Good morning.

You'll do about six jobs this week, and only one of them is the job you set out to do. The rest arrived because there's nobody else in the building.

Today I'll show you where each one goes, and give you the prompt that reads your own week and picks the first one to take off you.

—Sam

When I’ve asked many of you what was getting in your way, the same answer kept coming back in different words:

One of you wrote that there are so many options and capabilities you don't even know where to start.

Someone else described the problem as "knowing which processes to automate first."

And a third person put their finger on the gap between theory and Tuesday morning: "I know a lot of the things I could do, but I have a hard time figuring out the steps to DO them."

That's a routing problem, more than anything else. You don't need another list of what's available. You need to know where a specific piece of your own work belongs.

Once you stop doing a repeating job by hand, it ends up in one of four places:

Ask yourself two questions to start figuring this out:

How often does it happen? If the answer is once in a while, a prompt is the whole solution.

Most people skip straight past this row and start designing an agent for something that happens twice a quarter, which is how you end up with a half-built system and a worse mood.

Does it have to start without you? If yes, it's an Agent. If you're content to trigger it, build the Skill, because it's cheaper to make and far easier to fix when it goes wrong.

A third question turns up later, once you've got two pieces running: Does the work cross a handoff, where one thing produces and another checks or sends?

That's a workflow, and it's the last thing you build rather than the first.

Now the part that matters if you're running this with one person or two:

You are the human here. The question is not necessarily who to hire. It's more about which sliver of each job needs your judgment, and how small you can make that sliver.

In the audit below, sixty-nine hours a month come out at fifty-three routed and sixteen kept, and almost all sixteen are time on the phone with a customer.

Before you look at anyone else's roles, find out what's in yours.

Paste this into whatever you use, with your real week attached:

I ran it against a real week: an independent marketing consultant, six retainer clients, around $180k a year, no staff.

Here's what came back:

Sixty-nine hours a month, and about fifty-three of them route away.

Of the sixteen that stay, roughly twelve are the weekly check-in calls themselves and four are the discovery calls, which leaves the prep, the follow-ups, the reports, the decks, and the chasing on the other side of the line.

What survives is time on the phone with a customer, one read before something publishes, and a handful of judgment calls. Nobody was hired to take the rest.

It picked the monthly reports to build first. Six hours, judgment that writes down cleanly, a fixed date so it never waits on anyone to remember, and a bad month that's visible and cheap to fix. The invoice chasing came second, at a third of the hours, because the failure mode there is your own money sitting still.

The six roles below are the ones I see unfilled most often. Take whichever matches what your own audit put at the top.

Everything that turns one idea into the images, the video, and the cuts that a week of publishing eats.

Most operators write the idea and then lose an afternoon making it look like something.

The occasional version is a prompt. The version that runs every week is a Skill holding your visual standards, so you stop re-explaining your palette. The version that works ahead of your content calendar is an Agent.

Your part is the on-brand call, made once, written down, and then applied by everything downstream.

Start with the prompt:

The person who reads your own numbers and tells you what changed.

Almost nobody has this one filled, which is why most small businesses find out about a problem from a customer rather than from a dashboard.

This role is the clearest case for an Agent, because the work is a scheduled pull against a threshold and the judgment is entirely writable. Start with the prompt so you can see the shape of the answer you want, then build the Skill around that shape, then put it on a schedule. What stays yours is deciding what's worth acting on.

Listings, inventory levels, and the leak in ad spend that nobody checks.

If you sell products, this role is running whether you've staffed it or not, and it's usually running on whatever you wrote the week you launched.

Listing copy is a Skill, because it happens the same way every time and needs your voice. Stock levels and spend are Agents, because they have to watch when you're not looking. Pricing strategy stays with you and always will.

The job is knowing which messages need you, which ones your documentation already answers, and which ones are a customer starting to leave.

Triage is the piece worth building first, and it's an Agent, because a message arriving at 11pm shouldn't wait for you to sort it.

Reply drafting is a Skill. The angry ones and the refund conversations stay yours, permanently, and that's the right call rather than a limitation.

Getting invoiced money into the account. Every operator I talk to under a certain size is doing this at 4pm on a Friday when they finally remember, which is exactly why it belongs to something that doesn't forget.

The whole role is an Agent watching dates with a Skill drafting at each stage.

The only human piece is the rare call where the relationship needs a voice, and you'll make maybe four of those a year.

Reading what you're about to sign and telling you which three things to ask about.

Most people at this size sign whatever arrives, because a lawyer for every renewal costs more than the renewal.

Renewal and expiry watching is an Agent, and it's the version that saves you the most, since the expensive contract mistake is usually the one that rolled over while nobody was looking.

Redlining against your standard positions is a Skill. The negotiation is yours.

Workflow is a word that makes people picture a build they can't afford.

Here's the whole of one, using the Collections Clerk, and it's done in an afternoon:

An Agent reads your invoice list every morning and finds anything past its due date. It hands each overdue invoice to the Skill, which writes the message at whichever stage that invoice has reached.

The Agent sends it, logs the date, and moves the invoice to the next stage. When something crosses sixty days, the chain stops and puts it in front of you with a one-line summary and the customer's payment history.

Four moving parts, one handoff, and one simple escalation rule. The escalation rule makes the whole thing safe to leave running, because you've told it exactly where its authority ends.

Build the pieces in the order they'd fail:

Save this somewhere you'll see it, fill it in as you go, and add a row when you notice a seventh role you've been carrying.

The column that matters is the third one. When you first fill this in, "still mine" will be long.

The job over the next few months is making each entry in it smaller and more specific, until what's left is only the work that needed you.

You were doing all six of these jobs before you read this, and nobody handed them to you on purpose.

What's new is that four of them can run without you sitting in front of them, and the part you keep gets smaller each time you look at it properly.

The Cortex build this month goes deeper on one of these, the part where customers slip away before anybody notices.

Upgrade to Cortex here.

Talk soon,
Sam Woods
The Editor

.