A two-week summer automation sprint
The other slow season
December gets the slow-week automation advice, but for plenty of businesses the real lull is summer: customers on vacation, projects waiting on fall budgets, the office quieter than any December. Two quiet weeks is enough runway for something more ambitious than a holiday project, if it is run like a sprint instead of a someday.
Here is the two-week shape we use.
Week one: pick, measure, describe
Days one and two: run the ranking, list the recurring tasks, score them by repetition, resentment, and reversibility, and commit to one winner. Days three through five: measure it, tally the hours it currently takes while writing down the checklist a temp would need to do it. The checklist writing always surfaces the unwritten steps, and surfacing them is the real work.
End of week one, you have a target, a baseline number, and a complete description. That is everything a build needs.
Week two: build, watch, document
Days six through eight: build the first version, scoped ruthlessly, drafts only, human approves everything. Days nine and ten: run it live on real work while someone watches every output and feeds corrections back in. The corrections are the polish; expect a dozen and welcome them.
Before the sprint closes: the one-page handoff doc, what it does, when it runs, how to stop it, who to call. Then declare it done and let it run.
What two weeks buys
By September you have a system with a summer of clean runs behind it, a measured before-and-after, and a team that has seen the pattern work once, which makes the second automation dramatically easier to choose and trust. Run the sprint yourself, or bring us in for the build week; either way, the deadline is the point.
The audit answers this for your business
Two weeks, $2,500 flat ($1,000 for the first three clients), and you get the map of your own automatable work with dollars on it.