the work in question is no longer in the hands of people. Simultaneously, once the work is automated, you have the confidence that it will be completed consistently, correctly, and in a timely fashion. 

But you don’t need to wait until you can answer those questions to start thinking about your Mindful Tasks. Start now by making a note each day of your top 3 highlights from the last working week. Make sure to include a note about why they stood out to you. Then, ask yourself: how can I spend more time on the highlights? What’s preventing me from focusing on the work I enjoy? Answering these questions can put you on the path to more fulfilling work right away.

In our next post, we’ll take a closer look at Robotic Tasks, and we’ll show you how (and why) they can be automated.

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One of the most important parts of creating an automation starts before you even need to open up Zapier or Integromat. 

Every project needs a plan that’s up to the task, and before you start connecting apps together in the platform of your choice, you should start by documenting your ideas through some business process mapping. 

If you’ve never heard the term before, it might sound a little intimidating, but don’t worry. For all intents and purposes here, it simply refers to building a flowchart of a business process - in this case, the business process that you want to automate. 

Creating a flowchart will help you to organize your ideas, keep track of your progress as you’re building the automation, and easily explain how the automation works to colleagues or clients. 

Let’s jump right in. 

Step 1: Set Up Your Workspace with the Right Tools

There are many programs available for creating flowcharts, but our preferred software at XRay is Lucidchart. 

Lucidchart is a powerful app that allows you to connect data to your diagrams and offers an extensive library of sophisticated templates and shapes. If you’d prefer, you can also use a free alternative like Google Draw for business process mapping, but this tutorial will focus on Lucidchart controls and features. 

In Lucidchart, you can simply drag shapes from the panel on the left onto your canvas. Once they’re on the canvas you can edit their content and connect your shapes to show a flow and a hierarchy. 

In this post and our tutorial video, we use the BPMN 2.0 Library of shapes, a common standard for business process mapping which you can add to your flowchart by clicking on the “+ Shapes” button underneath the shapes panel. 

If you haven’t used Lucidchart before, play around with it a bit to get familiar with the UI. It’s generally an intuitive and straightforward app, but you can always check their support docs for help.

Once you’re all set up in Lucidchart, it’s time to start documenting the process itself. 

‍Note: If you’re unsure of what to automate at your business, check out our post about robotic tasks to get started.

Step 2: Document Each Step of the Process

Create a shape for each action, event, or other element that’s part of this process. To make it easy to follow your flowchart chronologically, put the events that occur first at the top of your chart, and go down from there. Events that happen simultaneously can be on the same level.

As a general rule, each shape should document one specific event or action. For instance, creating a Kickoff Meeting agenda and putting that agenda into a calendar invite would be two separate tasks, even though they’re closely related.

Additionally, you should put any automated action that requires a new step in the automation software into its own shape. This will make it easier to translate your flowchart into an automation when it's time to start building. 

Once you’re confident that you have every step of the process documented, use arrows to connect each shape and indicate how each action or event relates to another. For instance, if a certain event prompts two actions, make sure to draw arrows from the event to both actions. 

Understanding which events trigger which actions will be vital when constructing your automation, especially if you’re dealing with a process that has multiple branching paths. 

You can draw arrows in Lucidchart by just hovering over a shape, clicking on one of the circles that appears, and dragging to draw a line. Once your shapes are connected to form a clear flowchart, you can get ready to add more context with swimlanes. 

Step 3: Add Each Step to a Swimlane

Finally, it’s time for a quick trip to the pool. The “pool” shape allows you to add swimlanes to your flowchart, which is a convenient way to add lots of helpful context to your flowchart. 

For an automated process, you’ll want to create a swimlane in the pool diagram to represent each piece of software used in the process. You’ll likely need to create more lanes to accommodate all of the apps involved.

Drag your flowchart on top of the pool diagram, and start moving each shape into the appropriate lane. You might want to make a copy of the shapes you’ve created to preserve your work so far.

If a task involves multiple apps at once, you can stretch the shape to overlap all of the relevant lanes. Most of the time, however, each shape should only be in one lane.

Mapping your process into swimlanes will often make you realize that you left out some important steps, so make sure to add anything that comes to mind. You can also use annotations to provide any additional information about the process.

That’s all there is to it. Now you can use your flowchart to start building your automation.

Use Documentation for Planning, Maintenance, and Collaboration

Business process mapping is an extremely useful method of documenting an automation that will give clarity and context to anyone who needs to understand the process. Whether you need a roadmap to follow while you’re creating the automation, or you just need a way to explain your idea to a colleague or client, business process mapping can help you get it done.

If you’d like to see a live demo of business process mapping, check out the video on our YouTube channel. 

If you'd like to learn more about planning and building no-code automations, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

What are Robotic Tasks?

What if you could spend all day at work on the things you liked the most? What if you could take all of the tedious, mind-numbing labor and hand it off to a robot?

It’s more realistic than you might think.

At XRay, we believe that everything you do at work each day can be broken into three categories: preparing to do work, actually doing work, and reporting on the work you just did. When you’re actually doing work, you’re probably (hopefully) engaged with a lot of Mindful Tasks. However, the “preparing” and “reporting” stages of your work are likely loaded with Robotic Tasks. 

Robotic Tasks are the opposite of Mindful Tasks. While Mindful Tasks tend to be challenging, unique, and rewarding, Robotic Tasks tend to be simple, repetitive, and frankly dull. Robotic Tasks are usually binary; they’re either completed correctly or they’re not. There’s no opportunity for creative flair or strategic insight to improve or diminish the quality of a Robotic Task’s outcome. 

One of XRay’s primary goals is to help entrepreneurs identify and eliminate Robotic Tasks from their own workloads. In this post, we’ll dive into the details of what defines a Robotic Task, and why you shouldn’t be spending your time on them. We’ll also show you how you can start removing them from your workflow today, for free, with the tools you’re already using.

Robotic Tasks eat up your valuable time

A Robotic Task is any task that doesn’t require you to use creativity, analytical skills, strategic planning, or thoughtfulness. Some common Robotic Tasks include:

• Copying and pasting information
• Updating and opening software
• Configuring software to predetermined settings
• Running payroll
• Creating Google Drive folders and Slack channels for a new customer
• Filling in the blanks in a document template

Robotic Tasks Consume your time and your attention, and get in the way of creating value directly. Every minute that you spend searching for an email is a minute you could have been responding. There is a direct but opposing relationship between robotic and Mindful Tasks: each Robotic Task you have to complete takes away time for Mindful Tasks, even when you’ve finished the task itself. According to researchers at UC Irvine, it takes about 25 minutes to regain your focus after an interruption. If Robotic Tasks are intruding on your workflow, you’re losing more than just the time it takes to complete the tasks, and you’re hampering your ability to create value.

