How to Cut Your Weekly Work From 60 Hours to 4 Hours Using Automation

I know a business owner who used to spend 60 hours a week running his business. Now he spends 2-4 hours. After seeing this transformation, I've been helping other businesses leverage these same techniques. Here's what I've learned.

The Reality of Modern Automation

I used to think automation meant hiring developers or lots of code. That's not true anymore. Today's tools work like Lego blocks - you connect pieces that each do one simple thing. Need to pull important details from a contract? Extract an address from a message? AI handles these pieces without any coding needed.

Start With an AI Assistant

First step: If you aren't already, you should be using AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude.AI throughout your day. They're not perfect, but they're incredibly useful for drafting emails, summarizing documents, or brainstorming ideas. Just keep it open as a tab and use it as an assistant throughout the day. If you're like most people, that's where you get stuck. How can you really leverage it to transform your day and your business? Keep reading.

Find Your Time Wasters

Here's what worked for me and others: For one week, I wrote down everything that ate up my time or frustrated me. Just quick notes at the end of each day. Then I sorted everything into three buckets:

• Not Important: Stuff I really shouldn't be doing
• Important and Automatable
• Important and Not Automatable

Be honest with yourself about that first category. I found I was spending hours on tasks that weren't moving the needle. Either stop doing them or hand them off.

Partial Automation Is Still a Win

Here's the biggest lesson I learned: You don't need to automate 100% of a process. Even 80% automation is a massive win.

Real example: If you meet with clients and send them proposals and contracts, you might spend hours after each meeting crafting these documents. With automation, you can dump your meeting notes into a form that creates the a draft proposal and contract – just tweak and send. Yes, you'll still review and adjust, but you've cut the time from hours to minutes.

Real Examples That Work

Here's a few examples, to inspire you of what you could do in your business:

• Get new leads everyday from scanned websites and Google Maps
• Go through your spreadsheets and update other systems or send emails
• Getting smart reminders for the most important CRM tasks
• Automatically extract key info from documents
• Extract key info from invoices and post to your bookkeeping system
• Scheduling and posting social content across platforms
• Routing and prioritizing support requests

Making AI Work for You

Forget the AI hype for a minute. Here's how to think about it: Write down your regular tasks, step by step. For each step, ask "Could I explain this to a new hire?" If yes, AI can probably handle it.

Tools That Actually Help

You don't need to be technical. Platforms like Make.com or N8N let you build automations visually - literally connecting blocks that each do one thing.

Example: When someone fills out your form, automatically add them to your spreadsheet, send them an email, and create a draft proposal. Each step is just a block. Three blocks, connected.

Getting Started

The hardest part? Figuring out where to start. That's where we can help at Dataspice.

We can just help you brainstorm and get started. We also build these automations so you can see exactly how they work and modify them yourself later if needed.

Whether you use our services or not, start small. Pick one repetitive task. Map out the steps. Try automating just part of it. You'll be surprised at how much time you can save.

To get started, contact me today!