Where does your team’s week go? How to find the admin you can automate
Ask any small business owner where their team’s time goes and you’ll get an honest guess. Ask the team to track it for a week and you’ll usually get a surprise. The repetitive jobs, the ones nobody thinks of as “work”, add up faster than anyone expects.
Here’s a simple exercise you can do this week, no software required.
Step 1: Track the repeats for five days
Give everyone a sheet of paper or a shared note. Every time they do a task that they’ve done before, and will do again, they jot down what it was and roughly how long it took. Things like:
- Copying enquiry details from email into a spreadsheet
- Sending the same confirmation or “thank you” message
- Chasing an unpaid invoice
- Updating a booking calendar by hand
- Pulling numbers together for a weekly report
- Re-posting the same content to different social channels
Step 2: Sort the list into three piles
- Needs a human. Anything that needs judgement, empathy or a real conversation. Keep these. This is where your people add value.
- Follows the same steps every time. If you could write the instructions on one page, it’s a candidate for automation.
- Shouldn’t be happening at all. Duplicate work, reports nobody reads, steps that exist “because we’ve always done it that way”.
Step 3: Start with the biggest, simplest win
Don’t try to fix everything at once. Pick the task from pile two that happens most often and annoys people most. Automating one well-chosen job, like enquiries flowing straight into your client list with an instant reply, often frees up more time than a dozen small tweaks.
What this is not about
Automation isn’t about replacing people. It’s about taking the copy-and-paste out of their day so they can spend it on customers, on growth, and on the work they were actually hired to do. The best result we see is a team that goes home on time, and a business that runs smoothly when someone’s on leave.
Not sure where to start?
Start with a quick call. We’ll talk through how your business runs today, where the time is going, and whether a full systems audit is the right next step. No jargon, no hard sell.