Let’s be honest: how much of your workday disappears into the black hole of admin? The emails that need to be polite but firm, the meeting notes that no one wants to type up, the endless to-do lists that seem to multiply overnight.
I used to think being “busy” meant being productive. But there’s a huge difference between being busy and being effective. When you’re spending three hours a week on repetitive typing, that’s three hours you aren’t spending on strategy, creativity, or, let’s be real, knocking off early to enjoy a patio.
This is where the “work smarter” mantra actually pays off. The trick is to pick one single, repetitive task to automate first. Don’t try to overhaul your whole workflow in a day. Just pick the thing you dread the most.
For a lot of people, that’s email.
Here’s a practical exercise you can try today:
- Identify the repetition: Do you often write similar replies to customer questions? Do you struggle to summarize long email chains for your team?
- Use AI as a scribe: Instead of typing a response from scratch, jot down three bullet points of what you want to say. Feed that to a tool and ask it to “draft a professional, friendly email based on these points.”
- Edit, don’t create: This is the sweet spot. You’re no longer staring at a blinking cursor. Now you’re an editor, tweaking a draft to match your voice. It cuts the time in half.
This same concept applies to data, too. If you’ve ever had to sort through a spreadsheet looking for trends, you know the pain of “analysis paralysis.” AI tools can analyze data sets and spot patterns in seconds, something that would take a human hours.
Quick technical tip: When working with data, you might hear about hallucinations. It’s a funny term, but it just means that sometimes AI “guesses” incorrectly. Always double-check facts and numbers if you’re using AI for analysis. Think of it as a super-fast assistant who occasionally needs supervision.
The goal isn’t to let the machine run the show. It’s to clear the clutter so you can focus on the work that actually requires a human heart and a human brain.
If you want to see exactly how this works with hands-on templates (so you’re not just reading theory but actually doing it), the AI Playbook series walks you through these exercises step-by-step. It’s a lot easier to learn when you’ve got a map.
