Austin’s Favourite Automation Playbook

Three years into Timeforce and deleting spreadsheets still brings me joy. Hello, I’m Austin, resident integration gremlin. My job is to prod every API we can find and wire it into something that saves the crew a quarter of an hour, give or take, especially once the kettle’s boiled.

Start Small, Ship Faster

Our first Zapier flow did nothing glamorous – it copied approved time entries into a tidy Google Sheet archive. Hardly fireworks, yet finance could audit without pinging engineers at midnight. Lesson learned: the modest automations are the ones that stick around.

These days the stack is a blend of native Timeforce webhooks, a few Make scenarios, and some custom scripts running on an elderly Raspberry Pi perched on my bookshelf. Yes, the Pi still blinks like a festive fairy light. No, I haven’t dusted it recently.

Guardrails Matter

Automations sulk when nobody keeps an eye on them. I keep a checklist taped above the monitor:

• Run weekly smoke tests on the key flows, even when you’d rather nip to the bakery.
• Version control every script, especially the “temporary” ones – temporary enjoys telling fibs.
• Write two sentences in the playbook before daring to call something finished.

When a webhook misbehaves, we log it inside Timeforce as a system task. Five minutes of triage beats discovering the glitch on invoice day.

Let Humans Opt Out

Not everyone wants their workflow robotised. Andy adores dashboards; Sam still scribbles timers on paper first (says it clears the head). So each automation ships with an obvious off switch – usually a toggle in settings or even a “skip” keyword in Slack. Giving people agency keeps the trust warm and the DMs calm.

Fancy dabbling? Build one automation that narrates itself. Ours posts to #automation-changelog whenever it runs. That little log makes the whole crew feel looped in and keeps me honest. Also, celebrate the tiny wins with biscuits. They help.