One thing at a Time.

Your task is to do one thing, 1000 times. How do you do it?

This scenario has been common for my career. Whether we need to fix a data error on a bunch of accounts or we are new launching product on promotion and everyone's gotta have it.

My approach is simple, start by doing them one at a time.

I know it's a lot of work, and you might be tempted to try and batch them or build some sort of automation right from the beginning - but until you know the process inside and out, there isn't much good in batching.

When you start out doing things one at a time, a remarkable thing will happen around the 5th time through the process (at least for me), you will begin to have a deeper understanding of the standard way of doing things - and how the standard might be improved.

When you try and batch or automate before you have a good understanding of what is needed for THIS project, you run the risk of hitting an unknown snag a partial way through. Now, if you have only done one task and you discover this issue, then there is only a single account that is stuck in progress. When the issue is resolved, then it's easy to pick it back up and get going again. But if you tried to batch things or automate a bunch of the tasks there will be many that are in progress when the issue is found. This creates a lot of work to either fix or restart the process for all those accounts.

The goal at the beginning of a project like this is to find out what is needed to complete it. To set the standard process. And then gradually improve that process little by little.

Once you have the process dialed in, you will hit the flow state, and once you hit flow, the time it takes you to complete the 1000 tasks will dramatically reduce.

Flow looks like: following the standard, making an improvement, testing it on the next one, and then doing that until the job is done.