How to find your most repetitive work, starting from last week’s calendar

A common way to start with AI is to open a chat and try whatever prompt you saw last. Some of it sticks, and most of it is forgotten by Thursday. This tutorial starts from your own week instead, with the tasks you actually repeat and the minutes they take. In under an hour you’ll see where your time goes, in your own numbers, and step 7 gives you a stopwatch figure to measure any fix against. Several of the fixes need no AI at all, which is fine: the point is to get the time back.

It works for anyone with recurring work, from a manager with a standing report or an executive assistant running three calendars to a teacher answering the same parent emails every term or a small business owner doing the admin after hours.

By the end of this you’ll have a sheet of your repeated work ranked by minutes per month, with your monthly total underneath, one task picked, and an hour booked in your calendar to fix it. If that hour can be this afternoon, the first fix can be running before you log off.

What you’ll be able to do

• Build a spreadsheet of 10 to 15 recurring tasks, ranked by the minutes each one takes you per month, with your own estimates and the total at the bottom.
• Mark the right fix for each of the top ten: stop, template, filter or rule, form, or AI first draft.
• Pick one task, time it once as your baseline, and book an hour to fix it with the matching tutorial.

What you need

• Last week’s calendar and your Sent folder. If last week was unusual (a holiday, a conference), use the week before.
• A spreadsheet: Excel, Google Sheets or any other that can multiply and sort.
• About 45 minutes, and a stopwatch (your phone’s clock app has one).
• For step 5, optionally, a chat assistant such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot; a free account is enough. Paste task names and numbers only, and swap any client’s or colleague’s name for a role (“a client”, “my manager”). Before you upload a client document covers the rest.

Steps

1. Open last week’s calendar and your Sent folder side by side. The calendar shows the meetings that repeat; the Sent folder shows the work around them: agendas, follow-ups, reminders, the same answer sent to four people. Scroll the folder back to last Monday and work forward a day at a time, asking what you copied from one place to another, what you chased, what you answered for the second time and what you reformatted for someone else.

2. Write one row per recurring task. Type the column headers (below) across the first row of a new sheet. Add a row for each task that comes up at least once a month, named by what you do: “Chase missing receipts for expense claims” rather than “Admin”. Fill in Times per month (B) and Minutes each time (C) with your best guess, rounded to 5 minutes and counting the hidden parts, such as finding last month’s version or fixing the format. A task you do every workday counts as about 20 times a month, a weekly one as 4. In What it produces (D), write the thing at the end, such as an email or an updated sheet. Aim for 10 to 15 rows, merging tasks that end in the same thing.

3. Calculate minutes per month and sort. In E2, type =B2*C2 and copy it down to your last row. Then sort whole rows by column E, largest first. In Excel, click any cell in column E, then on the Data tab choose Sort Largest to Smallest (Sort Descending in Excel for the web and on a Mac). In Google Sheets, select the table, choose Data > Sort range > Advanced range sorting options, tick Data has header row, then pick Minutes per month and the order that puts the largest number on top (both menus checked in October 2026). After sorting, leave an empty row and add =SUM(E2:E16) below it, with the range adjusted to your last row. That’s your total minutes per month of repeated work; divide by 60 for hours.

4. Mark the fix for the top ten. In column F, write a fix for each of the ten largest rows using the fix key below: ask its questions in order and stop at the first yes. That way a task that could simply stop never gets a polished template. If you’re torn between two fixes, Five ways out of a repetitive task explains each one with examples.

5. Optional: ask an assistant to question your list. Paste the review prompt below into a new chat, followed by your rows. Use it to catch estimates that leave out the preparation, and tasks that could stop. Treat its fixes as a second opinion: it knows the name of the task, and you know the task.

6. Pick one task. From your top ten, choose a row with high minutes per month and low stakes that comes up at least weekly. That gives you four tries a month to get the fix right, and a clumsy first version costs nothing. The biggest number on the sheet is often the wrong first pick (see below).

7. Time it once. The next time you do that task, run a stopwatch from the start until the result is sent or saved, including the search for the last version. Write the minutes and the date in column G. That’s your baseline, and the only savings figure you’ll ever need is the difference between it and your time after the fix. If the task doesn’t come up today, set a reminder for the day it does.