Now, what do we mean when we say that these tasks don’t create value? You might look at some of the items on the list above and think, for instance, “Hey, payroll is actually extremely important!”  

And you’d be right. Making sure your employees and vendors get paid in full and on time is obviously a crucial task. But it’s simply a bare-minimum requirement for your company to keep existing; it’s not something that differentiates your company from any other. This is the nature of Robotic Tasks: they may or may not be important, but they’re never the activities that define your company’s value propositions. 

Robotic Tasks don't make you better at anything. They don't make your customers happier, and they don't make your employees want to work harder. Your customers and employees will only notice if the Robotic Tasks aren’t getting done; even perfectly-performed Robotic Tasks just maintain the status quo and keep things moving exactly the same way as they have been. Even though many Robotic Tasks can be completed fairly quickly, breaking away from your more valuable can interrupt flow states and make it harder to effectively pick up where you left off.

So what should we do about these tasks that interrupt our focus and take up our time?

Robotic Tasks can be transferred to someone or something else

The great thing about Robotic Tasks is that you don’t actually have to do them. Every Robotic Task that’s currently dragging on your productivity can either be automated or handed off to someone else (for now). 

Of course, it’s not always something that can happen immediately. The key is to identify your Robotic Tasks, and then to make sure that you have a repeatable, documented procedure for them. There’s a good chance you’ve heard of the “peanut butter sandwich exercise.” You can see a great example of the exercise here, but the gist of it is this: when you’re giving instructions to a computer via code, you have to be completely precise and unambiguous. Computers can’t think, so they can only do exactly what you tell them. For us humans, this can be difficult to adjust to, because we constantly make assumptions - often without realizing it. The peanut butter sandwich exercise asks one person to list all of the steps to making a sandwich, while another person follows those steps exactly. The results are usually chaotic, and make for some great videos. But there’s a valuable lesson there in how to approach software, and it applies to no-code solutions as well. 

No-code automation platforms like Zapier are quite simple to use, but they still are going to require you to clear up any ambiguity in your processes before you can start automating them in a meaningful and coordinated way. Once you’ve found a Robotic Task that you don’t want to be burdened with anymore, document each step using the “peanut butter sandwich” mentality: no ambiguity, no room for interpretation or error. Each action will have a corresponding data point, and you need to make sure that each necessary datapoint will be captured by your automation system.

Make a note of all of the applications involved in the task, and then check Zapier and Integromat to find out which platform supports the apps you want to use, and the actions you want to take. You’ll find that Zapier has support for a greater number of applications, but Integromat can perform more actions with the apps that it does support. Once you find a platform that supports the apps, you can start creating the automation right away while referring to your documentation. 

Integromat (recently acquired 🎉) and Zapier, two of the most commonly-used automation platforms, both offer free accounts that you can get started with. The free accounts set a limit on how many automations you can create and how many tasks you can perform, but will be just fine for creating your first automations. If you have any questions about using these platforms, you can always reach out to their support, or to us at humans@xray.tech 🙌. 

If the app you use isn’t supported by any platform, or you can’t automate the task for some other reason, the documentation you created will allow you to re-assign the task to a more junior employee or even to a Virtual Assistant (VA). Of course, ideally, nobody would have to do Robotic Tasks. But in the meantime, it’s especially important to make sure that the people who lead your company aren’t getting bogged down with responsibilities that don’t really utilize their talents.

Automating your Robotic Tasks will make you and your team more productive

Among electric companies, devices that draw excessive power while not actually doing anything are called “energy vampires”. Robotic Tasks are the energy vampires of the workplace. Just like that old TV that’s plugged in 24/7, you might not take notice of them very often, but they’re constantly draining your time and focus, one drip at a time. Automating these tasks whenever possible will create substantial productivity gains in the long run by allowing you to devote a greater portion of your day to your value-generating activities. Don’t waste your time with Robotic Tasks; you have a choice to work more mindfully.  

Action Steps

1. Consider your typical workday and identify three Robotic Tasks that you frequently have to complete. Remember, a Robotic Task is one that doesn’t involve any of the CAST attributes. They’re not creative, analytic, strategic, or thoughtful.
2. Pick one of the Robotic Tasks and document it thoroughly.
3. Find out which no-code platform(s) you can use to automate the task
4. Automate the task

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One of the first questions that entrepreneurs often have when they consider automation is:

What exactly can I automate?

Trying to find out what’s possible with automation will often lead to getting overwhelmed by information and possibilities. On their website, the no-code automation platform Zapier boasts that they can connect to over 3,000 applications, while competitor Integromat lists a slightly more conservative figure of “hundreds” of integrations.

It’s true that the potential of automation is nearly limitless; in fact, if you can think of a system you’d like to automate, there’s probably a way to do it. 

However, if you’re just getting started, you might be looking for some more specific advice that can help you figure out where to get your first foothold in automation.

At XRay, we’d recommend a few strategies for those just beginning their automation journey: 

1. Automate the tools you’re already using

2. Use CAST to find which processes you should (and shouldn’t automate)

3. Start with some of the most commonly automated processes

In this article, we’ll explain each of these strategies and tell you about the most popular automations among our members. 

Automate the tools and processes you’re already using

Whenever possible, we believe it’s best to build your automations around the tools you already use and the processes you’re comfortable with. 

When your workflows are already getting the results you want, there’s no need to throw them away and start from scratch. Instead, you can support those workflows with automated steps to achieve the same outcomes faster and more consistently. 

For instance, let’s consider a simple invoicing workflow. When a salesperson closes a deal, they update the lead’s information in your CRM, and then send an email to accounting to send an appropriate invoice. Someone in accounting then draws up the invoice and sends it.

With automation, you could preserve all of the steps and results, but sending the invoice would be entirely automatic. The salesperson would just have to update the lead’s status in the CRM, and this action would trigger an automated process creating and sending invoice, with notifications sent to the accounting department to keep them apprised of the deal. 

Ultimately, the familiarity of the tools and processes involved will make it easier for your team to adapt to the new automated workflow without having to learn entirely new systems (of course, we still provide documentation and training to make sure that the transition goes smoothly). 

Fortunately, in most cases, you can start automating with just about any apps that you’re likely to be using. As long as the app has an API, low-code automators like XRay’s techs can connect it to automation platforms like Zapier and Integromat.

So if you’re not sure where to start with automation, you might want to start with what’s already familiar. Take a look at your own business processes and find the robotic tasks that are interrupting your team’s focus, then use XRay.tools to see if there are pre-built integrations available for the apps you’re using.

Use CAST to determine which processes you should (and shouldn’t) automate

When you’re trying to figure out what to automate, it can often be helpful to look at things from another perspective: what shouldn’t be automated? What work do you and your employees want to keep doing yourselves?

