Five Tasks You Should Stop Doing Yourself (And What That Reveals About How You Work)
A practical automation list turned into something more interesting: a way to see where your time actually goes and why that matters more than the hours you save.
I read Jodie Cook’s recent Forbes piece, “Exactly What To Automate With AI In 2026 For Faster Business Growth.” The advice was practical. The list was useful. And then I found myself thinking about something the article did not say directly.
The recommendations were straightforward:
Automate your analysis so you stop clinging to experiments that should have ended weeks ago
Automate client onboarding so you are not buried in admin every time someone says yes
Automate testimonial collection so social proof accumulates without your constant attention
Automate content creation workflows so you can produce more without sacrificing quality
Automate personal life tasks so trivial decisions stop draining your energy
Good advice. But what caught my attention was a line buried in the middle: “Every task you do manually is a tax on your growth, and you pay it over and over without realizing the compound effect.”
That framing changed how I thought about the whole list. This is not really about saving time. This is about seeing where your attention goes and deciding whether that is where it should go.
The Tax You Do Not Notice
Here is what I keep wrestling with about automation advice.
Most people do not experience their manual workflows as friction. They experience them as work. The tasks feel productive because effort is being expended. You finish your client onboarding admin and feel like you accomplished something. You manually track your metrics and feel like you are staying on top of things.
The problem is that effort and progress are not the same thing.
Cook’s “tax” framing helps explain something I have seen repeatedly: founders who work constantly but struggle to gain traction. They are busy across dozens of activities. Their hours add up. Their impact does not compound.
What makes this hard to see is that the tax is invisible until you start looking for it. You have to step back and ask questions:
What am I doing repeatedly that does not vary much based on effort?
What tasks require my attention without creating proportional value?
What would happen if I stopped doing this myself?
These questions are harder than they sound. Most of us have never mapped our work this way.
What Each Automation Actually Does
Let me walk through the five recommendations from a different angle. Not the mechanics of how to set them up, but what each one reveals about how work should flow.
Automating analysis is not about dashboards. It is about removing yourself from decisions where your judgment gets clouded.
The advice is to set success criteria before you start an experiment, then let the data tell you when to quit or double down. The reason this matters: human judgment gets clouded by hope. We cling to projects we have invested in. We see progress where there is none because we want to see it.
When you automate the tracking, you are building a system that protects you from your own optimism. You are deciding in advance that your feelings about an experiment should carry less weight than what the numbers say.
Automating client onboarding is not about efficiency. It is about consistency.
The surface benefit is obvious: you stop spending a day on admin every time someone signs. But the deeper benefit is that your client’s first experience with you becomes reliable and independent of whether you had a good week.
Think about what you are actually saying when you build this system: “The way we welcome clients should not depend on my mood, my schedule, or my memory.” That is a statement about standards, not productivity.
Automating testimonial collection is not about saving time. It is about building an asset that compounds.
Social proof matters. People want to see that you have helped others in their situation. The research on this is clear. But manually collecting testimonials requires sustained attention, and sustained attention on low-leverage activities is exactly what most people cannot afford.
When you automate collection, something interesting happens. Six months later, you have a bank of proof you could never have built manually. Not because you lacked the time, but because manual collection depends on you remembering to ask. Automated collection happens whether you are paying attention or not.
Automating content creation is not about producing more. It is about building a capability.
The advice I read was specific: use AI in your content production but retain your human genius for the finishing touches. Create projects in your chosen AI tool that contain information about your customer, your business, your voice. Feed it examples of your best work.
What you are building is not a content machine. You are building a capability for content production that scales independently of your personal bandwidth. The distinction matters. A machine produces output. A capability creates options.
Automating personal life is not about convenience. It is about protecting your decision-making capacity.
This was the recommendation that surprised me most. Book appointments before you leave. Automate payments. Put recurring decisions on subscription. Hire help for tasks below your hourly rate.
The logic is simple: decision fatigue does not respect the boundary between work and life. Every choice you make manually, whether professional or personal, draws from the same cognitive reservoir. The founders I know who perform at the highest levels tend to engineer their personal operating conditions with the same care they apply to their businesses.
The Shift I Did Not Expect To Find
Here is what I did not expect when I started thinking about this list.
The automation conversation is usually framed as a productivity conversation. How do we get more done? How do we save time? Those are valid questions.
But the more I looked at these five recommendations, the more I saw something else. Automation changes the nature of the work itself. It moves the center of gravity from doing to designing.
When you automate analysis, you are not analyzing faster. You are designing how analysis should happen.
When you automate onboarding, you are not onboarding faster. You are designing what the client experience should be.
When you automate testimonial collection, you are not collecting faster. You are designing a system that builds social proof without your involvement.
This requires a different way of thinking. You have to understand a process well enough to design it. You have to think about outcomes rather than activities. You have to treat your work as something that can be engineered rather than something that must be performed.
That shift, from execution to design, is what I find most interesting about this whole topic. The five automations are useful on their own terms. But the real value might be in what they teach you about seeing your work differently.
What I Do Not Know Yet
I find myself uncertain about where this logic ends.
If automation is about protecting attention and building compound capabilities, how far should the principle extend? Are there activities that should remain manual precisely because the effort is part of the value?
