How we found 111 hours a month to automate (a method you can copy)
Before you automate anything, measure. The one-week time audit we used to find 111 hours a month of manual work, and how to decide what to fix first.
Most automation projects start with a tool. Ours started with a stopwatch. When we took over e-commerce operations at Pro Industrial Equipment, a 29,000-SKU seller on Amazon, Shopify, Walmart and eBay, there was no shortage of things to automate. The hard part was knowing which ones mattered. So before building a single workflow, we measured.
Step 1: Track every task for one week, in your busiest season
We tracked during peak months (December and January), because a slow week hides the real load. For every task, log:
- What it was
- How long it took, and how often it happens
- Its ROI: does it make money, protect money, or just keep things moving?
- How much you like doing it. This matters: the tasks you hate are the ones that get done late.
Be specific. “Customer service” is not a task. “Approving return requests on Amazon” is.
Step 2: Group tasks and convert to hours a month
Group similar tasks into buckets. Ours were customer service, operations problems, sales and business intelligence. Then convert everything to hours a month. A task that “only takes 10 minutes” but happens 6 times a day is 20 hours a month.
Some of the biggest lines from our audit:
| Task | Hours a month |
|---|---|
| Refunds, return requests and shipping issues | 40 |
| Fixing operations problems | 19 |
| Answering marketplace messages | 19 |
| Processing returns with the carrier | 14 |
| Dropship orders | 12 |
| Printing shipping labels in advance | 8.5 |
| US customs manifests | 5.6 |
Step 3: Label each task: automate, delegate or keep
- Automate what follows rules and repeats the same steps every time: manifests, label printing, order checks.
- Delegate what needs judgment, but not yours: customer messages, some returns.
- Keep the decisions only you can make, and the work that drives growth.
Our result: 84 hours a month to automate and 27 to delegate. 111 hours in total, or 63% of the time we tracked.
Step 4: Rank by impact, not by ease
Start with tasks that are frequent, error-prone, or that touch your account metrics. A missed customs manifest or a late shipment costs more than its minutes, because it hits on-time delivery and account health.
Step 5: Write the SOP before you automate
Document each task as numbered steps, exactly as it’s done today. Two reasons. First, whoever builds the automation needs it. Second, when an automated step fails, the step number tells you exactly where, and someone can finish that order by hand. We named every automation step after its SOP step, so a failure at “step 17.1” points straight to the problem.
What happened next
Over the next months, 80% of daily operations were automated, with 50+ workflows running in production. The time didn’t disappear. It moved to growth work: fixing pricing across 29,000 SKUs, building an alert system, launching an FBA program.
Your turn
Track one week. If you want help reading the results and ranking what to automate, tell us about your business.