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Find the hours hiding in your week

Before you touch a single tool, find out where your time actually goes. Owners consistently misjudge this — the tasks that annoy you most aren’t always the ones eating your week. Ten minutes of honest audit now makes every module after this one land harder.

The ten-minute audit

Grab whatever you take notes on and list the recurring tasks in a normal week. Not the crises, not the one-offs — the things that happen every week. Include the small stuff: appointment confirmations, chasing a late invoice, retyping the same quote, posting to social because you “should.” Small-but-frequent is exactly where automation pays best.

Then run each task through three tests. A task that passes even one is an automation candidate; a task that passes two or three goes to the top of your list.

• List every recurring task you touch in a normal week — aim for 15–25, small stuff included.
• Mark R for repetitive: you do it the same way every time.
• Mark B for rule-based: you could hand a new hire one page of if-this-then-that instructions for it.
• Mark W for writing- or data-heavy: the time mostly goes into producing words or reading numbers.
• Circle everything with two or more marks — that’s your raw material for the rest of the course.

Want a second opinion on your list? This is a perfect first taste of Tier 1 — paste your brain-dump into Claude or ChatGPT and let it do the sorting:

Here is a brain-dump of the recurring tasks in a normal week at my business:

[YOUR TASK LIST — for example: "send quotes, chase overdue invoices, confirm tomorrow's appointments, answer the same intake questions, write the weekly social post, type up job notes, follow up with leads who went quiet"]

My business, in one line: [ONE LINE ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS — for example: "a three-person residential cleaning company"]

For each task, tell me whether it is (a) repetitive — done the same way every time, (b) rule-based — explainable in one page of if-this-then-that instructions, and (c) writing- or data-heavy.

Then rank the five strongest candidates for automation, with one line on why each made the cut, and estimate roughly how many hours per week each one likely costs me based on what I've told you. Ask me up to three clarifying questions first if it would sharpen the ranking.

Start your automation shortlist

Now open a fresh page — paper, a note, a doc, whatever you’ll actually keep — and title it “Automation shortlist.” Write your circled tasks on it. That one page is the running deliverable of this whole course.

Here’s how it works: at the end of every pillar module, you’ll add the specific ideas that fit your business — a prompt worth reusing, a platform worth trialing, a tool worth building. Then Module 7 turns the shortlist into a simple 30-day plan. You’re not studying AI; you’re building your own to-do list with better information.

Six pillars, and where to start

Every task on your list lives in one of six pillars — one module each:

• Marketing & Customer Acquisition — getting found, following up, winning the work.
• Operations & Service Delivery — doing the work itself: scheduling, meetings, process.
• Client Management & CRM — remembering everything, keeping clients feeling looked after.
• Creative & Content — ads, social posts, images, and brand assets.
• Administrative & Finance — invoices, books, paperwork, the 9pm pillar.
• Reporting & Data Analytics — knowing what your numbers are trying to tell you.

Work through them in order, or jump straight to the pillar that hurts most — every module stands on its own. Your audit already told you which one that is.