Automate the Boring Parts, Keep the Interesting Ones

Here's something i realised about six months too late: the people who get made redundant by AI aren't the ones who automated their own work. They're the ones who waited for someone else to notice that their work could be automated.

When you automate the tedious parts of your job yourself, you become the person who builds efficiencies. When your manager brings in a consultant to automate the tedious parts of your job, you become the redundancy candidate.

Same outcome for the task. Very different outcome for your career.

i learned this the hard way. In my last role, i spent probably 15 hours a week on work that was, frankly, mindless. Data formatting. Report generation. Status update compilation. The kind of work that needs to be done but doesn't require a human brain at full capacity. I kept doing it manually because it was part of my job description, and it never occurred to me that automating it would be anything other than a nice time-saver.

Then the restructuring happened, and the consultants came in, and one of the first things they said was "this role spends 40% of its time on tasks that can be fully automated." They weren't wrong. But the framing was "this role can be reduced" rather than "this person freed up time for higher-value work." Because I hadn't done the automating. They had.

Identify what's actually automatable

Not everything boring is automatable, and not everything automatable is boring. You need to be honest about what falls into each bucket.

Grab a notebook or open a document. Write down everything you do in a typical week. Everything. Not the glamorous version you'd put on a CV. The actual version, including the stuff that makes you want to cry with boredom.

Now mark each task with one of these labels:

Fully automatable right now. Tasks where AI can do the whole thing with minimal human oversight. Examples: formatting data from one template to another, generating standard reports from databases, drafting routine communications, scheduling and calendar management, initial data cleaning.

Partially automatable. Tasks where AI can do the first draft or the heavy lifting, but you need to review, refine, and add judgement. Examples: first drafts of proposals, data analysis with interpretation, meeting summaries, research compilation, content creation.

Not automatable (and that's your moat). Tasks that genuinely require your human judgement, relationships, creativity, or institutional knowledge. Examples: negotiating with clients, mentoring junior staff, strategic decision-making, managing complex stakeholder relationships, handling ambiguous situations that need context.

Be ruthless in this assessment. If you're claiming something requires "human judgement" when it really just requires following a process, you're lying to yourself. And that lie won't protect you when someone else notices.

The "automate yourself into a better job" strategy

This is the bit most people miss. Automating your boring work isn't about doing less. It's about doing more of the right things.

When you free up 10 hours a week by automating the tedious stuff, you don't go home early (tempting as that is). You fill those 10 hours with the high-value work from your "not automatable" list. The strategic thinking. The relationship building. The creative problem-solving. The mentoring.

You're essentially redesigning your own job to be more valuable and harder to replace. You're doing the restructuring before the restructuring.

Here's what this looks like in practice. Say you're a business analyst who spends your week roughly like this:

• 15 hours: gathering and formatting data
• 10 hours: creating reports and presentations
• 8 hours: meetings and communications
• 7 hours: actual analysis and strategic recommendations

After automating the boring parts:

• 3 hours: overseeing AI data gathering and formatting (spot-checking, fixing edge cases)
• 4 hours: refining AI-generated reports and adding insight
• 8 hours: meetings and communications
• 25 hours: analysis, strategic recommendations, stakeholder consultation, new projects

Same role. Same salary. But now you're spending most of your time on the work that actually matters and that justifies your existence in the organisation. When the consultants come to assess which roles add value, your role looks very different from the analyst who's still spending most of their time copying data between spreadsheets.

How to actually automate stuff (without being technical)

You don't need to write code. i keep saying this because people keep not believing me.

Start with your inbox. If you're spending significant time on routine email responses, set up templates and use AI to draft replies. Tools like ChatGPT or Claude can generate contextually appropriate email drafts in seconds. You review them, adjust the tone, and send. What used to take 5 minutes takes 30 seconds.

Tackle report generation next. If you create regular reports that follow a consistent format, AI can generate them from your data. Feed it last month's report as a template, give it this month's data (being mindful of data security), and let it create the first draft. I've seen people reduce weekly report creation from 4 hours to 45 minutes this way.

Automate meeting follow-ups. If you're the person who takes notes and sends action items after meetings, AI transcription and summarisation tools can do the heavy lifting. You review and adjust, but the grunt work is done.

Build simple workflows. Tools like Microsoft Power Automate, Zapier, or Make can connect your existing apps and automate data flow between them. No coding needed. If you're regularly moving data from one system to another, these tools can handle it without you writing a single line of code.

Use AI for data cleaning. If you're spending hours fixing formatting issues, standardising entries, or catching errors in datasets, AI tools can handle most of this. Not perfectly — you'll still need to check — but much faster than doing it manually.

The politics of self-automation

Here's where it gets delicate. You've just freed up 12 hours a week. What do you do?

Option A: Tell everyone you've automated half your job and now have loads of free time. This is a terrible idea. It invites the question "do we need someone full-time for this role?"

Option B: Quietly redirect the time into higher-value work and let the results speak for themselves. This is the right approach.

When your manager notices you're suddenly producing more strategic insights, taking on additional projects, or delivering better quality work, the conversation should be "what's changed?" not "how are you doing less?" And the answer is: "I've streamlined some of my processes so I can focus more on the work that really moves the needle."

That's not dishonest. That's professional. You're describing exactly what happened, framed in terms your manager cares about.

If you want to be more explicit — and sometimes you should be, especially if you're trying to become the AI person on your team — frame it as innovation: "I built a workflow that automates our weekly data formatting. It saves about 6 hours a week, and I've been using that time to do deeper analysis on the customer segments we discussed. Want me to show the team how the automation works?"

Now you're not the person who automated away part of their job. You're the person who innovated and created efficiency for the whole team. Same action. Better framing.

Do it before someone does it to you

This is the uncomfortable truth i keep coming back to. Automation is coming for the boring parts of your job whether you like it or not. The question isn't whether those tasks will be automated. It's whether you'll be the one who does it.

When you automate your own tedious work:

• You control the narrative
• You choose what to automate and what to keep
• You redirect the freed-up time toward what makes you valuable
• You build a reputation as someone who embraces efficiency
• You develop skills that are increasingly in demand

When someone else automates your tedious work:

• They control the narrative
• They might automate things you'd have preferred to keep
• The freed-up time might be "freed up" by making your role part-time or redundant
• You get a reputation as someone whose work was replaceable
• You're left scrambling to demonstrate value

i've seen both scenarios play out dozens of times in restructurings. The outcome difference is stark.

Your action plan for this weekend

1. Do the task audit. Write down everything you do in a week. Be honest.
2. Categorise each task: fully automatable, partially automatable, or your human moat.
3. Pick the easiest fully automatable task and automate it this week. Use ChatGPT, Claude, or any of the tools available to you.
4. Once that's working, pick the next one.
5. Redirect every hour saved into work from your "human moat" category.

The goal isn't to have less work. The goal is to have better work. Work that uses your brain, not just your hands. Work that makes you indispensable, not redundant.

Start with the boring stuff. Keep the interesting stuff. And make sure you're the one making that choice.