Automate the admin
away

I built a live talk for this. The deck is still there if you want to click through it. This is the same talk, written out.

Work on what you love. Automate what you hate.

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Spend time on R's

Only automate when the work is repetitive, follows rules, and pays back the time it takes to build. That's Dan Martell's 3 R's. If it doesn't hit those, leave it.

• Repetitive. Work that repeats. How often do you do this task?
• Rules-based. Work that follows rules.
• Return on time. Work that pays back the build time.

Only automate work that repeats, follows rules, and gives you ROI.

Make it less dumb

Before you automate, ask whether the step should exist at all. Eliminate, simplify, and accelerate first. Then automate. Dollars before dopamine.

The most common error is optimizing something that shouldn't exist.

1. Should this exist at all? Am I blindly following "requirements"?
2. Can it be eliminated?
3. Can it be simplified?
4. Can it be accelerated?
5. Now — should it be automated?

Never automate at step 5 what you skipped at steps 1–4.

Only spend time building solutions for business problems you actually want solved. Dollars before dopamine.

The AI triangle

AI gets powerful when Agent, Knowledge, and Tools are connected. Alone or in pairs, you still do the work, or the work stays generic. All three is a proactive admin assistant.

• Tools + Knowledge. You do all the work or you train others. People do the work.
• Knowledge + Agent. Intelligent researcher. Great for data — but you still do the work.
• Tools + Agent. Work gets done, but it's generic.
• All three. A powerful, proactive admin assistant for you.

Admin away

Twenty-two real admin problems, and how you'd automate them.

Use 10-80-10. You set up the first 10%. AI does about 80%. You review the last 10%. That builds trust. Don't automate the relationship.

CRM

• Personalize customer touchpoints. Touchpoints feel generic. Pull purchase and contact history from the CRM. Let AI suggest thank-yous, offers, loyalty messages, and newsletters by customer tier. Require approval before sending. Tools: CRM.
• Keep contact records clean. Contact records are outdated. On a weekly or monthly schedule, compare CRM records with trusted sources, flag missing or stale details, and queue suggested updates for review. Tools: CRM, LinkedIn, Apify.

Sales

• Find and follow up with ideal prospects. Prospecting wastes my day. Define the ICP, location, and relationship filters. Search LinkedIn, save qualified contacts to the CRM, and draft — not auto-send — personalized follow-ups. Tools: LinkedIn, Apollo, CRM.
• Turn meeting requests into booked calls. Slow follow up on booking meetings. Detect meeting intent in email or text, reply with the booking link, and enrich the calendar event with CRM context. Tools: Google Calendar, CRM.

Email

• Triage the inbox and prepare replies. Crazy Inbox. Classify incoming mail by priority and client, remove junk, save important messages to a database, and draft replies in the user's tone. Use rules to file attachments in Google Drive. Tools: Gmail, Google Drive.

Text

• Surface the messages that need a response. Lose texts. Forget to follow up. Run a nightly summary, flag critical or trusted-client messages, suggest replies or tasks, and mark only low-risk leftovers as read. Tools: iMessage.

Meetings

• Turn recordings into useful work. Forget meeting follow-ups. Record and transcribe the meeting, extract decisions and action items, update each person's context profile, and route tasks into the task system. Tools: Granola, Notion, Google Calendar.
• Send the recap and start the next steps. Proactively start work after meetings. After a call, generate a client-ready summary, review the to-do list, assign tasks, and draft the follow-up email for approval. Tools: Gmail, Granola, Notion, Fathom.

Calendar

• Plan the week around goals. Time block my week. Capture weekly goals, estimate the work blocks needed, find open time, and draft a calendar plan. Let the user approve before events are created or moved. Tools: Calendar.
• Prepare smarter meetings. Unprepared for meetings. Read the contact's location and prior notes, suggest a convenient venue, and create a draft invite with location, agenda, and prep context. Tools: Google Calendar, Apple Contacts, Notion.

Contacts

• Follow up after conferences. Follow up with conference leads. Capture new contacts from a list, photo, or screenshot. Enrich them. Draft a personal text or email for each. Then send after review. Tools: Apple Contacts, Siri, Shortcuts, iMessage.

Customer support

• Build an FAQ that keeps learning. Wasted time on FAQs with customers. Store approved answers in Notion or Google Docs. Answer tickets, emails, website chat, or calls. Escalate low-confidence cases and feed resolved answers back into the FAQ. Tools: Notion, Google Docs, retail.ai, Gmail, iMessage.

SOPs

• Build a company playbook from real work. We can't onboard new employees quickly. Interview the owner, analyze approved emails and documents, draft step-by-step SOPs, and publish reviewed versions for employee onboarding and automation. Tools: Gmail, Google Drive, Notion.

Hiring / ATS

• Screen and route applicants. Applicants drown the inbox. Publish approved job details, collect applications through a form, score candidates against explicit criteria, and send a daily shortlist to the hiring manager. Tools: Grokbot, Notion, ClickUp.

HR

• Generate the welcome packet. Boring onboarding. Trigger from an approved hire record, merge role and employee data into welcome letters, checklists, and equipment orders, and route sensitive documents for approval. Tools: Google Docs, Notion.

Accounting

• Prepare bookkeeping for review. Bookkeeping is "taxing." Import transactions from QuickBooks, suggest categories from prior rules, flag exceptions, and send a review queue to the bookkeeper. Tools: QuickBooks.

Contracts

• Draft SOWs from approved boilerplate. SOWs start from scratch or are impersonal. Pull client, scope, timeline, and pricing from the CRM or proposal. Merge them into approved templates, highlight nonstandard terms, and require human approval before sending. Tools: Google Drive, CRM.

Social Media

• Turn daily work into publishable stories. Inconsistent social media. Use meeting notes, journals, photos, and business stories as source material. Generate draft posts or coaching insights, then route them into the content calendar for editing. Tools: Notion, Apify, Muse, Composio.

Personal Productivity

• Review voice notes and take action. Capture and implement ideas faster. Capture quick thoughts from a phone shortcut, summarize them at day-end, convert actionable items into tasks, and save the rest to the right idea or reference library. Tools: Granola, Shortcuts, Notion.
• Save useful books, podcasts, and highlights. Save thoughts from books and podcasts easily. Capture highlights or dictated notes, tag them by topic, create a short summary, and connect the useful ideas to current business questions or content drafts. Tools: Notion, Granola.

Forms

• Find events and handle registration. Waste time on filling out forms. Search for relevant trade shows, podcasts, books, or local events. Prefill forms with approved profile data, and create a draft calendar event before submission. Tools: Google Calendar.

Website

• Let AI safely edit the site. Site edits take too long. Connect the CMS or code workflow, convert a plain-language request into a preview or pull request, run checks, and require approval before publishing. Tools: Vercel, Cloudflare, TinaCMS, Sanity, Prismic, Webflow, Grokbot.

The deck has the same sections, if you want to click through them.

Open the live deck