Essentially, it talks about the money lost by doing something one way as opposed to doing it another way.
By spending your time doing something an automated piece of software could be doing, your time is being occupied. That time could have been used on another more profitable venture, but because it's occupied, you are missing out on that additional income. That is called your opportunity cost.
Here is a scenario. Let's say I value my time at $25/hour. Now, let's say I have a conference to get to. My options are that I could take a flight, or I could "save some money" and drive.
The flight would take 4 hours and the drive would take 36 hours.
The flight costs $500 roundtrip.
Did I "save money?"
My opportunity cost for driving versus flying is: $25 * (36 - 4) = $800. On average, I could have earned about $300 more with the additional time I spent driving versus flying. I subtracted the 4 hours because that is the absolute fastest way I could travel. So, barring not going to the conference, you have to pay the 4 hour cost.
There are a lot of other little variables that are hard to account for such as the amount of joy you'd get from driving because you love roadtrips, etc, but the above is the gist of the idea. Time has value, and there are costs to using your time, even if money isn't leaving your wallet.