8. Book an hour, today if you can. Block the time in your calendar, with the task as the title and the link to the matching tutorial (listed at the end of this page) in the description. The filter, template and form tutorials each take about an hour, so if your pick is one of those and your afternoon has room, start now.

Templates to copy

The column headers. Type them across the first row, from A1 to G1; pasted as one block, they would land down column A instead:

Task
Times per month
Minutes each time
What it produces
Minutes per month
Fix
Timed (minutes, date)

The fix key. Paste it into a second tab, or a note next to the sheet:

Ask in order. Stop at the first yes.

Stop: I could drop it, or do it half as often, and nobody would
  lose something they need.
Template: the words are nearly the same every time.
Filter or rule: I can tell what to do from the sender or subject alone.
Form: requests arrive incomplete or in different shapes.
AI first draft: the text changes each time but follows a pattern
  I can check in a few minutes.
None yet: keep doing it by hand and look again next month.

The review prompt:

Below is a list of my recurring tasks. For each one I've estimated
how many times a month I do it and how many minutes it takes each time.
My role: [for example, office manager at a 40-person company].

For each task:
1. Say whether my minutes look low or high for this kind of task,
   and what I might be leaving out (preparation, searching for files,
   waiting, corrections).
2. Suggest one fix from this list, in this order of preference:
   stop, template, filter or rule, form, AI first draft.
   Give the reason in one sentence.
3. If the task could stop or happen less often, write the question
   I could ask the people who receive it.

Don't add tasks I haven't listed and don't change my numbers.
Answer as a table: Task | Estimate check | Fix | Reason | Question

My tasks:
[paste your rows: task name, times per month, minutes each time]

An example sheet

For example, here are the top rows of a sheet for an operations coordinator at a small nonprofit, after sorting. The coordinator and her numbers are made up.

Task	Times per month	Minutes each time	What it produces	Minutes per month	Fix
Sort notifications from the task tracker and shared drive	20	10	A usable inbox	200	Filter or rule
Chase missing details on room booking requests	12	15	A confirmed booking	180	Form
Weekly status email to the director	4	40	An email	160	AI first draft
Answer “where do I find the expense form”	25	5	A reply with a link	125	Template
Notes and follow-up after the Monday team meeting	4	30	A follow-up email	120	AI first draft
Monthly volunteer hours report	1	90	A PDF report	90	Stop (ask who reads it)

The 90-minute report felt like the worst job on her list, and it comes last. The two rows at the top take 10 and 15 minutes at a time, and she would never have named them if asked. Her first pick is the notification filter: top of the sheet, daily, and nothing breaks if the first version sends one message to the wrong folder.

What can go wrong and how to check

Small, frequent tasks hide

Rank by how long a task takes each time, or by how much you dislike it, and the five-minute jobs you do every day sink to the bottom. Sort by minutes per month. Then read the top row across and check that its numbers still belong to its task: sorting one column on its own, instead of whole rows, scrambles the sheet.

The assistant’s suggestions are generic

It sees “weekly status email” and suggests an AI first draft, because that’s what weekly status emails usually get. Yours might be three figures from a dashboard and two fixed sentences, which is a template with blanks. Overrule it whenever you know the task better.

Picking the hardest task first

The top row may depend on other people or on a decision above your pay grade. That’s a project, and projects stall. Note it for later and start with the highest row you can fix on your own this week.

Estimates that are guesses

They are, and that’s fine for ranking. To keep them honest, time two tasks this week (the one you picked and one more) and correct column C. If one comes out far from your guess, check the similar rows: you probably misjudged them the same way.

Where to go next

The hour you booked needs a tutorial. Choose it by the fix you marked:

• Filter or rule: Email filters that move newsletters and notifications out of your way.
• Template: Five email templates built from your sent folder. If the same question reaches you from many people, like the expense form in the example, An FAQ page built from the questions you answer every week answers it before anyone writes.
• Form: A request form that fills a spreadsheet.
• AI first draft: start with Set up your AI assistant once, then the post for your task, such as the meeting follow-up or the weekly status report.
• Stop: Five ways out of a repetitive task suggests proposing it as a four-week trial.

Then set a 20-minute reminder a month from today to repeat the audit: time the fixed task again, write the new number next to your baseline, and move on to the next row. By then you’ll have a few prompts worth keeping, and Keep your best prompts in one place shows where to put them, starting with the review prompt from this page.