I think this is pretty much spot-on. I've always called it 'removing the pain-points' because any time I get sick of something, I automate it. Sometimes that's after 3 times, and sometimes it's 100. But if I start to hate it, I automate it.
I do choose to remove some of the pain points differently, though.
I write things in the newest languages at home, rather than at work. Anything I do at work should be re-usable by anyone on the team, and that's hard if it's in some fancy new language that nobody else has looked into yet.
Rather than sort through email manually, I set up filters. Then I scan the subjects of all the new emails in that tag, read the ones that are important, and then mark the rest read all at once. (I don't have to archive because I set my filtered email to never hit the in-box.) GMail has some nice shortcuts as he noted. I use this to mark all unread messages as read: UIN (Select all unread, mark read, unselect.)
I also streamline anything I'm asked to do repeatedly, like add new fields to a form. I know I'm going to be asked to do this constantly, so now it's just a matter of adding a little metadata and the rest happens automatically.
And I also put everything I can into the hands of others, so long as it doesn't involve changing code. If there's a list of Titles that change a lot, I give the ability to change them to whoever requests it. (Business rules are what stop them anyhow, not me.) Then I don't have to do that any more. (That's rather simplistic, but I can't give more elaborate examples for fear of breaking my NDA.)
> "I've always called it 'removing the pain-points'"
I call it "removing friction".
Just like in physics theory a weight would fall according to f=m•a whereas in real there is fluid friction, in an "ideal" world I'd just think only about relevant information and my thoughts would command actions I want to do on the computer instantly, but this world is not ideal and introduces friction. Which produces an awful lot of drag.
Friction can be taken away, up to the point of reaching wizardry, at which point one simply waves a hand at friction-inducing minute problems to move them out of sight and concentrate on the Real Problem At Hand.
Regarding putting things in the hands of others: another good example is data analysis. Say you're the sole programmer at a startup and all your time is focused on building your product. But you also have lots of data coming in that needs to be sliced up and visualized. Write a script that sticks your data in a format your business-types can easily work with (hint: spreadsheet). And let them go at it.
Of course this is a general approach for analysis. Get the data into a tool that makes data exploration easier: R, Excel, matlab. That rather than writing lots of custom scripts.
I do choose to remove some of the pain points differently, though.
I write things in the newest languages at home, rather than at work. Anything I do at work should be re-usable by anyone on the team, and that's hard if it's in some fancy new language that nobody else has looked into yet.
Rather than sort through email manually, I set up filters. Then I scan the subjects of all the new emails in that tag, read the ones that are important, and then mark the rest read all at once. (I don't have to archive because I set my filtered email to never hit the in-box.) GMail has some nice shortcuts as he noted. I use this to mark all unread messages as read: UIN (Select all unread, mark read, unselect.)
I also streamline anything I'm asked to do repeatedly, like add new fields to a form. I know I'm going to be asked to do this constantly, so now it's just a matter of adding a little metadata and the rest happens automatically.
And I also put everything I can into the hands of others, so long as it doesn't involve changing code. If there's a list of Titles that change a lot, I give the ability to change them to whoever requests it. (Business rules are what stop them anyhow, not me.) Then I don't have to do that any more. (That's rather simplistic, but I can't give more elaborate examples for fear of breaking my NDA.)