Turn one job into a workflow
The lesson that changes your week
Everything so far has been set-up. This is where it does something.
Pick one job you do repeatedly. Not the most important one. The most repetitive one, where you already know roughly what you are going to do before you start.
Good candidates:
- The weekly or monthly report someone expects
- Reviewing an incoming contract or quote against your standards
- Turning a call into notes, actions and a follow-up
- Preparing the pack before a recurring meeting
- Working through a batch of customer feedback
Bad candidates: anything you do once, and anything where the whole task is judgement. Those are fine to use AI for. They are not workflows.
Break it into steps
Write down what you actually do, step by step, at the level of detail you would use to explain it to a new hire on their second day. Most people find they have between six and twelve steps and that two of them are things they had never consciously noticed.
Do it as a conversation, and let the AI hold the pen:
Create WORKFLOWS/MY_FIRST_WORKFLOW.md in my AI OS. I am going to describe a job I do repeatedly. Walk me through it: the trigger that starts it, the inputs and the single source of truth, every step in order, who or what should do each step, the checks before it counts as done, and where my approval is required. Ask one question at a time and write the file as we go.
Who does each step
Then, for every single step, ask one question:
The answers available to you:
| Answer | When |
|---|---|
| A person | Money, legal exposure, reputation, or a client sees it |
| The model | Interpretation, drafting, summarising, judgement calls |
| Code or a formula | Anything with one right answer |
| A lookup | The answer already exists in your files. Do not let it recall |
| A tool | Opening, saving, moving, filing |
| Nothing | The step exists out of habit. Delete it |
That last row is worth taking seriously. Mapping a process honestly usually finds one step that nobody has needed for a year.
The three things that make it trustworthy
Most people map the steps and stop. These are what stop it going wrong quietly.
A named trigger
"An invoice lands in the shared inbox." "The first Monday of the month." Not "when needed."
If you cannot name what starts it, it is not a workflow yet, and it will only run when you happen to remember.
One source of truth
When two places disagree about a number, which one wins? Name it.
If you cannot, fix that before anything else. It is the most common cause of output that is confidently, plausibly wrong.
Checks that are separate from the work
Write down what must be true before the work counts as finished.
- Do the figures in the output appear in the input?
- Is anything cited that is not in your own files?
- Does the total match the source rather than the summary?
And the instruction that matters: if a check fails, stop and tell me. Do not keep going and leave a note instead. Stop and tell me.
Where you sign
Fill in the approval table. Every point where a person has to look before anything moves.
This is not a stage you grow out of once the system is good. It is the feature that makes the rest of it safe to automate at all.
Run it once, for real
Not a test case. An actual piece of this week's work.
Then fill in the last section of the template honestly:
- How long it took before, and after
- What broke the first time
- What you changed as a result
That middle line is the most useful sentence in the whole file. Something will break. Something always does, and it is usually a missing input or a step you were doing without realising.
Fix it and run it again. That is the loop, and it is not new: learn, analyse, plan, build, check, then round again. It is how a graduate becomes an engineer. What has changed is that you are no longer the only one going round it.
Stuck anywhere along the way? Reply to any Build Notes email and tell me where. I would rather fix the lesson than have you quietly give up.