At XRay, one of our goals is to create more time for people to do mindful work that requires uniquely human skills, rather than wasting their time on robotic tasks. To determine if a given task is mindful or not, we have a simple set of criteria called CAST. 

You can read more about CAST here, but to sum it up quickly, CAST stands for Creative, Analytical, Strategic, and Thoughtful. It’s a simple litmus test to help determine if a given task is worthy of human attention, or if it might be better suited to automation.

Is the task in question creative, analytical, strategic or thoughtful? If so, it’s probably something that requires human attention. Drafting a new pitch deck is a creative endeavor; reviewing a quarterly report is analytical; setting goals and a plan for the next quarter is strategic; giving critical and effective feedback to your team members requires thoughtfulness. 

The goal of automation should be to support tasks that require CAST attributes. Once you’ve identified the work that your people should be doing, you can start to consider what they need to have ready beforehand to do that work; in many cases, preparation tasks are prime candidates for automation.

Go with a universal automated workflow

If you’re still not sure what to automate after combing through your business processes to find robotic tasks, you could also consider our automated workflow packages that target some common and widely applicable processes.

Automated Client Onboarding

For B2B companies, agencies, and studios, client onboarding is an essential task, but can often be tedious and error-prone. By filling out a single short survey for each new client, the Client Onboarding Workflow will automatically create folders, messaging channels in Slack or Microsoft Teams, calendar invites, templated meeting agendas, and any other documents or resources you need for your projects. 

By automating all of this, you can create a consistent onboarding process for your clients that leaves a great first impression and lets you capture analytics along the way. You can track each new client through all of the stages of onboarding and pinpoint any delays or problems. 

Automated Team/Internal Onboarding

Much like onboarding your clients, bringing your new hires into the team often requires a great deal of administrative work. You need to create accounts for each new employee, add them to the appropriate workspaces in various apps, generate contracts and forms for them to sign, and share documentation or training material. 

Each of these steps can be triggered through an automated survey that you fill out each time a new recruit joins your company, making it easy to create a consistent onboarding process, gather feedback from your new team members, and track their progress throughout their orientation and training. 

Automated Data Visibility

One of the most useful benefits of automating a workflow is that it creates and captures dozens (if not hundreds) of data points for you to track and analyze. Our Data Visibility automated workflow focuses entirely on the data-driven aspect of automation.

We use automated systems to collect, clean and store vital data, identify and track KPIs, and provide your team leaders with critical business intelligence. Each time your employees and colleagues complete an essential business process, the DataViz workflow will automatically log several datapoints about what happened. You can then work with our team to study your accumulated data and uncover key insights.

Finding a Starting Point

While the staggering array of possibilities with automation can be overwhelming, there are several simple ways you can get started. You can start automating your existing processes, identify the work you want to make more time for, or consider some of our most popular automated workflows. 

If you have any questions about how automation can improve your workflows, feel free to reach out to us at any time through our contact page.

If you'd like to learn more about no-code automation, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

No-code automation giant Zapier is a great platform for people who are just getting started with automation. But while no-code automation is a skill that anyone can develop with time and practice, there are still some hurdles to avoid and strategies to follow for success.

If you’re new to the field and starting to experiment with building automations in Zapier, we have a few tips and best practices in this post that will help you as you’re building Zaps to start speeding up your workflows. 

Tip 1: Make a Flowchart First

Before you start diving into a somewhat longer or more complex automation, we recommend making a flowchart first that maps out your ideas. Go into Lucidchart, or whichever flowcharting software you prefer, and make a diagram that includes each step that has to go into your automation.

Using some simple color-coding can help you to keep track of the steps you’ve accomplished and the steps that you still need to add into the automation. When we’re creating flowcharts for our automations at XRay.Tech, we’ll often mark finished steps as green, incomplete steps as yellow, and steps that we haven’t started on as red. That makes it easy for any of our techs to check on the team’s progress at a glance. 

Making a flowchart is also a great way to share your automations with your team. For those who aren’t familiar with Zapier and its UI, a flowchart is a much more intuitive way to understand what an automation does and the purpose it serves. 

If you’re hoping to get more of your team to start adopting automations into their workflows, simple flowcharts can be an invaluable asset for explaining how they can use what you’ve already made. 

Tip 2: Give Detailed Names to Your Zaps

As your Zaps start to pile up, it will become crucial to give them descriptive, informative names. A helpful name will make it easier to find the Zap you’re looking for manually or with Zapier’s search function, which only looks at a Zap’s title. 

Since Zapier doesn’t put a limit on the character lengths for Zap titles, feel free to add as much detail as you want. A short sentence is often going to provide more practical context than a brief, punchy title. 

“Find emails from a specified client and copy them into that client’s Airtable directory” might be a bit of a mouthful, but it tells you exactly what the automation does, and will help to differentiate it from other Zaps you may make that connect GMail and Airtable. 

Along the same lines, it’s often a good idea to rename each individual step within your Zaps to something that provides more information than the default titles. If you’re adding a search step, make a note of what the search criteria are; if you’re creating a document, explain what the document contains. 

Fastidious naming conventions might seem a little tedious, but they’ll be a lifesaver when you have to revisit Zaps you made months (or years) prior. You won’t have to worry about forgetting what a particular automation does or how it works when the names of each step tell you clearly. 

Tip 3: Duplicate Your Zaps Before Making Changes

While Zapier is an excellent and versatile platform overall, it does lack in certain areas that make work a bit more difficult. As of right now, Zapier doesn’t have any sort of built-in version control, which means that you can’t revert back to older versions of your Zaps after making changes.

That’s why we recommend always duplicating your Zaps before you start making any major changes. That way, you have a copy of a working version of your automation that you can fall back on in case your changes start to break the Zap.

Even if you’re trying to fix a Zap that’s already having issues, it’s often a good idea to work in a copy of the Zap so that you can preserve any steps that were working - or confirm which steps were causing the problem. 

To copy a Zap, just click on the arrow next to its name, and choose “Copy” to immediately create an exact copy.  

Tip 4: Chat Notifications

As your automations work quietly in the background with little or no input from you and your team, it’s important to have a way to keep track of what they’re doing. Knowing when a document was generated or when a report was filed can help you to work more efficiently and prevent you from accidentally doing redundant work.

A simple way to stay in the loop is to add a chat notification at the end of all of your automations. Just add a step to send a message in Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc., and include a brief message with what the Zap just did and a link to the Zap itself. You may also want to include links to any documents or resources that the automation created for easy reference. 

At XRay, we put all of our automation notifications into a dedicated “auto_updates” channel, so we can check on our automated activity all in one spot. 

Tip 5: Explore the Possibilities with XRay.Tools

Before you start building your automations, it’s a good idea to get a sense of what’s possible with the tools at your disposal. 

