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Things I’d mention:

1. An additional benefit of automating small tasks is “getting better at automating small tasks”.

2. On the “working memory” subject: you say things along these lines already, but I would put it like this: if we imagine that your memory at the relevant level has N slots, and the concepts for your task currently require N+1 slots… if adding a convenience shrinks the required size to N, then that’s very helpful. Therefore I would particularly favor conveniences that seem to shrink the “memory footprint” of the actions.

I would add that often automating the task is way more fun than doing the task itself. Once I spent a lot of time automating something that was so mind numbing (simple, boring, but required constant focus as a small mistake would have had negative consequences) that I thought I rather shoot myself than do it again.

Although it turned out to also have saved a lot of time in the long run (it was not clear during that time how many times I would have had to do the task), I would have still chosen automation for the mental health benefits.

Strongly upvoted, thank you for clarifying this. So many things that seem intractable are only that way because people haven’t articulated the “extra costs” involved:

• tasks taking up mental effort, outside their bare “time cost”

• someone sounds dumb when trying to say something, but they haven’t articulated it yet /​ don’t know how to articulate their real objections

• Kelly criterion /​ insurance in general working by preventing large ruins, despite the negative arithmetic returns (see Save Haven, Spitznagel).

It would be handy to provide a list of tasks that many people do often and that can be optimized (and how to) - i.e. normal everyday things, rather than programming. Particularly ones relevant to this post, i.e. where optimizing seems like more trouble than it’s worth. (Examples of the former abound—eg buying ready meals or Deliveroo instead of cooking, paying someone to do some of your admin. No good examples of the latter occur to me right now, but there must be some.)

Optimizing also includes dropping. In particular, dropping = not doing something at all, not because it’s of negative value, but because it’s lower value than other things you could do, i.e. a poor use of your time, and not easily outsourced. There may be things you could & should drop even though doing so involves time/​effort and keeping going involves little.