Everyone has one. The task you push to the end of the day, then the end of the week, then quietly resent every time it comes back around. That's the one worth fixing first, not the interesting one.
01Name the actual task
Not "admin" in general. The specific, recurring thing: the report you reformat every Friday, the same three replies you write every week in slightly different words, the summary nobody else will do. If you can't name it in one sentence, you haven't found the real one yet.
02Build the shortcut once
Describe the task to AI in full, one time, and save the result as your standing version.
Build it once
Here's a task I do every week: [describe it exactly, including
what you start with and what the finished version looks like].
Write me a template I can reuse: the instructions I'd give you
each time, with blanks for whatever changes. I'll paste this
back to you along with the week's details from now on.03Use it the moment the dread shows up
Don't wait for a slow afternoon to try it. Use it the next time you feel that specific flicker of "not this again." That's the actual test of whether it works, not a calm trial run days later.
⚠ Watch out for
- Pick a real one. A hypothetical task doesn't have real edges to test the shortcut against.
- A shortcut you don't use yet isn't done. Building it is half the job. Reaching for it next Friday is the other half.