We’ve made a web app designed specifically to show you the integrations Zapier has for any app that you search for. Just go to xray.tools, enter the software’s name to build your toolbelt, then click on View to see the triggers, actions, and searches that Zapier supports for each app.

While our search only checks Zapier for now, we’ll soon add support for other platforms like Integromat. You can also click on “Get Shareable Link” to generate a link with your toolbelt prefilled into the search, so you can easily share the results with your team or refer back to it later. 

Keep Automating and Saving Time

These tips should help you to kickstart your early Zaps and stay organized as you start creating more automations and experiments to support your workflows. 

If you’d like to learn more about integrating automation into your daily work, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Every app in your toolbelt serves a different function. You might be using Airtable as a database for all of your vital metrics, while Notion serves as a wiki for your team, acting as a centralized knowledge base.

But what if you want to sync some data between both? You can always migrate from one app to the other with a simple .csv export of the table in question, but that won’t help you if you want to keep the tables in both apps synced up going forward.

That’s where Unito comes in. Unito lets you build flows that automatically sync two databases, so changes in one will be reflected in the other. Unito supports several popular apps, including Airtable, Notion, Google Sheets, and more.

In this post, we’ll show you how to set up a Unito flow to sync tables in Airtable and Notion.

Set up your Airtable and Notion tables

Start with similar tables

Before you do anything in Unito itself, you’ll need to make sure your tables in Airtable and Notion are ready for the sync.

It’s best to start with identical tables, but it’s fine if one table has additional columns that won’t be synced, or different names for the same data. 

As long as you know which columns will be matched together for the sync, you should be all set. 

Add “Last modified” columns

Next, you’ll need to add a “Last modified” column to each table so that Unito can see when the record was last updated. That will be its cue to sync the record to the other database. 

In Airtable, add a new column, and select “Last modified time” as the field type.

In Notion, create a new column with “last edited time” as the type.

Build your flow in Unito

Create a new flow

With your tables all set up, head over to Unito and create a new flow. Choose your apps, and select the tables that you want to sync.

Set the flow direction

Choose whether you want your flow to be a two-way or one-way sync. With a two-way sync, changes made to either table will prompt an update in the other table. In a one-way sync, changes to Airtable will prompt an update in Notion, but changes in Notion won’t be updated in Airtable (or vice versa).

We’ll be using a two-way sync for this flow.

Review the syncing rules

Unito will automatically populate a set of rules that will determine which records get synced. It might look a little confusing at first, but it’s just saying that any record created on or after the current date will be synchronized.

You can modify these rules if you’d like, but it’s usually fine to leave them as they are. We’ll deal with syncing old records later.

Match fields and launch your flow

Now you’ll need to match each field in Airtable to its counterpart in Notion. If you have extra fields in either table that you don’t want to include in the sync, you can just leave them out in this step. 

Once all your fields are matched up, you can launch your flow.

Sync old and new records

Old records

If you’d like to sync all of the records added to your table before the Unito flow was made, just scroll to the bottom of the flow page and select “include older records or work items”. Confirm your choice, then click on “Sync now” at the top of the page.

This will sync all of your existing records one at time, which can take quite a while if you’re working with large databases. 

New records

To sync new records, just add them to Airtable or Notion as you normally would. Within about 10 minutes, Unito will sync the new record to the other database. 

Keep your data consistent without any extra effort

Now your Airtable and Notion sync is all set, and your tables will show consistent data to everyone on your team without any added work on your part. 

For more automation tutorials covering platforms like Unito, Zapier, and Integromat, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Keep Track of Your Automations with Documentation

Every day, knowledge workers waste time on robotic tasks that could be automated. In our previous articles, we’ve shown you how the XRay method can be used to identify robotic tasks and begin automating them away. By now, you’ve probably set up an automation or two to clear some of those robotic tasks off of your plate. But what happens next? What if you want to show your team how the automation works? What if you want to train someone else to manage the automations? How can you turn a handful of zaps into a robust automation infrastructure? The answer to all of these questions is documentation. 

Proper documentation makes your automations easy to maintain, keeps you and your team informed of what’s happening, and lets you record and discover valuable data about your business processes. Here’s how you can document your automations to get the most out of them, and start creating a knowledge base that goes beyond automation to encompass all of your business processes. 

Creating an Operational Database

As you start integrating more automations into your business processes, you’ll need a system to keep track of them and educate your team members on how they work (or at least make them aware of what the robots are doing). Organized, systematic documentation will make it a lot easier for you to maintain your automations, and will create a source for your team to learn from. Thorough documentation will let anyone understand how a no-code automation works, much like how a software engineer’s documentation will inform any developers who pick up the project after them. Documentation takes the work and planning of one or more team members and turns it into maintainable, scalable institutional knowledge. Let’s say you’ve created an automation for onboarding clients, and part of this automation includes entering your new client’s financial info into Quickbooks. What if your financial team decides to switch to Xero? Documentation will make it easy to find the exact steps that relate to Quickbooks so that you can update them to work with Xero instead. 

Your documentation will consist primarily of a database that describes all of your automations. You can create your database in any modern spreadsheet tool, but our preferred tool at XRay is Airtable. The purpose of the database is to define all of your automations, and to clearly organize them into triggers and processes. In our documentation system, Processes, Triggers, and Automations form a simple hierarchy. In this hierarchy, an 🤖 Automation is a single automated task; for instance, a Zap in Zapier that sends out an email every week to your team asking for general suggestions, aggregating their anonymized responses in a spreadsheet. Each automation is associated with a 🔢 Trigger and a 🙌Process.  A trigger is an action or event that prompts the automation to start. In our team survey example, the automation is triggered based on the time; it runs every day at 4:00PM. A process groups together multiple automations based on their operational purpose. This feedback-gathering Zap would be just one automation in a process focused on building workplace culture.

To take a closer look at how these terms work in practice, let’s examine the documentation for Verb, one of XRay’s clients. As a fitness and wellness app, Verb needs to create a profile for each of their coaches. XRay created a series of automations that allows Verb to create fully-functional, published webpages for their coaches by filling out a simple form. In our documentation, the entire action of creating a webpage is a process called “Coach Webpage Creator” that consists of several different automations. One of the automations includes an API call to Stripe to create new objects and prices for sale, so users can book sessions with the coaches through the webpage. Another automation grabs all of that newly created information, merges it with the survey information, and pushes it all to Webflow to get published. Each of these automations is prompted to run by a trigger. Many of the automations in the “Coach Webpage Creator” process share the same trigger: “Get a New Form Response”. In other words, whenever a coach is onboarded at Verb, they fill out the Typeform survey with all of the information needed to create a new page, then several automations fire off in a specific sequence. A copy of the survey response is stored in airtable, the Head of Coaching is notified, and much more. When documenting triggers, we always use the exact same term that Zapier (or Integromat etc.) uses to describe it. This makes it easier to match up the data in our documentation to the actual systems we’ve created.

