Find the work worth automating first
By Travis HedrickPublished
A one-week exercise for operations leaders. Your team logs the work they repeat, you sort it with three questions and some simple arithmetic, and at the end of the week you know which task to automate first and how many hours it takes up today.
Keep a log of the work your team repeats
Share one spreadsheet and ask everyone to add a row whenever they do something they have done before. Copying details from one system into another, chasing a reply, rebuilding a report and sending the same reminder all count.
A row takes a few seconds, so nobody has to track their whole day. Rough minutes are fine, because five days of honest estimates tell you more than a perfect count that nobody finishes.
| Task | Who does it | Minutes each time | Times this week | Systems it touches |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Copy web form leads into the CRM | Sales coordinator | Their estimate | Tally marks | Website form, CRM |
| Rebuild the Monday sales report | Operations manager | Their estimate | Tally marks | CRM, spreadsheet, email |
| Remind clients about missing documents | Account manager | Their estimate | Tally marks | Inbox, shared drive |
Example rows show the kind of task that belongs on the log. Your team fills in the numbers.
Mark the tasks a machine could follow
Read down the log with three questions. A task with three yes answers is a strong candidate. One or two means it waits, or that some groundwork comes first.
Are the steps the same every time?
If the person doing it follows the same steps in the same order, software can too. A task that needs a small judgment call, like sorting incoming email, can still suit an AI agent.
Does the information already live in a system?
When the details sit in your CRM, inbox or accounting software, an automation can read them. If they live in someone's head or on paper, writing them down comes first.
Is a mistake easy to spot and fix?
Start where an error is cheap and visible, like a report or a reminder. Leave payments and anything legal until a first automation has earned the team's trust.
Put hours on every candidate
For each task that passed, multiply the minutes it takes by the times it ran this week and by the number of people who do it. Divide by sixty and you have the hours a week it costs. Sort the log by that number.
Ask finance for the hourly cost they plan with for that role, and the hours become the dollar figure a budget owner asks for first.
Try one task
Hours a week
Hours a year
Cost a year
Worked out in your browser from what you type. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Write the top task down like a handover
Take the task with the most hours that passed all three questions. Write its steps the way you would for someone covering a week of vacation, under the five headings here, and keep it to one page.
If it needs three pages, it is really three tasks. Start with the smallest of them.
- Starts when
A form arrives, a day of the week comes around or a status changes.
- Steps
Each action in order, and the system it happens in.
- A person decides
The points where someone makes a call, and what they look at to make it.
- Done when
What finished looks like, and who hears about it.
- Goes wrong when
The usual problems, and how somebody notices them today.
Build it yourself, or bring it to us
Build the first version yourself
With the handover page in hand, someone comfortable with a workflow tool can build a first version. Run it next to the manual process for a week, compare the results, then switch over.
Bring your log to a Brainstorm
Thirty minutes, free, with your log and the handover page on the table. You'll leave knowing what it takes to automate the task, whether or not we end up working together.
Put this to work
Read more about our business process automation services, or find out where your business stands in about five minutes.
Pick a time that works
Thirty minutes, no pitch deck, no obligation. Bring your log and the task at the top of it.
Want a head start? Take the free 5‑minute AI Readiness Assessment first. Book from your report and a summary comes with you.
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