In the long run, working with manual processes consumes more time and becomes a habit if not simplified early. So long as the task you're working on is not time-critical, always weigh the time improvement of the process simplification even if it's small to save you more time if you use it often.
UCSB Data Science Club Payment Confirmation Script
Previously, we had to split the payment verification screenshots of 500 members across 15 officers. I made a Google Apps Script automation that used the Gmail API to track incoming Zelle payment emails and extract the sender's name. Unfortunately, there wasn't a good way to get their email so I used their name like a foreign key to query our member spreadsheet with the Sheets API to retrieve their email that they registered with. Then, it would send them a confirmation email that they use to verify club membership at our general meetings. This saved us officers each 30 minutes across Fall and Winter quarters. We do this every year so these 30 minutes can be spent doing something else of interest :)
UCSB Engineering Student Council Attendance Tracker
As the secretary, my task was to log attendance from each meeting minutes document of the quarter into a large spreadsheet. I slacked on this for almost a year because I was afraid of the tedious work. To solve this, I created a Google Apps Script automation that used the Docs API to fetch attendance info and integrated with the Sheets API to log the entries, saving me 30 min every quarter. To pass the torch, I wrote a small document for a future ESC member to push run which auto-populates the attendance tracker sheet for simplicity.
Amazon Alexa Widget Development Script
Due to confidentiality reasons I can't reveal the exact process, but it's like: run command 1 to generate id1, use id1 to run command 2 to get id2, use id1 and id2 to get id3, check status of id3 to see fail/success after 3 minutes. In the short term, it saved me just maybe 5-10 minutes every day. But because we develop our widgets often, this saves hours in the long run where I can work more on other tasks with the time I saved.