Ultimately, the goal of our documentation system is to create a hierarchy that makes it easy to find any aspect of your automation that you want to know more about, update, or reference. Maintaining the hierarchical documentation allows anyone on your team to study and understand your automated systems from any perspective. If they want to know everything that happens when a certain event occurs, they can refer to the “Triggers” tab. If they want a detailed breakdown of each step in an automation, they can check the “Automations” tab. Providing all of this additional context makes the database an extremely useful resource to turn to when someone wants to know more about an automation or learn what's possible with your existing tools. For instance, if someone on your team wants to know exactly where certain data is being stored and fetched in an automated process, they can refer to the database and check the relevant automations. Maintaining visibility into your automations becomes especially important when you need to start making changes, like replacing one of your software tools or changing who’s notified after certain steps in a process.  

 Like automation, documentation can seem like a tedious and daunting task at first. The key is to start small and focus on the most important information first, such as the basic hierarchy we’ve outlined in this post. If you take a look at our example in Airtable, you’ll notice we have more tabs and data than what we’ve discussed here. To get started, you don’t need to worry about that level of detail just yet - we’ll come back to it in a later post. For now, just concentrate on creating a useful, living document that organizes your automated systems in a way that your team can understand. 

Self-Documenting Automations

One of the greatest benefits of automating many of your business processes is that it gives you the opportunity to empirically track each process that’s been automated and see patterns in new data. If you’ve automated your contract and payment processes, you can see how long it takes to get a proposal signed or how long it takes to receive your first payment. If things are running slower than anticipated, you can find the exact capacity breakdown points. All you need to do is set up an Operational Activity Log.

An Operational Activity Log is a document that updates whenever your automation runs, storing the key data that the automation interacted with as well as metadata about the automation. To create an Activity Log, you’ll need to have a spreadsheet to store the data, and you’ll need to add steps to each of your automations to record their data in your activity log. This can get very complex. If you’re feeling sharp, checkout this Activity Log we made for you. Creating an entry in the Airtable activity log is typically the last step in all of our Zaps. You can see an example in the screenshot below.  The result is a chronological list of automations that ran, and the data processed each time they ran, all inside of one spreadsheet. The activity log is a simple creation, but it has massive implications for your overall automation strategy. It provides a reliable path for debugging when errors pop up, and it scales better than people can on their own. Questions about when a document was sent or when a proposal was completed can be answered by checking the log instead of distracting people who are focusing. 

The data you store in the activity log and how you break it down is entirely up to you and your company’s needs. In general, you should try to track the key metrics that will quantify the success of both the task being automated and the automation itself. The value here is in the meta-analysis. An automated activity log gives you the ability to see trends, create timeline-based insights, and understand how well an entire workflow is working, rather than just giving you a single metric at the end. If it’s a time-sensitive task, you’ll want to make sure to log the time and date of each critical action to make sure that everything is happening on schedule. If you’re hoping to boost engagement on social media, you’ll want to log the likes, retweets, etc. that each post gets. Apps like Zapier and Integromat allow you to take nearly every piece of data that’s used in an automation and send it to spreadsheet software like Airtable and Google Sheets, so virtually any data that you want to log can be logged. Just make sure not to log so many metrics that the activity log becomes unwieldy and difficult to navigate. As the saying goes: garbage in, garbage out. You have to be intentional and strategic with what you want to keep track of, or you may end up with a pile of useless data.  

In addition to activity logs, announcements are another form of documentation that you’ll set up from within an automation. While an automation is running, it should be configured to conclude the automation by sending a message into relevant communication channels to announce what it did. For example, the account management team might see a message pop up in their Slack channel that says: 

“Mike just updated ABC Company’s Information!
The following information has been updated: created and assigned a new Jira Ticket, updated Hubspot CRM, drafted an email to the client"

This message shows the team how Mike’s one manual action triggered three automatic actions, and would typically include a link to the Zap or Integromat scenario, as well. As these automations get more complicated, prevalent, and important, the simple announcement will help everyone to stay in the loop and leave a clear breadcrumb trail to follow if any issues arise. You’ll need to strike the right balance of announcements. Too many, and your team will get distracted and annoyed; too few, and you start to create the dreaded “black box” effect, where everyone starts to take the automations for granted and forgets how they work.

Automation without proper documentation risks becoming a mysterious process running in the background and creates easily avoidable risks as your automation infrastructure grows, understood only by the person or people who set it up. Creating documentation and an activity log early on will provide context for your entire team, especially as your company grows and new faces enter the ranks. Over time, your automated activity logs will deliver critical insights into the operations of your company and the success of your automations. In our next post, we’ll discuss how a similar concept can even be applied to your team and their mindful tasks as you create a broader knowledge base that encompasses standard procedures and a dictionary of terms, removing unnecessary ambiguity from everyone’s daily work.

No-code and low-code automations are a convenient way to save time at work, letting you refocus your attention on the things that matter the most. 

But in some cases, automations can almost become too convenient. If your automations are running completely in the background, it’s easy to lose track of what they’re doing, which can result in redundant work, unnoticed errors, or other mistakes. 

The last thing you want is to spend an hour making a document that your automation already put together yesterday. 

In this post, we’ll show you three ways to keep track of all your automated activity, so you’ll always know what the robots are doing. 

Check the automation history

One of the simplest ways to see what your automations have done is to check the history tab of your automation platform. Apps like Zapier, Integromat, Unito, etc., all have an easily accessible history tab for you to reference whenever you want. 

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When you check the history on any of these apps, you’ll see a list of every automated action that your account has performed over a certain window of time. This will usually include errors or failed runs in addition to the successful actions, which can be helpful when you’re trying to fix bugs.

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These history tabs provide comprehensive records, but regularly checking them isn’t the most convenient way to keep an eye on your automations.

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At XRay, we’re all about automating repetitive tasks to save time, and refreshing an automated activity log every day definitely qualifies as a repetitive task. 

So while checking the history can be useful, we’ll also show you a couple of more proactive ways to track your automations. 

Configure real-time chat notifications

One of the first “best practices” that we established for building automations at XRay was to have every automation send a Slack message every time it runs. To keep things organized, we send all of the messages for our internal automations into a dedicated #auto_updates channel. 

With automated messages, everyone on your team can stay in the loop without having to take any extra actions on their own. Each message includes a brief description of what the automation did, a link to edit the automation in Zapier, Integromat, etc., and links to any resources the automation might have created. 

The messages are sent in real-time, so if a new document is created at 3:00pm, you’ll know about it before 3:05. Messages can also be sent in any app your team uses: Microsoft teams, Discord, etc.

