Last Wednesday at 11 PM, I was still copy-pasting spreadsheets by hand
Year three of freelancing. The task I hate most? Every week I have to consolidate a dozen Excel files from clients into one report. The job looks simple, but each round takes 40 minutes. I had always told myself "this is just a manual job" and toughed it out for two years — until I complained about it to my buddy Lao Zhou (a programmer friend). Five minutes later he sent me a tiny script. I stared at those ten lines of code and my eyes actually welled up.
What those ten lines actually did
In plain terms: it made the computer "read" the Excels, pull out the client names, amounts, and dates, summarize them by month, and email me the result. My friend A May runs Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) agency operations in Hangzhou — she uses a similar method to auto-generate her daily product-pick tables. Linda, an independent consultant, uses one to auto-sort client survey answers into different folders. All roughly ten lines of code. But what you get back is a real, honest 1–2 hours every day.
What it costs to copy this today
Money: $0 (all free tools: Python + Google Sheets)
Time: 30 minutes if you have a friend who codes; about 1 hour for a complete beginner using a ready-made template
Technical barrier: You can read a little English and copy-paste. That's it.
First step: Open ChatGPT. In the chat box, describe your most annoying repetitive task in plain language — e.g., "Every week I need to pull column A out of 10 Excel files and merge them." Ask it to write the script, then ask it to translate each line for you, one by one.
Stage-specific advice
Just starting out: Don't bother with this yet. Wait until you catch yourself doing the same thing 3+ times a week — then come back to this idea.
1–2 clients in: If you're spending 3+ hours a week on "tidying up," I'd just run my most-hated task through ChatGPT once. Getting it working beats chasing a perfect solution.
Scaling up: If you're like me and burning 5+ hours a week on repetitive work, spend 500 RMB (~$70) on a programmer friend to write it for you. The time you save is worth 10x more than what you pay.