Stop Automating Tasks That Shouldn't Exist
Most busywork is a copy of information that lives elsewhere. Automating it creates dead code. One question tells you what to automate and what to delete.
For years I kept a to-do list in my notes app. It cost me about two hours a week: updating it by hand, carrying items forward, adding whatever I remembered promising someone.
It never fully worked. Tasks fell off. Commitments resurfaced late, usually when someone else asked about them.
The obvious fix was to automate it: sync it to a calendar, add reminders, build a template that rolled unfinished items forward. I didn't. I deleted the list entirely, and my work tasks stopped falling through.
The reason matters more than the result. Once you see it, you can look at any recurring task in your week and know in under a minute whether to automate it or kill it.
The List Was a Copy
My to-do list did no work. It held a copy of information whose original lived somewhere else: in client threads, in project files, in commitments made inside other tools. The list existed because nothing connected those places, so I carried the state between them by hand.
Two hours a week is about a hundred hours a year, spent keeping a copy current.
Copies drift. That is not a discipline problem. It is what copies do. Every time the original changed and the list didn't, the two disagreed, and the list lost.
A task that exists to carry information between two places will always be out of date, because it only updates when you do.
Why Automating It Makes It Worse
In twenty years of software development, the most expensive code I've dealt with was rarely the broken code. It was the dead code. Developers use the term for logic that no longer does anything useful but still has to be maintained, tested, and worked around, because nobody is sure what breaks if it's removed.
Automating a copy task produces exactly that. The sync, the reminder rules, the rollover template: each is a small piece of infrastructure whose only job is to keep a duplicate in step with an original. It needs fixing when either side changes. It fails quietly. And because it now runs without you, nobody ever asks whether the duplicate should exist at all.
Automating a task that shouldn't exist doesn't save the time. It makes the task permanent.
What Replaced It
My work now runs through four projects: business development, social media, this newsletter, and a trading advisor. AI manages each one, and tasks are added and closed inside the project that produced them, as the work happens. One list assembles itself from all four.
Nobody maintains that list, including me. It is not a better copy. It is a view of the originals.
The difference shows up in sequencing. A static list holds items. It cannot know that a newsletter task is waiting on a business development task, or that slipping one pushes three others back. A system that sees the full scope sees the waterfall. It pushes the upstream task first, on schedule, because it knows what is stacked behind it.
A list can hold your tasks. Only the system doing the work knows their order.
What Deleting It Cost
Here is the part I got wrong. When I stopped keeping the notes list, some personal tasks fell through. The new system covers my work projects and only my work projects. The old list had been carrying both, and I didn't notice until the personal items stopped surfacing.
That is the real risk of deleting a task. A task you delete takes everything it was quietly carrying with it, including the things you never wrote down as its job.
Developers know this one too. It is why dead code survives. Removing it is cheap. Finding out what depended on it is not.
The answer is not to keep the copy. It is to inventory what the copy carries before you remove it, then give each item a real home.
The Test
For every recurring task in your week, ask one question: where does this information already live?
- If it lives somewhere else, the task is a copy. Delete it and point yourself at the original.
- If it lives nowhere else, the task is real work. That is what you automate.
- Before you delete anything, list everything the task touches, including what it carries by accident, and give each one a home first.
Most status updates, recap emails, tracking spreadsheets, and to-do lists fail the first question. They are copies. Automating them gets you a maintenance burden that looks like progress.
-Ken
Systems over hype. Delete before you automate.
Get the next issue in your inbox. Subscribe free to Monk Wealth Forge: https://monkwealthforge.substack.com