Having an automation updates channel helps your team to work more efficiently with automations. It prevents them from having to ask each other if and when automations ran, or go searching for files.

It also works as a simple reminder that your automations are working - or a tacit warning that something might not be right. As long as you see regular updates when you expect them, you know everything’s working fine. If you’re not seeing any activity, it’s a strong signal that your automations might need a quick fix.

Build User-Controlled Automations

App history and chat messages will let you know about your automations after they run, but there’s also a way to stay ahead of the curve and be aware of every automated action before it happens.

There are several different ways to trigger automations, as we’ve discussed in a previous post. Many triggers are passive, like scheduled automations that run every day at a specific time, or software-based automations that run whenever a task is updated in Trello. These automations run without human input, which can be useful but doesn’t always offer the control and visibility that you might be looking for.

With a user-controlled trigger, an automation only runs when a user launches it with a survey, a form, or even a simple button. Because a human has to be involved at the start of the automation, you (or someone on your team) will always be aware of when and why a user-controlled automation runs its actions. 

Opting for a user-controlled trigger isn’t always necessary, but it can be a helpful way to integrate human checkpoints into critical workflows. Even if you’re automating the bulk of the work, you may still want to have someone on your team manually approve each invoice or proposal being sent out, or every job offer going to new recruits. 

Even with user-controlled triggers, you should still make sure to add a chat message to the end of the automation. That way, you’ll have confirmation that it ran successfully after you launched it.

Streamline your work without losing visibility

Automations eliminate lots of tedious work from our overburdened to-do lists, but it’s still important for us to know about all the work they’re doing. If your automations just run silently in the background, it’s easy for you and your team to get confused and start producing redundant or unnecessary work - which defeats the purpose of automating in the first place!

With the tips that we’ve outlined here, you can easily stay on top of your automated activity. If you’d like to learn more best practices for building automations, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

As certified Zapier Experts, we at XRay.Tech often hear the question: if Zapier is so easy to use, then why do I need an expert?

While Zapier is certainly an intuitive no-code platform, building automations at scale for your entire organization is often something that requires assistance from experienced automators like XRay. You’ll also find Zapier Experts to be an extremely useful resource whenever you run into a problem with your automations that you just can’t figure out on your own.

In this article we’ll explain when and why Zapier Experts can help you with your automations. 

Building Automations for Your Team

It’s easy to get started building automations in Zapier. With just a little tinkering (and a few visits to Zapier’s community forum), any moderately technical user should have no difficulty in setting up some simple Zaps that make their workflows easier. 

However, building automations that support your whole team, multiple departments, or even your entire organization is a much more complicated project.

Each additional user role adds its own requirements, and a previously simple automation that worked well for you may now need branching paths, precise logic, and a robust database to accommodate everyone’s needs.  

Zapier Experts like XRay can help you scale your automations so you can focus on your job, not on building and managing Zaps. We’ll be able to handle all of the data that needs to go in and out of your automations, write documentation to make it easy to train your team, and provide maintenance to keep your Zaps running. 

Experts Can Handle Data, Documentation, and Maintenance

Data

Experts like XRay’s automation techs are highly experienced with all the various types and formats of data that Zapier pulls in from different apps. They know how to curate the data you need most and how to store it in an efficient operational database so the information can be easily referenced in future automations. 

Additionally, our techs are familiar with the unusual quirks often associated with data from certain apps, such as knowing which apps need to use a file download link and which need to save the file itself. Fine distinctions like that can make or break an automation, and can be very frustrating to try to discover on your own. 

Accurate, accessible data is essential for building a team- or company-wide automated infrastructure, and Zapier experts can make sure you gather that data the right way.

Documentation

Documentation isn’t provided by every Zapier Expert, but it’s one of the key pillars of XRay’s approach to building automations.

With each automated workflow that we create for members, we create another page in their Process Playbook. The Process Playbook includes helpful, detailed guides about what each automation does and how to use it.

With proper documentation, you and your team can learn how to use each new automation and keep track of your entire automated infrastructure. While it’s pretty easy to remember one or two automations that you’ve built yourself, it’s important to have a system in place if you want to stay organized and informed when you’re relying on dozens of automations at your company.

Beyond its use as a training and informational resource, your Process Playbook also transforms your processes into a tangible asset. Presenting a few pages is a simple way to show potential investors or buyers how your company operates.

Maintenance

No-code automation relies on your other software to operate. If your automations connect Hubspot and Google Drive, then any updates to those apps might interfere with how your automations work.

Most of the time, software updates won’t be an issue, but some will cause errors in your Zaps every now and again. That’s when it’s useful to have a Zapier Expert to turn to. 

A Zapier Expert will be able to find, diagnose, and fix errors in your automations much faster than you’ll be able to do on your own, maximizing the uptime and productivity of your automated workflows.

Reach Out to an Expert Whenever You’re Stuck

Whether you’re trying to scale up your Zaps or not, Zapier experts can help you to solve your automation issues when you’re hitting a wall. If you’re not sure how to get your apps connected and Zapier’s forums aren’t able to resolve the issue either, then reaching out to a Zapier Expert is your best bet.

XRay.Tech offers 30 minutes of free support, and many other experts are also happy to offer some pro bono assistance to start. 
So reach out to XRay if you’d like to scale your automation, or if you just need help figuring out a tricky problem. You can also check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Any automation can be built in a number of different ways, with varying levels of complexity and flexibility.

You can build an automation in the simplest, most direct way possible to quickly handle one or two scenarios, or you can build automations with branching paths, conditional logic, and database lookups to accommodate just about any scenario you might encounter.

At XRay.Tech, we build automations that go beyond simply connecting one app to another. We build automations for our members that support workflows across their entire organization, and to do that, we need to add some steps that go further than what might be strictly necessary to just get an automation up and running.

In this post, we’re going to use an invoicing process as an example to show you three different ways to build the same kind of automation: the simplest way, a better method, and XRay’s preferred approach. 

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The Easy (but Error-Prone) Way

For our invoicing example, let’s assume that we want to send a Quickbooks invoice to a customer whenever we mark that client as “Closed/Won” in Hubspot.

The simplest way to build this automation would consist of only three steps. 

First, the automation would trigger whenever a deal in Hubspot is marked as “Closed/Won” (this will be the same in all three examples). Then, the automation will create an invoice in Quickbooks using data pulled in from the Hubspot trigger. Finally, the automation will send the invoice to the client’s email address provided by Hubspot.

This automation is quick and easy to put together, but only offers limited functionality and will encounter errors in many common situations. For instance, if the customer in Hubspot isn’t already added into your Quickbooks database, the automation simply won’t work at all. 

