What to Automate First? Do the Sum
Not sure where to start? One sum picks your first task to automate: how long it takes, times how often, times how many people do it.
A company I worked with had a team of ten people reviewing applications. After each decision, someone emailed the applicant: whether they went ahead, and what came next. Each email took a few minutes to write. Nobody thought much of it.
Across ten people and many applications a day, those few minutes cost them far more than they thought.
That is where the best first automation usually hides: in a small task that everyone does, many times a day. When people hear “automation”, they picture a big process: a new system, months of work, everything connected. Most of the time the right first step is much smaller. It can be one email, one check, or one document you dread preparing.
The hard part is picking the right one. Before anything else, I step back and look for the work that pays back the most. I find it with one sum.
The sum
How long it takes × how often you do it × how many people do it
How long it takes. The minutes or hours one round of the task costs. Count all of it, not just the typing: finding the file, opening the right tool, copying from one place to another.
How often you do it. Per day, per week or per month. A task that takes two hours once a month is usually not worth automating. A five-minute task done 10 to 15 times a day often is.
How many people do it. One person doing a task is one cost. Ten people doing it is ten times that. The two-hour monthly task can become worth it when many people do it. The five-minute task, done 10 to 15 times a day by everyone on a team, is a huge saving.
The cost most people miss
The sum counts the minutes on the clock. It misses context switching.
Every small manual task pulls someone out of what they were doing. They stop, open another tool, do the task, and then have to find their way back into the first job. That switch shows up on no time sheet, and it happens every single time. It is why the small, frequent tasks cost more than they look.
Two kinds of winner
Small and frequent. The email you send every time something happens. Checking that an order went through. Confirming that a record was updated. A few minutes each, but tens of times a day, and each one is a context switch.
Big and occasional. Preparing for Monday’s call: a one or two page brief on the company and the person you’re meeting. A summary of last week’s news and trends in your market. An hour or two each time, and most of it is gathering and sorting.
Plenty of tasks sit in between. Take a report you write after every call, in a fixed template. Today you copy the last one and edit each section.
Run the sum on both kinds. Either can come out on top.
A worked example
Back to that team. I worked directly with their CEO. They first came to me because some of their emails were landing in spam. While I moved their sending onto a proper email service, I pointed out that nobody needed to write these emails by hand.
Before, a reviewer decided whether an applicant went ahead or not. Then came the email: open Gmail, click compose, and copy the title, the body, the signature, the recipient and a booking link from a spreadsheet full of formulas.
A few minutes per record. Many records a day. Ten people.
Now they pick a status from a dropdown in the spreadsheet, and the right email goes out on its own. Nobody opens Gmail for it any more. A few minutes became about a second.
My own estimate of what that is worth: at 10 records a day per person, which is low, it comes to about 30 minutes per reviewer per day. Across ten people, about five hours a day.
When I asked the CEO for feedback, their estimate was that the team’s productivity went up about 10%. For a team of ten, that is roughly one extra person’s work from the same people.
Notice what stayed human. The reviewers still decide who goes ahead. Only the copying went.
Two mistakes to avoid
Automating too much. Some owners hand everything to AI, including their own expertise, knowledge and context. The output is bad, and they conclude it was the wrong investment. Start with the grunt work instead: research, a long document or template, filling in a report in Excel, building a presentation. The presentation may still need your own touch. Keep the judgment calls for yourself. In the example above, the reviewers still decide who goes ahead; the automation only sends the email.
Automating something that isn’t well defined. If you have written procedures, you can read through them and see which steps to automate and which stay with people. In many small companies nothing is written down, and the knowledge lives in people’s heads. Then the first part of the project is getting that knowledge out of their heads and onto paper. Skip it, and the automation makes mistakes, because the task was never defined in the first place.
Your turn
Take one ordinary week. List the tasks that repeat, the small ones and the big ones. For each, write down how long it takes, how often it happens and how many people do it. Multiply. Or put the numbers into the cost calculator, which turns them into euros.
Then check it against the two mistakes.
Start with the biggest number, not the most impressive idea.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your list, bring it to a free 30-minute discovery call. We’ll look at where your time goes and what to automate first.
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