You know the drill: you sit down with coffee, and suddenly it’s 11 a.m. and you’ve done nothing but shuffle emails, clean up spreadsheets, and check the same five dashboards. That’s not work — that’s busywork. And it’s exactly the kind of thing you should automate.
I’ve been building automation scripts for my own indie projects for years, and these five are the ones I genuinely use every single day. They’re short, dependency-light, and easy to adapt. If you’re not a developer, don’t worry — each comes with a README and you can copy-paste into a file and run.
## 1. Auto-tidy your Downloads folder
If your Downloads folder is anything like mine, it’s a black hole. A script that sorts files by type (images, PDFs, code, archives) and moves them into dated subfolders is a two-minute fix. I use `os` and `shutil` — that’s it. Run it once a day via cron, and you’ll never see a mess again.
## 2. Check your API endpoints for downtime
Instead of manually opening your status page, hit your critical endpoints with a script that pings them every five minutes and sends a Slack alert if something’s down. You can use `requests` and a simple loop. The script also logs response times so you spot slowdowns before they become outages.
## 3. Generate a daily summary of your Stripe transactions
If you sell digital products, you want to know yesterday’s revenue at a glance. A script that pulls from Stripe’s API and prints a summary (new customers, MRR change, failed payments) takes about 40 lines. You can even have it email you the summary — no more logging into the dashboard.
## 4. Clean up and deduplicate your CSV exports
Every time I export data from a tool, it’s got duplicate rows, extra spaces, and inconsistent date formats. A small script that loads the CSV, drops duplicates, normalizes dates, and saves a clean version has saved me hours of manual editing. It’s the kind of thing you think is trivial until you need it.
## 5. Automatically rename screenshots
If you take a lot of screenshots for documentation, you end up with ‘Screenshot 2025-03-01 at 15.22.34.png’ — useless. A script that watches a folder and renames files based on a pattern (like ‘feature-login.png’) is a game changer. You can even OCR the image to auto-generate a name.
The best part? None of these scripts require more than 30 minutes to set up. And once they’re running, they save you that time every single day. That’s the whole point of automation: you invest a little now, and it pays off in perpetuity.
If you’re ready to reclaim your mornings, start with one script — the one that annoys you most. Then come back for the rest. Your future self will thank you.