Your Workday as a System
Your Workday Through a Systems Lens
Most people do not need to work harder. They need to allocate their attention better.
Seven categories of work
Map everything you do into these categories:
- Gathering: Collecting information from various sources.
- Filtering: Separating relevant from irrelevant.
- Transforming: Changing format, structure, or level of detail.
- Routing: Sending information to the right place or person.
- Summarizing: Compressing into key points.
- Deciding: Choosing what to do.
- Executing: Doing the high-value work only you can do.
The pattern you will likely discover
Categories 1–5 are mechanical. They are necessary but they do not require your unique judgment. Categories 6–7 are where you create your real value — decisions, strategy, creative work, relationship building, execution.
Most people spend the majority of their day in categories 1–5. Their best thinking gets consumed before it can produce the outcomes that matter.
This is the core bottleneck AI agents can fix.
Run a workday audit
For three workdays, track your activities in 30-minute blocks. For each block, log:
- What you did.
- Which category (1–7) it belongs to.
- Whether it was manual and repetitive.
- Whether it required your judgment.
Real examples from different roles:
| Activity | Category | Mechanical? | Judgment? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scanning 50 emails for urgent items | Filtering | Yes | Low |
| Reformatting meeting notes into status update | Transforming | Yes | Low |
| Deciding which deal to prioritize this week | Deciding | No | High |
| Pulling together a client presentation from last month's data | Gathering + Transforming | Yes | Low |
| Coaching a team member through a difficult situation | Executing | No | High |
| Compiling weekly KPIs from three dashboards | Gathering + Summarizing | Yes | Low |
| Choosing between two strategic directions for Q3 | Deciding | No | High |
How to interpret your audit
If your time is heavy in gathering, filtering, transforming, routing, and summarizing — you have strong agent opportunity.
If your time is already heavy in deciding and executing — protect that time fiercely and use agents to improve the quality of your inputs.
Turn the audit into action
Choose one workflow that:
- Appears often (at least weekly).
- Follows a similar pattern each time.
- Takes meaningful time (30+ minutes per occurrence).
- Is easy to verify (you can tell good from bad quickly).
- Is low-risk if imperfect (not client-facing on day one).
Start there. One small win builds momentum for the next.