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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2143 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So here's an admittedly fairly trivial matter that's been on my mind lately. This is a bit of Fun, bit of Wellness, take it mainly as a lighthearted question because it's really not weighing on me too badly all things considered.

It's Friday and I'm home after 10 hours poring over numbers in Excel spreadsheets. I find that after a workday like this it's hard to get myself to do anything at all, it's almost as if there is a daily quota of mental effort I can expend on things. Once I devote all of that to preparing people's financial statements, income tax returns, business activity statements and so on I can't devote any more of my focus to my own projects and endeavours. Not to mention memory limitations, I am now using a significant portion of my storage capacity to track goings-on at work (made worse by my clients' numerous demands, which I will mention later) and remember the appropriate accounting and tax treatment for various matters as well as the relevant circumstances of each of my clients. The work itself isn't necessarily super difficult in and of itself, it's just that there are a lot of clients asking for a lot of different things.

It's quite hard to coordinate anything after work too, because my clients are often absolute fucking children who expect they be catered to on a timeframe that suits them - for example, they want things to be done at a certain time yet sometimes take forever to provide the information necessary to do the work they request, and their delays sometimes require me to stay long after close of business. Yesterday, I had scheduled something with a family member at 6pm, and near close of business the client returned with over a dozen transactions they wanted me to process (while this is something that happens on Thursdays the client usually provides the relevant info earlier in the day), and I was forced to complete the work hastily and hand it over to a reviewer - who unsurprisingly found errors. Said reviewer was not happy about that, and I have stopped planning anything after work because of this. Compared to other stuff that's happened though, this is a small matter - this same client requested that we do work over the Christmas period for them, when the office is closed and people are expected to take annual leave. Please note, they sprung this on us in November, when almost everyone else working on the client had already made travel plans, and as a result I might be the one who has to do that work.

I can't really list anything significant I do outside of work at the moment, because as it is right now the work week smashes me enough that I can't build up the level of focus necessary to actually do things. In other words, I feel as if I'm becoming my work, and I'm not sure if I like that.

How do you not be a boring person after work? Help, please.

I can't tell you how to be less boring outside of work.

However, you clearly don't have an infinite amount of work. So any time savings there would be something you should seek out, and the better you get at this, the initial problem becomes less of a problem.

Is there any standardized format in the data you deal with? If so you can automate all the grunt work with a python script. If it's not standardized, it's going to be a bit more rough..

BUT GPT-4 exists. I'm sure "code-interpreter"/"advanced data analysis" can do what needs to be done at a fraction of the time you would need in excel. And anonymizing data is trivial with a python script as well.

I really don't think someone sufficiently smart enough to use ChatGPT and write a bit of code should be doing excel-monkey work in this day and age when we have tools that can do that automatically with natural language prompts.

Automating away a bunch of my work has actually been in my mind. There's often no standardised format to the data though (sometimes a client will just throw us various bank statements, rental statements and other such documents and we'll just have to use those). This isn't an insurmountable problem and I do want to do it, but I haven't had sufficient downtime to pursue that goal yet.

Human in the loop my man -- just take your best shot at automating the thing and then present it to yourself (or better yet a lackey) item by item as approve/don't approve.

You do work like a robot this way, but stuff gets done a lot faster even if your automation is highly imperfect.

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