Picking Work Worth Automating

[Video placeholder. Recording pending. The lesson walks through the three-bucket decision and three concrete reps to avoid.]

The decision you keep deferring

After Module 01 you should have a list of things you retyped, plus a top-three sentences list. The natural next question is "which of these should I fix?". The honest answer is: most of them, but not all of them at once, and not all of them with the same tool.

The trap is to chase every savings. You spend two hours building an automation for something you only retype once a month, and the savings never pay back. Pick the right things.

Three buckets

For each item on your list, ask three questions in order:

1. Does it happen at least once a week? If no, leave it alone. You will not feel the savings.
2. Is the text mostly the same each time, with only small changes? If no, you are looking at writing, not repetition. Different problem.
3. Could a new hire do this in under a minute if you explained the pattern? If yes, it is a candidate for either a template or a small snippet.

Bucket the survivors into three groups:

• Automate: same trigger, same outcome, every time. Examples: "Hi, thanks for reaching out, I will reply within 1 business day", your standard invoice close, your weekly status update format.
• Template with variables: same skeleton, different fill-ins. Examples: a sales reply that needs the prospect name and company, a meeting recap that needs the date and attendees.
• Leave alone: anything that needs a human voice, a creative decision, or a specific context that you cannot easily describe. Examples: a tough customer refund, an apology that needs nuance.

What this module is not

This is not a rule for what to optimize. It is a rule for what to skip. Most people try to automate too much and end up with a brittle system they do not trust. Better to automate five things that you use every day than fifty things you use twice a year.

Exercise: bucket your top three

Take the three sentences from Module 01 Exercise 02. For each one, write down which bucket it belongs in. If two of them end up in the same bucket, that is fine. The goal is not balance; the goal is clarity.

Then take the items you put in the Automate and Template buckets and number them by frequency. We will start with the most frequent one in Module 03.

Common pushback

"I have a unique case every time."

Maybe, but how many of those cases start with the same five words? Even when the middle changes, the bookends are repetitive. We will look at variables in Module 06.

"What if the automation breaks and sends the wrong thing?"

Treat that as a real risk, not a theoretical one. Keep the templates small at first. Review the first ten expansions by hand before you let the tool run unattended. Once you trust it, scale up.

What is next

In Module 03 we look at the simplest building block, text expansion: you type a short trigger, the tool replaces it with a longer block. This is the foundation of every later technique.