Every article I publish goes through the same tedious steps – generate an outline, run grammar checks, format for WordPress CMS, create social posts (for repurposing). I used to do each step manually, switching between tabs (Now split in chrome tabs), copying and pasting, checking boxes off a list. Guess how many hours it would take?
For me, It takes about 14 hours repetitive tasks, then I switched my specific skills and tasks to no-code automation platform (n8n).
Now it handles the entire pipeline. I focus on writing. The boring stuff happens automatically while keeping me as a human-in-loop.
What’s human in loop? The automation runs, but I review the output before it takes final action – or I check the results afterward to catch anything off. Either way, I stay in control without doing the repetitive work myself.
What “Boring Stuffs” Can You Actually Automate?
Before we get into “how”, here’s what n8n can take off your plate.
- Data entry and spreadsheet syncing – If you receive any new form submission or order, you can easily add it to Google sheets or to your database. Customer data changes in CRM? sync it everywhere instantly.
- Email management – Auto reply to common questions, sort incoming emails by sender or keyword, forward specific messages to team members, from email to slack or maybe WhatsApp.
- File organization – Rename file based on patterns, move upload to dated folders, back up important documents to cloud storage like Google drive or dropbox.
- Notification and reminders – Get Slack alerts when something important happens, notify team about your deadlines.
- Social media posting – Schedule posts across platforms, auto-share new blog content, post updates when product launch.
- Report generation – Pull data from multiple sources (e.g. database, sheets), format it, send it to stakeholders on a schedule
- Lead and CRM updates – Capture leads from forms, or emails, enrich the contact data, update deal stages or buckets automatically.
If you find yourself doing the same task more than twice a week, It’s probably a sign that you need to automate.
Why n8n Instead of Python or Zapier?
“Automate the Boring Stuff with Python” is an excellent book. But it assumes you want to learn programming. If you just want to stop wasting time on repetitive tasks, writing, and maintaining Python scripts might be overkill.
The Python Approach: Write code, debug it, schedule it with cron, maintain it when APIs change, fix it when something breaks. I agree It’s powerful, but requires ongoing technical investment.
The Zapier/Make Approach: Easy drag-and-drop setup, works great for simple tasks, but cost scale quickly – $20 / $50 (monthly) for serious usage – and you’re limited to what they’ve pre-built. (and, yet, they have most of the integrations unless you need a custom one for your business needs)
The n8n Approach: Visual workflow builder like Zapier and Make, but you can self-host the instance locally for free. Write custom nodes when you can’t do something with the visual tools.
50 “Boring Tasks” You Can Automate Today
These are real automations – some I use daily, other I’ve built for my friends or seen in the automation community.
Content & Publishing
- Generate article outlines from a list of keywords
- Run grammar and spell checks on drafts automatically
- Format and publish WordPress posts from Google Docs
- Create social media posts when a new blog post goes live
- Scrape communities for content ideas and dump them into a spreadsheet (Educational only)
- Pull YouTube video transcripts and save to Google Docs
- Auto-create featured images using templated designs
- Track content performance weekly and compile into a report
- Send draft review reminders to editors after 48 hours
- Auto-translate posts for multilingual sites
- Update internal links across old posts when new content publishes
Email & Communication
- Sort incoming emails into folders by sender or keyword
- Auto-reply to common questions with templated response
- Send follow-up emails 3 days after no-response
- Forward invoices to your accountant automatically
- Unsubscribe reminders – flag newsletters you never open
Data & Spreadsheets
- Sync form submissions to Google Sheets in real-time
- Update your CRM when a spreadsheet row changes
- Merge data from multiple sheets into one master sheet
- Clean up duplicate entries automatically
- Pull analytics into a weekly report spreadsheet
- Convert CSV uploads to formatted Google Sheets automatically
- Validate data entries and flag rows with missing fields
- Sync Stripe payments to a revenue track spreadsheet
- Auto-calculate monthly totals and append to summary sheet
- Pull exchange rates daily and update pricing sheets
- Cross-reference two sheets and highlight mismatches
- Export database tables to spreadsheet on a schedule
- Track affiliate commission from multiple platform in one sheet
Files & Backups
- Back up important folders to Google Drive every night
- Rename and organize downloaded files by date
- Convert uploaded images to webp format automatically
- Archive old files to cold storage after 90 days
Notifications and Reminders
- Get Slack alerts when a client pays an invoice
- Birthday and contract renewal reminders
- Notify your team when inventory drops below a threshold
- Alert you when a competitor publishes a new content
Client & Project Management
- Create Trello/Asana tasks from form submission
- Send onboarding emails when a new client signs up
- Update project status across multiple tools simultaneously
- Generate and send invoices on schedule
- Track billable hours from Toggl/Clockify to spreadsheet automatically
- Notify clients automatically when their deliverable is ready
- Archive completed projects to cold storage after 30 days
- Creating meeting notes template in Notion when calendar event starts
- Alert you when a client hasn’t responded in 7+ days
- Send project kickoff checklist to team when contract is signed
WordPress Specific
- Monitor uptime and get alerts when your site goes down
- Auto-post new WooCommerce products to social media
- Sync WooCommerce orders to Google Sheets or Airtable
Your First Automation Takes 5 Minutes
I won’t walk through a full tutorial here – that’s what the Hello World Workflow Guide is for. But understanding the pattern helps you see how simple this actually is.
Every n8n automation follows the same structure
Trigger > Action > (Optional: More Actions)
The trigger decides when your workflow runs. New email arrives. Form gets submitted. Webhook receives data. You pick the event that should kick things off.
The action decides what happens when triggered. Add a row to Google Sheets. Send a Slack message. Update your CRM.
Between trigger and action, you map the data. “Take the sender’s email from Gmail and put it in Column A”. n8n shows you the actual data structure when you click on any node’s output – you can drag and drop fields instead of writing expressions manually.
That’s the entire mental model. The complexity comes from chaining more nodes together or adding conditional logic, not from the core concept itself.
If you’ve never touched n8n, you can start with hello world workflow. You’ll have something running in under 10 minutes.
Start With One
Don’t try to automate everything at once. Pick the one task from this list that annoys you most. Build that workflow. Watch it run for a week. or maybe, you have a custom workflow in mind, just try to connect the dots and watch it run for a week.
Once you see n8n handling something you used to do manually, you’ll spot the next opportunity yourself.