An automation like this is a good way to start learning what a platform like Zapier is capable of, but it wouldn’t be very useful for your company as it would still require you to add each customer manually to Quickbooks.

A Better Method: Find Customers and Build a Simple Activity Log

To make this automation actually meet minimum requirements, we’ll add a lookup step and start building a rudimentary activity log.

This version starts out the same way, but the next step is an important difference. Instead of jumping straight to creating and sending an invoice, we’re going to perform a search for an existing customer using the email address provided by the Hubspot trigger. If there’s no record of that customer in Quickbooks, then the automation will create one for us. 

With this Find/Create step, we make sure that the customer is in Quickbooks without requiring any manual work to add them. 

After that, the automation proceeds in much the same way as the first: it creates an invoice, and sends it out to the customer. 

Finally, we’ve added a step to log some information in Google Sheets. This will create a simple activity log which will compile information whenever the automation runs. 

With an activity log, we’ll be able to quickly reference a variety of data about each automated action: a payment link for the invoice, the client’s email address, the time the invoice was sent, and more. 

An activity log is a great way to keep track of your automations and make sure the data that they create doesn’t get lost along the way. However, Google Sheets isn’t the best tool for working with automations. It’s a tool that nearly everyone is familiar and comfortable with, but it lacks some key features that it would need to be an ideal automation database. 

To finally bring this automation up to XRay’s standards, let’s swap out Sheets for Airtable and add a Slack notification to keep everyone in the loop.

XRay’s Approach: Flexible Databases and Convenient Notifications

We’ll bring the automation up to 7 total steps with the addition of an Airtable database and a Slack notification.

Creating a database in Airtable rather than Google Sheets is more than just a simple software switch. Airtable is an ideal spreadsheet app to use as an automation database. Its system of filters and views let us sort our data in custom, precise ways to control our automations and easily collect data each time they run. 

This version of the automation looks pretty similar to the previous one, but you’ll note that there are two Airtable steps instead of a single Google Sheets step. Now, instead of just making a simple activity log, we’re using Airtable to make a full customer record. We’ll be able to associate each invoice with a linked record of clients, as well as with a linked record of automations.

We’ll also be able to use all of this robust and interconnected data to support other automations in the future, like sending automated email reminders to clients with unpaid invoices. Making updates like these will be much easier with Airtable, because adding new columns and rearranging their order won’t  break the automations as it would with Google Sheets. 

Finally, we’ve added a step to send a Slack message to the team after an invoice is sent. Notifications like these are a simple but vitally important way to keep everyone in the loop about what the automations are doing. 

We’ve found that automations have a tendency to become invisible unless you announce their activity, and invisible automations will often lead to confusion and redundancy as people repeat the same work that was already performed automatically.

Building Adaptable Automations for our Members

When we’re working with our members, we want to provide them with efficient, adaptable automations that can respond to all of their current needs and adjust to fit what their future needs. 

While it would often be quicker to simply connect one app directly to another, using an operational database in Airtable to manage the flow of data ultimately makes the apps more useful in the short term and more resilient to change in the long term. 

One of the reasons why we prefer memberships over project-based engagements is that they let us get to know the companies and the people we work with better, which in turn allows us to better build automations that match their goals and requirements. 

If you’d like to learn more about how we build automations, or if you’d like to start learning to build automations yourself, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Much of the work we do every day is defined by the people we work with. As you’re considering XRay.Tech as an option for building automated workflows, you’re likely curious about what your team will actually be like, and how you’ll work together.

In this post, we’ll explain who you’ll work with if you decide to start an XRay membership, and how everyone on your team will contribute to the success of your membership. 

Your XRay Project Manager Coordinates our Efforts

Every XRay member is assigned a project manager. Your project manager will be your main point of contact at XRay, and they’ll coordinate efforts between our two teams to ensure that we’re making constant, consistent progress. 

Over the course of your membership, you’ll get to know your PM well as you talk daily on Slack and once a week during regular Zoom meetings. In turn, it’s your PM’s responsibility to understand your goals and use cases, and to see how automation can fit into the long-term plans of your business. 

An automation is only useful if it performs a task that serves your business and your employees. While technical skill is required to set up an automated infrastructure, it’s equally important to understand the operational context of each automation. 

Each automated workflow needs to be easy to operate, and the data or assets it produces need to be suitable for your team to work with. 

With a birds-eye view of your organization, your PM will help to give our technicians the context they need to build automations that fit your business. 

Your XRay Technician Team Builds Your Automations

At XRay, our technicians are the skilled low-code specialists who build automations for our members and for our internal use. 

In addition to a project manager, each XRay member will work with several technicians as they design, build, and maintain automated workflows. 

While your project manager will stick with you for the long-term, the team of technicians who build your automations will be a bit more fluid in order to match the right person to the right task. 

Collectively, our techs have a wide array of specialized skills and experience. Some are experts in particular automation platforms, and will be brought into the fold if your latest project requires knowing the intricacies of Integromat or Parabola. Others have the programming experience needed to create complex low-code automations with custom API queries. They’ll step in when your automation needs to go beyond the capabilities of prebuilt integrations. 

Throughout your membership, you’ll likely see many different techs pop in and out as we tackle different workflows that require different expertise. Your project manager will make sure that any new tech brought onboard will be up to speed on Day 1, so the changes in personnel won’t slow down our progress.

Our Leadership Team Keeps an Eye on the Long Term

While most of your day-to-day conversations will be with your project manager and technicians, XRay’s leadership will stay in touch with you throughout your membership. 

XRay Co-Founders Tom Nassr and Mark Campos will meet with you on a regular basis to discuss the long-term strategy of your membership. They’ll also help you to form proactive partnerships with our other XRay members whenever they see an opportunity that could be beneficial for everyone involved.

One of the reasons we prefer a membership model to working on a per-project basis is because we often find that many of our different members are working on similar problems or share similar goals. Memberships enable us to make better connections between the companies we work with. 

A Collaborative Effort

Under the direction of our leadership team, your XRay project manager and technicians will form a versatile, talented team that offers long-term stability and technical flexibility throughout the duration of your membership. Together, they’ll build automated workflows that perform to specifications and make your team’s workday easier. 

If you’d like to learn more about how XRay builds automations, check out our blog or our YouTube channel, or follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can also contact us if you have any questions or want to talk to us about your automation goals.

Making the switch from manual processes to automated workflows is a big change for any organization. If you’re considering automation for your business, you might be worried about a messy transition as you overhaul your systems. 

At XRay, we have a simple method that makes the conversion from manual to automated quick and frictionless. In this post, we’ll explain how we handle that crossover with parallel systems and extensive documentation.

Building in parallel

Whenever we build a new automation for one of our members, we start by creating a basic version of the automation that handles only the most common use cases for its business process. 

