I recently met a big4 consultant who was given a massive data entry project with a two-week deadline. His options looked bad:

• Spend all week + weekends working

• Miss the deadline

The crazy part? Despite having zero coding experience, he managed to hack together a Python script to automate three months of work in 44 seconds.

Here’s how he did it:

The task?

His team was building a client dashboard to help them view and analyze all tech projects across the org. The dashboard looked good aesthetically, but the underlying data was just plain wrong…and it was a nightmare to fix.

• Missing values

• Duplicate entries

• Inaccurate info

The reality was the dashboard was useless unless the data was cleaned up. So our consultant’s job? Manually clean up the data set of thousands of rows — a massive project. He did some quick math:

• It would take him 5 minutes per row

• 5 minutes × 1,500 rows = 7,500 minutes = 125 hours = ~3 weeks of non-stop data entry

• This was only one of three projects on his plate, and he could only spend 10 hours weekly on it

• So the manual entry would take him 12 weeks — 8 weeks after his deadline

Completing this task manually was not an option. He needed to find a better way.

He did what every good High Output Worker would do and thought creatively about how he could complete the task not only faster but also smarter.

The solution?

His first instinct was to use Excel formulas to automate the process, but his sheet kept crashing (too many rows).

That's when he turned to ChatGPT for help.

He learned a more efficient solution would be to hack together a Python script to do the data entry for him — based on the formulas he had already developed in Excel.

Despite having zero coding experience, he iterated with ChatGPT to build a python script that could handle all the data entry for him.

Once the script was complete, he ran it, and in <60 seconds, all 1,500 projects were processed, and he had a clean sheet of data.

Three months of work finished in less time than making a cup of coffee.

In the future, the #1 thing that is going to make people successful is their ability to think of better ways of doing things.

Sure, this consultant could’ve put their head down, worked weekends, and got to the same end result.

But he paused, thought creatively, and developed a more effective solution — allowing him to finish his project in a fraction of the time.

Next Steps

I'm curious: What repetitive work is stealing time from your highest-leverage activities?

What clever solutions have worked for you?

Reply to this email with:

• Your role

• Your biggest time-draining task

• Your solution (if you've found one)

• What you were able to accomplish with the time you saved

Your story might be featured in an upcoming newsletter!

Until next week,

David Lobo

Head of Growth, Workmate

P.S. If you know someone who could benefit from asking themselves “Is there a better way to do this?” forward this to them. Sometimes, all it takes is one example to shift our perspective on what's possible.

P.P.S. Ready to take back control of your time? Workmate is an AI-powered Executive Assistant that schedules your meetings, manages your calendar, and prioritizes based on your preferences. Join the waitlist today.