Shadow the process before you automate it

Before building an automation for any task, spend a stretch of time actually doing the task yourself and paying close attention to every small decision you make along the way. Owners often think they know their own process cold, but once they slow down and watch themselves work, they notice little judgment calls and exceptions they had completely forgotten about.

This matters because those forgotten exceptions are exactly what break automations later. A system built from a rough memory of the process misses the edge cases that come up regularly in real life, while a system built from close, honest observation handles far more of what actually happens. I've caught small exceptions in my own process this way that I would have sworn were not there.

Try this today: do the task you want to automate one more time by hand, narrating every decision out loud or writing it down, and use that as your actual blueprint instead of your memory of the process.