LESSON 6 OF 6
Three jobs, every week
BY THE END OF THIS LESSON
Leave with three named tasks you will hand over this week.
Why people stop after a fortnight
The usual pattern is to try AI on the most interesting problem, get a mediocre answer, and quietly stop. Interesting problems are the ones where your judgement is doing the work, so they are the worst possible first test.
The tasks that stick are the dull ones: small, repeated, and slightly annoying.
Pick three
A job is a good candidate when all three hold: you do it at least weekly, it has a predictable shape, and you would not be embarrassed for it to be roughly right before you edit it.
Typical winners: turning notes into something readable, first drafts of routine replies, restructuring something you already wrote, pulling the five points you need out of a long document.
Give each one a home
- A job that lives in your head
- Give it a home
- Not having to reconstruct it
A job that lives in your head decays. Put each of the three somewhere it survives: a project if it needs your background, a custom GPT if it has a fixed shape, a saved prompt if it is simple.
The saving is not the typing. It is not having to reconstruct what worked last time.
WORKED EXAMPLE
A VAGUE INTENTION
I should use AI more for marketing.
THREE NAMED JOBS
1. Monday: turn last week’s two customer calls into three post drafts. Lives in the Marketing project. 2. Daily: first-draft replies to support emails that are asking a documented question. Lives in a custom GPT. 3. Friday: turn my week’s messy notes into a summary for the team. Saved prompt.
"Use AI more" cannot be started, so it never is. Three named jobs with a day and a home are three things that will actually happen — and each one has somewhere for the setup to accumulate.
YOUR TURN
Choose your three and give each a home.
RUN THIS
Here is what my working week looks like: [describe it] Find the three tasks that are repeated, predictably shaped, and tolerant of a rough first draft. Ignore the interesting problems. For each, tell me whether it belongs in a project, a custom GPT or a saved prompt, and write the first version of the instructions.
What a good result looks like
You should recognise all three as things you actually did last week. If any of them sound aspirational, ask for a duller alternative.
KNOWLEDGE CHECK
Answer all 3 correctly to complete this lesson.
1. Why is your most interesting problem a bad first task?
2. What are the three properties of a good candidate task?
3. What is actually saved by giving a job a home?
REMEMBER THIS
Three dull, weekly jobs — each with a home — beats one impressive experiment.