Track: everyday admin
The least interesting track and probably the one that gives you back the most hours.
Nobody writes think-pieces about using AI to reformat a spreadsheet. But the small repeated jobs — the ones that take four minutes and happen eleven times a week — add up to more time than the impressive things do, and they are exactly the shape of work these tools handle without drama.
The test for everything here: could a competent stranger do this correctly with only what is on the screen? If yes, AI can probably do it. If it needs judgement about your situation, it cannot.
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The reply you have already composed in your head. You know what you want to say; typing it politely is the tedious part. Give it the incoming message and your one-line intent — "yes, but not before the 20th, and I need the spec first" — and let it write the courteous version.
The long thread you have been added to. "Summarise this thread. What is being asked of me?" Two minutes instead of fifteen.
The message you should not send angry. Write it. Then ask for the version that gets the same point across without the edge. This one is worth more than it sounds.
What goes wrong. Letting it write the whole thing from a vague brief, which produces the recognisably empty email everybody now recognises. And never send something you have not read — an AI-drafted email with a wrong date in it is your wrong date.
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Documents
Reformatting — the same content as a table, as bullets, as a one-paragraph summary, as a slide outline.
Filling a template. Give it the template and the raw facts and let it place them. Genuinely reliable, because there is no judgement in it.
Reading something long to answer one question. Paste the contract, the policy, the manual: "what does this say about cancellation?" Fast, and check the passage it points at — this is stage 2 of the research track in miniature.
What goes wrong. Asking it to summarise something you then act on without reading. A summary is a lossy compression chosen by something that does not know what matters to you.
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Spreadsheets and data
This is the quiet star of the track, because the work is mechanical and the answer is checkable.
Formulas. Describe what you want in words and get the formula. Faster than remembering the argument order of anything, and you can see immediately whether it works.
Cleaning. Inconsistent dates, names in four formats, a column that should be two columns. Give it twenty rows and ask for the rule, then apply the rule to the whole thing.
Explaining somebody else's sheet. "What is this formula doing?" — including the one you wrote last year.
What goes wrong. Do not ask it to do arithmetic. It is a language model; it predicts plausible-looking numbers. Ask it for the formula and let the spreadsheet compute. This is the single most important sentence in this track.
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The small repeated jobs
The ones worth automating are the ones you have done more than five times: the weekly status update, the meeting notes into actions, the invoice details into a message, the same twelve fields out of a form.
Write the request down once, properly, and keep it. Not in a chat history — somewhere you would look. This is the same advice as everywhere else in this guide and it applies most here, because these are the jobs you do most often.
When you have four or five of those and you are copying between windows to run them, you have crossed into building your own tools.
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The tools
Whatever you already use. Most office suites, mail clients and note apps now have this built in, and the integrated version wins on convenience even when the model is slightly worse — because the alternative is copying text between windows, and that friction is what stops people using the better tool.
A chat interface for anything the integrated one refuses or does badly.
A place for your saved prompts. A note, a document, a snippet manager. Anything searchable.
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Where it genuinely does not help
Arithmetic. Said twice on purpose.
Anything where you are the one who knows. It cannot decide which invoice is disputed or which of these two meetings to decline.
Confidential material in a consumer tool. Client data, personal data, anything under an NDA. Know whether your tool trains on your input — the business tiers usually do not and the free tiers often do, and the difference is in terms you can actually go and read. What to be careful about covers this properly.
Anything with a deadline and no time to check. These tools make a confident mistake at the same speed they do everything else.
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Next: Building your own tools — what to do when the same request keeps coming up. Or back to all the tracks.