Automating Time-Consuming Administrative Tasks

I turned the most annoying 20 minute task of my job into 20 seconds. Here's the step-by-step breakdown: For years, I've been drowning in business card requests. Emails at all hours, random texts, people stopping by my office - all asking for the same thing but never giving me complete information. I'd spend 15-20 minutes per request just coordinating between employees, our designer, and placing orders. It was literally the least important but most time-consuming part of my week. Working with Claude (Anthropic's AI), I built my first AI agent that completely automates this workflow. Now when someone needs business cards, they fill out a simple form in Teams. The moment they hit submit: ✅ Data automatically saves to SharePoint ✅ A ClickUp task gets created for our designer with all the details ✅ Task gets assigned with a 3-day deadline ✅ I get notified when it's ready for ordering What used to take me 15-20 minutes of back-and-forth now happens in seconds. Zero manual work on my end. The crazy part? This entire system was built in a few hours using tools we already had - Power Apps, SharePoint, Teams, and Power Automate. No coding required. Here's my biggest takeaway: AI agents aren't just for tech companies. They're for anyone tired of repetitive tasks eating away at time that should be spent on strategic work. I'm a marketing leader at an oil and gas services company, not a programmer. If I can build this, anyone can. What repetitive task is driving you crazy? Maybe it's time to automate it. Next up: I'm eyeing our expense reporting process 👀

LLMs are the single fastest way to make yourself indispensable and give your team a 30‑percent productivity lift. Here is the playbook. Build a personal use‑case portfolio Write down every recurring task you handle for clients or leaders: competitive intelligence searches, slide creation, meeting notes, spreadsheet error checks, first‑draft emails. Rank each task by time cost and by the impact of getting it right. Start automating the items that score high on both. Use a five‑part prompt template Role, goal, context, constraints, output format. Example: “You are a procurement analyst. Goal: draft a one‑page cost‑takeout plan. Context: we spend 2.7 million dollars on cloud services across three vendors. Constraint: plain language, one paragraph max. Output: executive‑ready paragraph followed by a five‑row table.” Break big work into a chain of steps Ask first for an outline, then for section drafts, then for a fact‑check. Steering at each checkpoint slashes hallucinations and keeps the job on‑track. Blend the model with your existing tools Paste the draft into Excel and let the model write formulas, then pivot. Drop a JSON answer straight into Power BI. Send the polished paragraph into PowerPoint. The goal is a finished asset, not just a wall of text. Feed the model your secret sauce Provide redacted samples of winning proposals, your slide master, and your company style guide. The model starts producing work that matches your tone and formatting in minutes. Measure the gain and tell the story Track minutes saved per task, revision cycles avoided, and client feedback. Show your manager that a former one‑hour job now takes fifteen minutes and needs one rewrite instead of three. Data beats anecdotes. Teach the team Run a ten‑minute demo in your weekly stand‑up. Share your best prompts in a Teams channel. Encourage colleagues to post successes and blockers. When the whole team levels up, you become known as the catalyst, not the cost‑cutting target. If every person on your team gained back one full day each week, what breakthrough innovation would you finally have the bandwidth to launch? What cost savings could you achieve? What additional market share could you gain?

Sometimes our own processes are the hidden blockers to our team's success. When everything feels stuck, it's rarely just about the team... It's about the systems we've built around them. I recently had an idea: a 'process audit' day. Imagine a day dedicated to identifying what slows your team down, and then: - Map repetitive tasks that steal creative time - Define clear automation candidates - anything done 3+ times deserves automation - Prioritize AI workflow integration for the highest-impact processes I won't get into how many hours one of my reps once told me they spent on updating multiple systems with deal data... So what are we doing about it? We're implementing an AI-driven workflow automation that automatically updates our CRM when deal-related emails and calls happen (in real-time, no less!). The result? We're about to reclaim a TON of selling time on behalf of our top reps! Teams blame performance issues on people when the real culprit is often outdated processes. Strategic process evaluation + targeted automation unlocks trapped potential. More time for meaningful work, faster execution, and a more engaged team focused on impact rather than administration. What's one process eating your team's productivity right now? #sales #ai #chatgpt #efficiency #productivity 🎥: IG lovetrends.ai

Ever feel like your team is stuck in an endless loop of manual data entry? (Automation Tip Tuesday 👇) That’s exactly where one of our clients — an education consulting firm — found themselves. They were juggling a whole tech stack of tools that didn’t “talk”  to each other, creating inefficiencies and double work. We started with a look into their sales workflow. 🔹 Sales data lived in HubSpot, but once a deal closed, someone had to manually update Asana to track project progress. 🔹 Internal teams worked from one Asana board, but clients needed visibility into their own project timelines — cue more manual updates. 🔹 With so much repetitive data entry, valuable time was being wasted on low-impact admin work. Here’s what we did: 🔗 HubSpot → Asana automation: We created an integration that auto-generates project tasks in Asana when a deal reaches a certain stage in HubSpot. No more copy-pasting! 📢 Internal and client boards sync: Internal progress updates in Asana now automatically reflect on client-facing Asana projects, reducing the back-and-forth. Less busywork, more productivity. By eliminating duplicate data entry, the team saved 10+ hours per week — time now spent on strategy and client success. When your tools work together, your team can focus on what really matters. Where is your team losing time? Drop a comment below! ⬇️ -- Hi, I’m Nathan Weill, a business process automation expert. ⚡️ These tips I share every Tuesday are drawn from real-world projects we've worked on with our clients at Flow Digital. We help businesses unlock the power of automation with customized solutions so they can run better, faster and smarter — and we can help you too! #automationtiptuesday  #automation #workflow #efficiency