Tasks

The kinds of things you do in your role

A clear list of the tasks you do regularly is the foundation for knowing which ones AI could take on.

Tasks are the atomic units of work. Most knowledge workers have a mix of recurring tasks that look roughly the same each time (write the weekly update, review the draft, prepare the agenda) and one-off tasks that require judgment and context each time. Those two types have very different relationships with AI.

Recurring, well-defined tasks are the ones most worth examining for AI help. If you can describe what goes in and what should come out, a tool can start to assist. If you cannot describe it that clearly, it is usually a sign the task is more judgment-dependent than it appears.

Getting a full picture of your tasks also reveals where your time actually goes versus where you think it goes. That gap is almost always informative and often surprising.

Make it visibleList your ten most common tasks: what triggers each one, what goes in, and what a finished result looks like. Flag which ones are the same every time and which vary. That list is your first working menu for AI assistance.

Why AI needs this

Each part of your work matters to AI in a specific way. Some of it is context a tool needs before it can help, some of it is work a tool can take on, and some of it is judgment that should stay with you.

Recurring versus one-off

Recurring tasks are the most immediate candidates for AI assistance. One-off tasks need to be described fresh each time, but recurring ones can be templated and handed off progressively.

What goes in and what comes out

Any task where you can say clearly what the input is and what a good output looks like is already well-positioned for AI help. The description is the first step toward the handoff.

Time and frequency

Knowing how long a task takes and how often it appears tells you how much is worth optimizing. A task that takes ten minutes once a week is a different priority than one that takes an hour every day.

Judgment content of the task

Some tasks look routine but carry hidden judgment: the email that needs exactly the right tone, the summary that requires knowing what to leave out. AI needs to know where that judgment lives so it does not paper over it.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Which tasks do you do at least once a week without much variation in what they require?
If you had to describe a task to a new colleague in two sentences, which ones are hardest to describe clearly?
Where do you find yourself doing the same mental work over and over for different outputs?
Which tasks feel like the biggest drain on your time relative to the value they produce?
Which tasks require things that only you know, and which could be done by anyone with the right information?

Readiness traps

Task lists often reflect what is planned, not what actually gets done. What you reliably complete each week is a more useful picture than what you intend to.
Judgment is easy to underestimate. A task that feels routine often contains more discretion than it appears, and handing it to AI without accounting for that produces mediocre output.
The tasks that feel most natural to do yourself are sometimes the best candidates for AI help, precisely because they are well-understood and repeatable.