I think the answer is yes. Some work creates meaning through the process, not the outcome. Some decisions benefit from the friction of deliberation. Some relationships require the inefficiency of personal attention.
But I do not have a clean framework for distinguishing between:
Tasks that should be automated because the value is in the outcome
Tasks that should stay manual because the value is in the process
The instinct to automate everything feels too aggressive. The instinct to preserve manual work because it feels more authentic feels too conservative.
What I keep coming back to is this: the question is not whether a task can be automated. The question is what that task is doing for you. That distinction is harder to make than it sounds. Most of us have not thought carefully enough about which of our activities create value through effort and which create value through output.
Automation forces that question. And the question might be worth asking regardless of whether you build the automation or not.
Where This Leaves Me
I started with a practical list of five things to automate. I ended up thinking about something larger.
The founders and leaders who build the most resilient organizations do not ask which tasks to automate. They ask what kind of organization they are building. They work backward from the capabilities they want to develop. They use automation as a tool for design, not efficiency.
That reframing feels important to me. Not because the practical advice is wrong. The five automations are genuinely useful. But because the practical advice points toward a bigger shift in how we think about work.
The question is not how to save time. The question is what you are building yourself to become.
Michael J. Goldrich is the founder of Vivander Advisors, where he helps organizations navigate AI transformation through AI Literacy, AI Discoverability, and AI Scaling. He writes about how AI is reshaping visibility, work, and leadership.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What does “automation” actually mean in this context?
It means setting up systems that handle recurring tasks without your direct involvement.
Automation can be as simple as a recurring calendar reminder or as complex as software that moves data between applications automatically. The common thread is that you design a process once, and then it runs without requiring your attention each time. Email sequences that send automatically, dashboards that update themselves, payment systems that process without manual input. The technology ranges from basic to sophisticated. The principle is the same: you stop doing something repeatedly so a system can do it for you.
2. I am not technical. Can I still automate things?
Yes. Most modern automation requires no coding.
Tools like Zapier, Make, and built-in integrations between software applications allow you to connect systems without writing code. Many of the automations described here, such as automated email sequences, recurring payments, and calendar scheduling, are features already built into tools you probably use. The barrier is not technical skill. The barrier is taking time to set things up once instead of doing them manually forever.
3. Which automation should I start with?
Start with the task that annoys you most and recurs most frequently.
The temptation is to start with something complex or impressive. Resist that temptation. The best starting point is the task you do repeatedly that feels like a waste of your time. It might be something small. The size matters less than the frequency. Once you automate one recurring annoyance, you develop the muscle for identifying others.
4. How do I know if a task is worth automating?
Ask three questions about any recurring task.
First, does this task happen regularly? If you do it once a year, automation probably is not worth the setup time. Second, does the outcome vary much based on effort? If the task is essentially the same every time, it is a good automation candidate. Third, does my attention on this task displace attention from higher-value activities? If yes, that is your signal.
5. What is the difference between automating something and delegating it?
Automation handles predictable, consistent tasks. Delegation handles tasks requiring judgment.
If a task is essentially the same every time and you can define what success looks like, automate it. If a task requires adaptation, relationship-building, or significant judgment, delegate it to a person. Some tasks might start as delegation and become automation once you understand the process well enough to systematize it.
6. Is there a risk of automating too much?
Yes. Some activities create value through the process itself.
The risk of over-automation is losing activities where effort is part of the value. Relationship-building often falls into this category. So does strategic thinking, creative work, and certain kinds of learning. The friction of doing something manually can create insights that automation would eliminate. Ask yourself: what am I learning by doing this myself? If the answer is nothing, automate. If the answer is meaningful, protect the manual process.
7. How does AI fit into this?
AI dramatically expands what can be automated.
Before AI, automation was limited to highly structured, predictable tasks. Data transfer between systems. Scheduled emails. Rule-based workflows. AI introduces flexibility. It can handle tasks requiring interpretation and adaptation, like content drafts, analysis summaries, and customer communication. The principles of good automation remain the same. AI changes the scope of what is possible.
8. What should I do with the time I save?
Reinvest it in activities that compound or cannot be automated.
The trap is saving time and then filling it with more low-leverage activities. The discipline is to protect reclaimed time for specific purposes:
Strategic thinking
Relationship building
Creative work
Experimentation
Learning
These activities benefit most from human attention and suffer most when attention is fragmented.
9. How do I measure whether my automation is working?
Measure what you can do, not the hours you saved.
Time saved is real but incomplete as a metric. The better question: what can I do now that I could not do before? Can you take on more clients without added stress? Can you collect social proof at scale? Can you run experiments and get clear answers without emotional attachment? These capability questions reveal whether your automation is creating structural change or cosmetic efficiency.
10. Why does automating personal tasks help professional performance?
Decision fatigue does not care whether a decision is personal or professional.
Every choice you make manually consumes cognitive resources. Deciding what to eat, when to schedule a haircut, which bills to pay. These small decisions accumulate. They drain the same reservoir you need for strategic thinking and creative work. Automating personal tasks, such as recurring subscriptions, scheduled appointments, and delegated household management, is not about convenience. It is about preserving your capacity for decisions that matter.