The vice of imaginary automation

Whatever you do, you should always try to automate whatever you can, as it will save a lifetime for you, keep your tasks fresh and interesting, and reduce the errors you start making when you do the same thing for a thousandth time on end. That's approximately how on of the basic principles of system administration goes. Automation is good. But what if you see a way to automate most of your routine, but not sure if you'll be able to reach that automation in a limited timeframe? For me that automation is A.I., the topic I've been haunted by for the last several years. Everybody knows A.I. can do many things for us. We've seen it in the movies, read about it in the books and dreamed about it countless times. By acknowledging that pursuing A.I. is a lost effort for most of us, we set a precedent and a comfortable excuse for suboptimal operation. So whenever I type the very same 10 commands I've been typing for the last several months, I should be thinking that a simple shell script will save me a minute each day, but instead I think, what the hell. It's only a minute a day, why should I spend another minute on a script that could get useless any time and yet another minute to remember to use it instead of the literal commands. And if I decide, like a good exec, on a fixed ratio - XX% of time spent on automation, (100-XX)% on everything else - I would probably be spending XX thinking about A.I. :-)