manual before automatic | 6/20/25

Automating systems before you do it manually is a huge trap as a young adult!

Whether it’s personal finance, relationships, your workflow, or anything else.

Take personal finance for example. You want to automate your savings and investing percentages from your paycheck. You may want to automatically track your transactions, categories, and amount spent in a neat little app.

I’m not saying these things don’t work. In fact, you SHOULD probably work yourself towards these milestones.

But doing them without knowing HOW they work is the trap.

Before automating a % of your gross monthly income towards savings, what if you MANUALLY transferred that money from checking to savings?

Before seeing a ready-made donut chart on your spending categories on YNAB or the Bank of America app, what if you MANUALLY entered all your transactions into a spreadsheet and categorized them yourself?

“WHAAAATT?? But that’s not efficient, Sai!!”

That’s exactly the point. Automation is created for EFFICIENCY. Not your EFFICACY.

Once that is part of your identity – you do these things every month without fail – THEN you can automate them.

So invest in doing things yourself to understand how they work BEFORE you outsource or automate them.