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I Listed Every Task I Do Twice a Week. Then I Fired Myself From 23 of Them.
· By Vaibhav Vijay · Automation, Productivity, Workflow, Leadership
Six months ago I sat down and listed every task I did more than twice a week. Invoice follow ups. Campaign reporting. Lead scoring updates. Slack summaries. Creative briefing templates. The list hit 23 items.
Then I asked a simple question: which of these actually need my judgement, and which ones just need my fingers?
The answer was uncomfortable. Most of what I called "work" was really just moving information from one place to another. Pulling data from a dashboard into a slide. Copying invoice details into a tracker. Formatting a weekly update that nobody reads past the first paragraph.
So I started building. Nothing fancy. Small systems that do one thing well. An invoice lands in a WhatsApp group, the system reads it and logs every detail before anyone opens the chat. A campaign crosses its daily budget, my phone buzzes with a recommendation before I have had my coffee. A lead fills out a form at 2 AM, by morning it is scored, tagged, and sitting in the right pipeline. No code army. No six month roadmap. Just one person asking "why am I still doing this manually" enough times.
The shift was not about saving time. It was about what I did with the time I got back. Instead of being the person who moves information, I became the person who decides what to do with it. Strategy sessions got deeper. Experiments got bolder. The team started coming to me with ideas instead of status updates.
The uncomfortable truth for most growth leaders: if more than 30% of your week is spent on tasks a well written workflow could handle, you are not leading. You are operating.
What is the one task you do every single week that you know should be automated but you have not gotten around to fixing?
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