One of the great things about computers is their ability to do incredibly time consuming tasks in milliseconds. This fact is often lost on web developers who put human beings in charge of manually doing things that a computer could do. I can add my name to the list.
One of the main prerequisites of course is knowing that there’s an alternative. If you don’t know that there’s another way, it’s pretty damn unlikely that you’re going to do it. For example, when I started running my first website about fifteen years I didn’t know squat. I did pretty much everything manually.
Chief among my labor was a flat file approach and not a database. Over the years I got wiser about moving to better technology whenever possible. It’s still an ongoing process but at least nowadays, there’s so many turn key solutions to running a website and many of them are open source to boot.
Update 2/8/15
Here’s a good example of a robot doing something better than a human could (or should!)