Today, in 10 minutes or less, youāll learn:
- ā”ļø How a 19-year-old's data entry nightmare sparked a career-long mission against tedious work
- šÆ The counterintuitive "energy drain" filter that beats traditional ROI calculations
- āļø 3 proven workflows you can set up this week (with templates you can steal)
SPONSORED
š Launch your consulting side business in 8 weeks
Ready to finally get started?
Part-Time Consulting Launchpad is our 8-week cohort program to build your profitable consulting business - without quitting your day job.
Our alums include over 100 senior professionals from Google, Apple, Stripe, Tik Tok, and fast-growing startups.
Here's what you need to know:
- Waitlist Enrollment opens in Early September
- Only 10 Spots Are Available
- Cohort kicks off on September 17, 2025
- Lifetime Access
Waitlist members get an exclusive 25% OFF and 24-hour early access before public enrollment - so make sure you save your seat:
Canāt wait? Get immediate access to our invite-only community
To get your brand in front of 7k+ professionals, founders, and consultants, fill this out and let's chat.
ā”ļø How to automate the energy-sucking parts of your job
When I was 19, I spent my summer painstakingly plugging numbers from tax forms into a giant spreadsheet - as an intern for a nonprofit consulting group.
To be clear, I did get to do exciting projects. But I absolutely dreaded this manual data entry task (at least I wasnāt fetching coffee).
After the summer ended, I promised myself Iād never take a job filled with corporate drudgery. No matter how much they paid me.
Last week, I saw this Linkedin post from Jay Singh, CEO of an AI product studio:
His view tracks closely with how I see work evolving over the next 5 years.
The priority for leaders and managers shouldnāt be about replacing humans (although this is certainly happening).
Instead, the priority should be:
Attracting, hiring, and retaining top talent.
Leaders have prioritized this strategy for centuries because itās effective, and the 2020ās are no different. The tools have just changed.
A smart talent strategy sounds like leveraging AI and technology to automate away the tedious parts of jobs, so top talent can spend more time on energizing work.
And if youāre a solopreneur, then you are the management AND employee. You are the one in charge of designing work that gives you energy.
In this edition, I walk through exactly how I prioritize automations, what tools to use, and popular use cases you can apply to your work - whether youāre a professional, solopreneur, or business owner.
šļø Find your biggest obstacle
Before giddily jumping into automating everything, make sure youāre focused on the right-sized problem.
For example, I used to work on automating financial operations. The worst feeling was spending months automating a complex compliance requirement only to realize it didnāt need to exist in the first place!
šÆ The counterintuitively simple way to prioritize
Now that youāve picked a problem worthy of automation, generate your hypotheses and start ranking them using the factors from Jayās post:
- Repetitive
- High-effort
- Energy drain
I personally love how he weights low-creativity / energy-draining work.
This is a super underrated criteria.
Iāve worked with many leaders who cultivate a culture of grind for the sake of grinding. But the leadership style I admire and adopt is making work fun and energizing - because I strongly believe thisĀ enables people do their best work.
š§° Your automation starter pack
If youāre just starting out, I recommend trying Relay and Make.
Why?
- Affordable options that you can quickly setup to justify ROI
- Relatively easy to use for non-technical users, especially Relay
- Extensive integrations list with most popular tools
- Both have a solid free plan for getting started
I use both in my work.
Hereās a quick hits list of what Iāve tried:
- Entry-level (non-technical):
- Mid-level:
- Make - established automation with new AI modules, good customization, inexpensive
- Advanced:
- N8n - very popular, requires API/JSON knowledge, has native AI agent capabilities
- Vector Shift - enterprise-level, built for complex workflows/scale
šļø Quick wins (steal these templates)
Now that you have your tools, letās show you a few quick wins.
Linkedin/X are filled with viral AI automation posts claiming āI automated my whole business with n8n!!!ā
But how much of that is real?
Thatās why Iām only sharing workflows I actually use (and any professional can use):
- Weekly task review report
- Newsletter summarizer
- Voice note ā content brief generator
1/ Weekly Task Review Report
Struggling to stay on top of your tasks?
I track all my team tasks in a Notion board, then ask GPT-4o mini to send a weekly task report to Slack that summarizes:
- Progress Last Week
- Plans This Week
- Problems/Issues
After reviewing this in Slack, I update my plans for the upcoming week.
šļøĀ Get the Make Template
ā
2/ Newsletter summarizer
Every week, I spend some time digesting my 50+ newsletter subscriptions, so I can:
- Find interesting content to share in the Last Weekās Gems section
- Curate ideas of topics for future content
- Learn a new skill or knowledge
Obviously, going down this rabbit hole can get extremely time-consuming.
Thatās why I took an out-of-the-box Relay template for generating newsletter summaries - and then lightly edited the GPT prompt to also extract insights for Portfolio Path readers/clients.
I highly encourage this technique.
Start with an existing automation template, then tweak it for your personal or business goal.
šļøĀ Get the Relay Template
ā
3/ Voice note ā Content brief generator
Every week, I write a newsletter - but Iām embarrassed to admit I save it to the last minute way too often.
I have been feeling a bit frustrated at myself because Iām proud of being āconsistentā but at the same time Iām treading water!
To get ahead, Iāve started recording voice notes on my afternoon walks, then setup a Make automation to generate a Notion content brief.
I then use this brief to guide my writing.
Even if you donāt have a newsletter, we all write so much in knowledge work. Imagine if you can cut down your writing by talking podcast-style instead.
Wouldnāt that make things easier?
šļøĀ Get the Make Template
The content brief I generated last week
In summary
The AI opportunity isn't about replacing humans - it's about redesigning work to be more energizing.
No one I know wants to be grinding through repetitive tasks, but itās just the proactive people I know who are systematically eliminating the energy-sucking parts of their work.
Here's what we covered:
- Start with your biggest obstacle - Don't automate everything, automate whatās a real problem
- Use the energy-drain filter - Prioritize repetitive, high-effort tasks that drain your creativity
- Begin with entry-level tools - Relay and Make offer the best ROI for most professionals IMO
- Steal proven workflows - Weekly task reviews, newsletter summaries, and voice-to-content generators
In spite of the doom-and-gloom news reports, Iām excited about what the future holds for folks who take charge of transforming their work for the better.
What energy-sucking task will you automate first?
The 19-year-old intern in you will thank you for it.
Thanks for reading! What automation are you most excited to try? Hit reply and let me know.
šĀ Last Weekās Gems
š” How One Big Private-Equity Fund Makes Its Numbers Incomprehensible (WSJ)
š¤ The Best Leading Indicator of Wealth (Nick Maggiulli)
š§ No one knows anything about AI (Cal Newport)
š Doomprompting Is the New Doomscrolling (Anu)
šĀ Upcoming Workshops
- September 4th, 6pm PST / 9am SGT: TopicĀ TBD ā Register
- October 2nd, 6pm PST / 9am SGT: TopicĀ TBD ā Register
Dates donāt work? You can visit our website for more upcoming events.
šĀ Reader Notes
