One of my goals this year is to “Automate finance + tax”. Today, I took a baby step by organizing my expenses. This is my current process: STEP 1: Download PDF receipts (from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other cloud/AI services) STEP 2: Organize them, so I know which receipt to upload against which expense STEP 3: Submit on SAP Concur. All steps are manual as of now. I automated STEP 2: Organize them. ...
In Excel, using Visual Basic, you can change an image as you scroll. This makes it easy to look at each image and annotate it. This is how I transcribed every Calvin & Hobbes. I used this technique first when typing out the strips during my train rides from Bandra to Churchgate. I had an opportunity to re-apply it recently when we needed to tag hundreds of photographs based on a set of criteria. ...
LinkedIn has a page that shows the people who most recently followed you. At first, it shows just 20 people. But as you scroll, it keeps fetching the rest. I’d love to get the full list on a spreadsheet. I’m curious about: What kind of people follow me? Which of them has the most followers? Who are my earliest followers? But first, I need to scrape this list. Normally, I’d spend a day writing a program. But I tried a different approach yesterday. ...
Marc Eisenstadt has analysed 15 years of email. … it is trivially easy to get to 2.5 hours per workday assuming a fairly ruthless, ‘one-touch’, knee-jerk email interaction regime. And worse if you deviate from the regime. Then there are other sources of workflow: blogs, aggregator summaries, phone calls (rare, but I still allow one or two), cell-phone, text message, instant messaging (my buddy list is very large, and most of them are work-related). ...