Catch the Work Before You Automate It

I tried to teach too much in one webinar.

I had frameworks for getting started with AI, choosing a useful task, and setting boundaries around an agent. I moved through them too quickly.

Afterwards, Danielle and I did a postmortem. While we talked through what had worked and what had not, I realized I had skipped a habit that comes before any AI tactic.

People need practice catching repetitive work.

The work becomes part of the scenery

When you run a business, you get good at pushing through whatever needs doing.

You rebuild the same invitation, chase the same approval, or copy information between the same two systems.

Then you carry on with the rest of the day.

After a while, the repetition stops looking like a problem. It is simply how the work gets done.

I help business owners get their time back, and this is one of the first hurdles. Telling somebody to “use more AI” does not help much. A new tool cannot choose the right job for you. First, you have to notice where your time keeps going.

The webinar itself gave me an example. The invitation process had been rough. During the postmortem, I realized the next step was to stop rebuilding it from scratch every time.

If the webinar was going to happen again, the invitation needed to become a repeatable process instead of another task sitting in somebody's head.

Make a small course correction

I built the free Course Correction and LIFT exercise to help business owners practise this.

Course Correction starts with three moves:

1. Notice. Catch yourself doing the same work again, especially when it is annoying, slow, or easy to forget.
2. Question. Ask what result matters, whether the task needs you, and whether the current approach still makes sense.
3. Change. Choose a better route. You might automate the work, delegate it, use AI for part of it, or stop doing it.

You do not need to map the whole company. One recurring task is enough.

Choose what is worth changing first

Once you start paying attention, you may spot more problems than you can tackle at once. Fair enough. Most small businesses already have a full plate.

LIFT helps you compare the work using four questions:

• Load: How much work is involved, and how many people touch it?
• Impact: How much time, capacity, or business value could you recover?
• Fallout: What keeps going wrong if you leave it alone?
• Try or Test: How easy would it be to test a better approach without betting the farm?

The score is a conversation aid, not a command to automate whichever task lands on top. Judgment still matters. So do safety, customer promises, permissions, and the people affected by the change.

Get one useful problem into the open. Then decide whether it needs a cleaner process, a person, simple automation, AI, or no technology at all.

If you have been wondering where AI fits in your business, start by watching your own workday. Catch the tasks that keep coming back. Write them down before they disappear into the scenery again.

You can use the free Course Correction and LIFT worksheet in your browser. There is no signup, and your entries stay in that browser.