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You have it, but are you using it?

I often see among my clients that they have access to fea­tures, apps, and ser­vices that could save them time, but they do not use them at all or use them less than they could. The same, of course, applies to me. I do not have time either to imple­ment more than a frac­tion of what is new, even in the ser­vices and apps I use daily.

I believe one obsta­cle is my imag­i­na­tion, quite sim­ply. Even if I read that an app ​“can now do this!”, it is not cer­tain that I will come up with a way to use it myself.

Exam­ples spark ideas

That is why I so much enjoy read­ing, hear­ing, and see­ing exam­ples of what oth­ers auto­mate in their work, with and with­out AI. So does Alexan­dra, who wrote to me and sug­gest­ed that I cre­ate an issue titled ​“10 com­mon automa­tions that might also help you.” So here, Alexan­dra, is my list for you (and for you who are read­ing this and, like both of Alexan­dra and me, enjoy examples).

Ten things I no longer do (myself)

Here are 10 automa­tions I ben­e­fit great­ly from right now, in no par­tic­u­lar order:

• When I get a new assign­ment, the RPA ser­vice Zapi­er writes the to-do tasks I need to com­plete with­in the assign­ment on my to-do list, with the cor­rect due date, name, and labels. At the same time, Zapi­er sched­ules the assign­ment in my cal­en­dar, reg­is­ters the assign­ment amount in a spread­sheet, and cre­ates a page for the assign­ment in Notion, where I keep my meet­ing notes.
• When I won­der whether I have writ­ten about a struc­tur­al detail in any of my 669 issues of Done! so far, I ask Claude Cowork, who finds the texts where I addressed that theme and tells me, briefly, what I wrote.
• Just when I have fin­ished a phone call and want to doc­u­ment what we talked about (because my mem­o­ry is unre­li­able), I make a quick voice note in the Recup app, which Zapi­er and OpenAI’s Whis­per tran­scribe togeth­er and email to me (cor­rect­ly inter­pret­ed, more­over) for fur­ther handling.
• OpenAI’s text-to-speech mod­ule cre­ates pod­cast episodes from newslet­ters I do not want to spend time read­ing, but that I am hap­py to lis­ten to while cycling.
• Some hotel book­ings and all train book­ings can­not be auto­mat­i­cal­ly import­ed into Trip­it (where I keep all my trav­el doc­u­ments), but I have taught Claude Cowork to add them ​“man­u­al­ly” direct­ly on the site.
• When a client has cho­sen an avail­able meet­ing time in my cal­en­dar, Zapi­er sets up a meet­ing in Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet, depend­ing on which plat­form the per­son prefers.
• An AI reads through the emails I have quick­ly select­ed, sum­ma­rizes them, iden­ti­fies any to-do tasks, and sug­gests what the next step is.
• Chat­G­PT gives me five sug­ges­tions for dish­es to cook for lunch on the week­end based on the family’s food pref­er­ences from the four recipe sites I like, every Wednes­day at 9 am.
• Every morn­ing, I receive a sug­ges­tion of four tasks to com­plete today that would lead me one step clos­er to each of the four goals I have in the busi­ness this year. The tasks must not take more than 30 min­utes to complete.
• My texts (like this one) are proof­read by Chat­G­PT, which points out any gram­mat­i­cal errors. I write every­thing myself, because it is impor­tant that my words are tru­ly mine, but it is nice not to have to proof­read on my own. Often, but not always, I agree with the AI about what is wrong and adjust accordingly.

Do this

1. Look at my list and see if there is an exam­ple that strikes a chord with you. It is some­thing you could try to set up yourself.
2. Try set­ting up the automa­tion you are tempt­ed by, even if you do not use the same ser­vices and apps as I do. For exam­ple, if you work with Microsoft 365, your equiv­a­lent of Zapi­er is instead Pow­er Auto­mate. You can use OneNote instead of Notion, and Copi­lot instead of Chat­G­PT (and, to some extent, Claude).
3. If you come up with some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent that you could auto­mate when you see what I do, try that too! In the devel­op­ment phase we are in right now, it is right to test, fail, adjust, suc­ceed, and test some­thing new.

More mean­ing in your work

If you auto­mate some­thing you’ve done man­u­al­ly so far, you save both time and ener­gy. You get more room to devote your­self to the tasks you would rather focus on, and your job becomes both more enjoy­able and more meaningful.

How do you do it?

Which automa­tion do you have set up that comes to mind when you see my list? Tell me about it. I want to hear and be inspired to test more automa­tions than I have so far.

(Here you can read more about how I turn unread newslet­ters into AI pod­casts!)