Module 7 · Your automation plan

Your 30-day automation plan

Since Module 0 you’ve been keeping an automation shortlist — the prompts, platforms, and tool ideas that made you pause and think “that’s my Tuesday.” A shortlist is a good start, and it’s also where most owners stop: a page of good intentions that never touches the calendar. This lesson turns yours into a 30-day plan with exactly three commitments on it.

Get the shortlist out

Pull it up now. If you skipped the exercise — no judgment, plenty of readers go straight to the pillar that hurts — rebuild it in ten minutes: for each pillar module you read, write down the one prompt, one platform, and one build idea that made you stop scrolling. Six pillars, a line or three each, one page.

Now resist the instinct to do all of it. A shortlist with twelve items on it produces the same result as no list at all, because everything competing for attention is the exact problem you’re trying to solve. The plan is deliberately small: one thing this week, one thing this month, one thing on deck.

1. This week

   Ship one Prompt-it win

   On a real task by Friday — a weekly task, so the habit forms.
2. This month

   Trial one Platform-it candidate

   Aimed at your most expensive pillar; a keep-or-cancel review on the calendar for day 30.
3. On deck

   Circle your first build

   Named, not started — so you never begin from a blank page.

This week: ship one Prompt-it win

Pick one Tier 1 item — a Prompt-it win — and use it on a real task before the week is out. Not a test run on made-up data; the actual review reply, the actual job-ahead brief, the actual P&L question. Zero setup, zero cost, immediate.

The criteria for picking: choose something you already do every week. A prompt that saves twenty minutes on a weekly task beats one that saves two hours on a quarterly one, because the weekly task is where the habit forms. And the habit is the real deliverable — once pasting a prompt feels as normal as opening a spreadsheet, every other tier gets easier.

This month: trial one Platform-it candidate

One. Not three. Pick the Tier 2 platform aimed at the pillar that costs you the most hours — the one you identified in your Module 0 audit — and give it a real trial: set it up properly, run it on live work for a few weeks, and measure what it actually saves.

Measuring doesn’t need to be scientific. Before the trial, note roughly how long the task takes you in a normal week. At the end of the month, note it again. If the platform gives you back real hours — or catches leads, invoices, or no-shows you were losing — it earns its subscription. If you find yourself working around it, cancel without guilt. Trials exist to be failed.

On deck: circle your first build

Somewhere in those six Build-it lessons, one tool idea made you think “I’d use that every week.” Circle it. You’re not committing to build it today — you’re committing to knowing which one it is, so that when you’re ready, you don’t start from a blank page. The next lesson gives you the math for deciding when that moment is.

Write it down

• This week: one Prompt-it win from my shortlist, used on a real task by Friday.
• This month: one Platform-it trial, aimed at my most expensive pillar — with a 30-minute keep-or-cancel review on the calendar for day 30.
• On deck: the one custom tool I’d use weekly, circled and named.

Three lines. Put them somewhere you’ll see them — the top of your task list, a sticky note on the monitor. In 30 days you’ll have a working habit, a verdict on a platform, and a named first build. That’s more progress than most businesses make on this in a year.