Three Months of Workplace Automation: What Actually Changed
Since late last year, I’ve been gradually automating repetitive tasks within my team. At first, it was just using ChatGPT to draft documents, but now I also have it organize reports, summarize Excel data, and draft weekly meeting minutes.
Realistically, the three things that helped the most were:
1. Meeting note summaries: What used to take 30 minutes to organize now takes 5.
2. Excel function explanations: Being able to ask right away when I got stuck drastically cut down search time.
3. Email drafts: Writing polite rejection emails is no longer stressful.
Of course, the limitations are clear too. Perhaps because of company security, it’s hard to input internal materials as-is, and if I use the output directly, the tone sounds too much like AI, so I have to revise it. In the end, human review time is still necessary.
Still, rather than what I expected from the word “automation,” the realistic feeling is more like using several small tools together. How far have you all taken workplace automation?
8 answers
Meeting-minutes summarization is a total game-changer lol. I also run the recording through to get a draft and then polish it up, and you can really feel 30 minutes turn into 5.
The email draft is good, but if you send it as is, your boss will immediately notice. If it’s got stuff like “Dear [Name]” in it, lol. In the end you still have to polish it, so it’s not like the stress is gone.
Well, that's a bit... When you say it's down to 5 minutes, does that include review? Usually, drafting and then revising it takes at least 15 minutes.