A couple of useful additions would be: 1. You can multiply the number by amount of users of your automation. 2. If your automation is valuable to others you g

A couple of useful additions would be: 1. You can multiply the number by amount of users of your automation. 2. If your automation is valuable to others you gain social attraction or financial leverage or both/similar. I'm a programmer first and foremost, so the following things are true in my case as well: 3. Automating a task can lead to learning valuable lessons about: automation itself, the task, any tools/languages you use to automate it. This cannot be encoded easily and is not deterministic. As a programmer learning new skills, improving my craft and gaining pieces of domain knowledge is my primary way of investment. 4. Enjoyment of doing the automation, non-deterministic value. 5. Avoiding suffering, the task might not be time consuming but "hard". Good examples of 5: * interfaces or synchronizations of values that are not failure proof, so you need to concentrate, which is taxing. * the task is boring it itself (often the case) * the task is associated with boring/stressful/generally negative things.