XKCD's "Is it worth the time"[1] grid seems appropriate here. Amazing how often I keep coming back to it, and how it really does play out.
Annoyances are a bit harder to quantify, but they also add up over the weeks.
Sometimes it is just easier to fight the world.
I feel my drive to de-frustrate the world make me a better engineer/designer.
Another demotivating argument one might hear often is that building X, learning Y or using Z has no business value because there already exists something that you could do/use.
That argument makes sense if your primary concern is to solve a particular domain problem AKA you are a 'business person'. But a craftsman/engineer/designer etc. Your primary value comes from your skills and knowledge.
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.