Seeing Your Work as a System

1.1 Breaking Your Work Into Tasks

Before you can use AI effectively, you need a clear picture of what your work actually consists of. Most people describe their job in broad terms such as “project manager,” “analyst,” “teacher,” or “administrator.” Those labels are useful for titles and contracts, but they do not help you decide where AI can support you.

If you want to integrate AI into your day in a meaningful way, you must first understand your job as a set of repeatable activities that consume time and attention. Once you see those units of work clearly, you can begin to decide:

• Which tasks could be automated or accelerated.
• Which tasks should be supported, but still owned, by you.
• Which tasks must remain fully human because they rely on judgment, relationships, or ethics.

This shift, from “I am a [role]” to “my work is made of these specific tasks,” is the foundation of practical AI use.

Core ideas

Any job, at any level, can be broken down into units of work, for example:

• Research

  Searching for information, reading documents, gathering data, scanning regulations, reviewing past cases.

• Writing and reporting

  Drafting emails, proposals, summaries, reports, slide notes, briefs, or minutes.

• Communication and meetings

  Preparing agendas, taking notes, writing follow ups, coordinating with colleagues, responding to questions.

• Analysis and decision support

  Comparing options, interpreting numbers, preparing forecasts, building scenarios, preparing recommendations.

• Administration and documentation

  Filling in systems, updating trackers, logging actions, maintaining records, formatting documents.

Understanding this breakdown is important because:

A simple review of your daily tasks can give you a clear picture of how your time is actually spent. When you write down what you do across a week or a month, patterns start to emerge that are difficult to see from memory alone. You begin to notice which activities take most of your energy and which ones simply fill the gaps in your day.

This exercise also highlights repetitive work that an AI system could support without changing your core responsibilities. It helps you distinguish between high judgment tasks, which rely on your experience and should remain in your hands, and low judgment tasks, which follow predictable steps and are strong candidates for AI assistance. Over time, this review becomes a structured map of your work that you can revisit as AI tools improve, making it easier to decide what to delegate to machines and what to keep as your own focus.

The “task inventory” exercise

Write your ten most frequent tasks in a table or worksheet, add a simple time category, and assign a judgment level to each. This becomes your personal “map of work” that we will use in the rest of the module.

Example: Task Inventory Worksheet

How to Use This Table

1. List the ten tasks you perform most often.
2. Assign a time category such as daily, weekly, monthly, or “as needed”.
3. Assign a judgment level:
   • Low for predictable, repeatable tasks
   • Medium for tasks that need some review or analysis
   • High for tasks that rely on expertise, judgment, or discretion
4. Use the notes column to describe anything important about how the task is done.

This becomes your personal map of work, which later sections will use to show where AI can support you and where your judgment remains essential.

1.2 The Three Questions for AI Opportunities

To decide where AI can genuinely support you, it helps to apply a very simple screening framework to each task in your inventory. This is so that you do not guess, but make a deliberate choice about where AI belongs and where it does not.

For every task you listed, ask:

1. Is this repetitive?

   Does this task appear regularly in your week or month, in more or less the same form each time?

2. Is this based on information that already exists in digital form?

   Does the task rely on emails, documents, notes, spreadsheets, or systems that are already written or stored, rather than on something only you know in your head?

3. Would I still want to review the result before sending it out?

   Is this a task where you remain responsible for the final version, even if an assistant prepares the first draft?

If the answer is “yes” to at least two of these questions, there is a strong chance that AI can assist with that task in a useful, low risk way.

Tasks that often qualify include:

• Drafting emails, summaries, agendas, and reports.
• Turning bullet points into structured documents.
• Creating first drafts of presentations.
• Organising notes and meeting minutes into clear records.
• Preparing checklists, templates, and standard operating procedures.

This leads to an important principle for the rest of the module.

You should not try to force AI into every part of your job. Instead, use AI to remove or reduce the work that does not truly move the needle in your role, so that you can invest more energy into the tasks that do.

If you ever reach a point where every part of your role could be performed by AI without your oversight, you are in a position that is highly vulnerable to full automation. The goal is the opposite. You want to design your work so that AI handles the mechanical parts, while your role becomes more strategic, relational, and creative over time.