Find your peak: score the jobs eating your week

01Why most automation starts in the wrong place

When owners first think about AI, they tend to reach for one of two jobs: the one that sounds most impressive, or the one that annoys them most. Neither is a reliable place to start.

The impressive job is often a long project with a fuzzy result. The most annoying job is often annoying precisely because it's full of judgement calls and exceptions, which makes it the hardest thing to hand over. Start there and you can spend months building something that gives back a couple of hours a week.

A better first job has two qualities. It takes real time every week, and it can be handed off cleanly. The score measures exactly those two things.

02List every job that repeats

Set a timer for 20 minutes and write down every task you or your team do every day or every week. These questions help:

• What do you do every single day or week that feels repetitive?
• What's the job you'd hand off tomorrow if you could?
• Where do things slip: missed enquiries, slow replies, chasing people, paperwork?
• Which software do you use for each one?

Next to each job, write a rough number of hours a week across the whole team. Rough is fine. You're looking for size, not precision. If two people spend an hour a day each on the inbox, that's ten hours a week, and it belongs on the list.

03Score it: hours × ease

Now give each job an ease score from 1 to 3, based on how cleanly it could be handed to an agent.

Multiply hours by ease to get the score. A job that takes 6 hours a week and is easy to hand off scores 18. A job that takes 8 hours but is hard scores 8. The highest score is your peak.

04A worked example

Here's how the list looked for a made-up kitchen fitting business with a team of five.

Example · dummy data. Score = hours a week × ease.

Writing quotes takes nearly as long as replying to enquiries, but every quote needs measurements and judgement, so it scores lower. Replying to enquiries happens dozens of times a week, follows the same pattern, and needs information that's easy to write down: services, area, availability. It's the peak.

It's also a good first job for another reason: it's easy to measure. In the example, replies were taking hours, longer overnight and at weekends. The target after go-live is under five minutes, around the clock.

You can run these numbers on your own jobs with the calculator on our home page.

05Four traps when scoring

Most lists have the same few mistakes in them. Watch for these before you trust the numbers.

• Calling a job easy when it hides judgement. "Replying to emails" sounds easy, but if half the replies need a decision from you, split it in two: routine replies (easy) and decisions (hard).
• Scoring one big job instead of its parts. Quoting might be hard as a whole, but gathering the details, checking the price list and chasing a reply are three easier jobs inside it.
• Forgetting monthly work. Month-end reports and renewals don't come to mind when you picture a normal week. Divide the monthly hours by four and add them in.
• Ignoring interruptions. A two-minute task done thirty times a day is an hour, plus the time it takes to get back to what you were doing.

If you're not sure whether a job is a 2 or a 3, score it a 2. It's better to be pleasantly surprised than to pick a peak that turns out to be a hill.

06Set a success measure before you build

Before anything gets built, agree what success looks like and write down where you are today. Good success measures are specific and easy to check:

• "Enquiries answered in under 5 minutes, 24/7."
• "Saves 6 hours a week on quoting."
• "No invoice more than 14 days overdue without a reminder."

Record the baseline now: hours a week, average response time, number of overdue invoices. It takes ten minutes, and without it you'll never know for sure whether the agent paid for itself.

If you don't write down the baseline, you can't prove the gain.

07Then do the next one

Once the first agent is live and trusted, go back to your list. The peak you just handled has gone, and the next highest score is waiting. Because your Business Map already exists, each new agent is quicker to set up than the last.

That's how a second brain grows: one job at a time, each one chosen on evidence, each one adding to what it knows.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes on your list, that's what the free discovery call is for. We'll score it with you and send you the result as a one-page summary.