We quickly refine this prototype through a series of tests of conversations with your team, until we have an automated system that approximates the results of your manual process. That’s when we begin to run the two systems together in parallel. 

If, for instance, you’re automating your inbound sales process, you can continue to have your sales team monitor your CRM and email the way they always have, while also seeing how the automation processes leads and sends automatic notifications (note: until you’ve made the decision to switch, any messages or forms that would go to your customers will instead go to one of your internal accounts for testing purposes). 

By running both systems at the same time, we can evaluate the performance of the automated workflow and adjust it as needed to accommodate for a wider range of scenarios or to perform additional actions.  

Make the Switch When You’re Ready

Once the automation meets your expectations, you can switch over and start relying on the automated steps to complete your workflow. Any remaining test data will be replaced with live data coming in from your company or your clients. 

For your first automation, we’re confident that you’ll be ready to make the transition well before your initial 45-day trial period ends (unless we previously agreed to a longer time frame for a particularly complex workflow), but the exact timing will be entirely up to you. We won’t push you to make the change until you’re happy with the automation’s performance during the parallel testing period. 

To help ensure an easy transition for your team, we provide all of our members with thorough documentation that explains what each automation does, how it works, and what they need to do to use it (if anything). 

All of the documentation, along with other helpful links and resources, will be delivered through our own app called the Workflow Dash. The Workflow Dash organizes web pages and links into easily accessible, context-rich Pins, and is free for our members. 

Between the practice they get using the automation during testing and the extensive documentation available in the Workflow Dash, your team will have no problem making the switch.

Refine Your Automations Throughout Your Membership

With an XRay membership, our work doesn’t stop once your automation is live. For as long as your membership is active, we’ll keep improving your existing automations in addition to building new ones. 

Every automation we create will be connected to an Activity Log, which will track every automated action performed. This data, along with you and your team’s experience in using the automation, will help guide us as we refine the automation to add new paths, remove outdated functionality, or integrate new software if you decide to switch tools. 

Most of our updates will be done as quickly as possible, and will incur minimum downtime. Much like our process for building a full automation, we’ll run tests on any new feature before we incorporate it into the live automation. 

If you maintain your XRay membership, your automations will only get better over time as we continue to fix any bugs that crop up and make incremental improvements to your entire automated infrastructure. 

A Seamless Transition

XRay.Tech’s process for building and implementing automations makes it easy to switch when you’re ready and puts you in charge of the transition. Our documentation delivered through the Workflow Dash makes it easy for your team to adopt each new automated workflow, and our membership model ensures that your automations keep up with your business as your needs change. 

If you’d like to learn more about XRay’s method for building automated workflows to create more time for mindful work, you can check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and reach out to us directly if you have any questions.

If you’ve seen XRay’s website, then you know our mission: creating 1 billion hours of focused, mindful work for the people we work with. 

It’s a lofty goal, but what does it really mean in practical terms? How are we actually creating time for people to work in a better way?

In this post, we’ll explain how XRay’s method makes our mission into a reality, we’ll give you a look at how we track the time we save for our members, and we’ll explain how the time saved by automations can be repurposed into more worthwhile pursuits.

Compounding time savings

We can’t promise that a single automated workflow or a month’s worth of optimizations will cut your workday in half, but we can guarantee incremental time savings that grow rapidly over the course of your membership.

While the exact time savings that we can accomplish will vary based on your process (and many of our automations have saved hours each week), we always start by targeting a modest 1% of your time each month at a minimum. That translates to about 25 minutes out of each 40-hour work week. 

Less than half an hour each week might not sound like much, but it’s only a starting point. Once we start optimizing and supporting one of your processes with automation, that will reveal opportunities for additional automations that we can build as your membership continues. 

We may start by automating your inbound lead handling flow and saving you 20-40 minutes each week that you spent sending out templated emails. That lead handling automation might then reveal the need for an onboarding automation as well, saving another 40+ minutes per client as the new automation creates folders, messaging channels, and task management projects for you. 

At XRay, we don’t view automation as a one-time project, but as a continual process of discovery, opportunity, and enhancement. We use a membership model because it lets us create compounding time savings for our members as we get to know their companies and their processes as well as we know our own. 

Your XRay membership may begin with about a half hour saved each week, but you’ll quickly see that figure grow as your membership continues. 

Tracking your time on your terms

While we’re on the topic of saving time, you might be wondering how we keep track of the hours and minutes our automations shave off of your workload. 

At XRay, every automation we build for members or for ourselves feeds data into a centralized Activity Log every time that it runs. The Activity Log collects some key information about the automation, such as the exact time that it ran, links to any resources it created, and the amount of time it saves on each run.

As we build each automation, we’ll ask you to estimate the duration of your current manual process, and compare that against the total duration of the automated process as soon as it’s ready for you to use. 

In other words, we’ll rely on your experience to create an estimate of the time our automations save for you. That way, our performance metrics will be completely transparent and based on your actual results, not just our theoretical projections. 

Since the Activity Log tracks the automations whenever they run and includes your estimated time savings, it automatically builds a cumulative record of the total time saved by each automation we’ve built.  

So far, we’ve saved nearly 1,500 hours for our members over the 10 months that we’ve been working with them. 

Reallocating your time to mindful tasks

As we’re talking about how automations save time, it’s important to consider what the benefits of streamlining a task with automation are.

Time can’t be banked and “saved” for later use, but it can be immediately reallocated to better tasks or more worthwhile pursuits. 

As we’ve covered before, our goal at XRay is to automate robotic tasks. These are tasks that don’t require any creativity, analysis, strategy, or thoughtfulness (CAST). They’re repetitive grinds that consist entirely of moving and rearranging data.

Since robotic tasks are more suited to a piece of software than to a person, we think it’s a natural and logical conclusion that they should indeed be performed by software. 

Once these tasks are automated, and your new Zapier, Integromat or Unito automations free up some precious time each week, what are you going to do with those extra hours and minutes? 

It’s up to you of course, but we’d bet that you’ll spend most of that newfound time on mindful work; assignments and projects that define your role and help make you better at your job. With robotic, repetitive tasks being taken care of automatically, you’ll have more time to handle unique situations that actually need your input and benefit from your skillset. 

All of this is to highlight the fact that the value of automation is twofold; it not only removes the distraction and tedium of robotic tasks, but also enables you to do more important, challenging, and useful work at the same time.   

XRay’s plan for success

When we say that we hope to eliminate a billion hours of robotic work, we know we’re aiming high. But we believe we have a process to make it happen, and our first few months are already showing some great results.

By using our members’ first automations as a starting point, we’re able to build automated infrastructures that save more time each month, creating more opportunities for mindful work along the way.

If you’d like to learn more about how XRay is achieving its mission of saving a billion hours of mindless work, be sure to check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.