One Time You just got off a call with a lead. Good conversation, clear next step. Now you are opening your CRM to type out what just happened, in your own words.
Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen on a busy day.
Do it once and it costs you nothing. But do it forty times a week, call it just part of the job, and that is the time theft.
Small tasks hide behind their own size
Ten minutes never feels like a problem. That is exactly why it survives.
Nobody audits a ten minute task. You audit the two hour ones, the meetings, the projects that ran long. The ten minute job passes every review because at any single moment it is obviously not worth fixing.
The multiplier is the whole story. A task is not its length. A task is its length times how often it happens, and the second number is the one you never look at.
A ten minute job is not a ten minute job. It is however many times a week you do it.
What I did instead
Have something listen to the call and write the note for you. You read it. You do not write it.
I hooked my Apple Voice Memo app to Claude. Every time I am on a call with a client I tap my watch, and my AI agent records and transcribes the call, files it to the right client, and adds it to the weekly report I send to clients.
The thing is, you will not believe it until you see it. This one thing saves me at least two to three hours on a busy day talking to clients.
Not because any single note got faster. Because the note stopped being mine to write.
The shape to look for
This particular leak is a call note, but the shape shows up everywhere in a working week. Three things are always true when a task is worth handing off:
- It repeats. Not occasionally. On a rhythm you could predict a week out.
- It has rules. You could tell somebody what good looks like without thinking hard about it.
- It punishes you when you skip it. Not immediately. Three weeks later, when nobody can remember what was agreed.
Find one of those and you have found a machine that has not been built yet. That is different from finding something annoying. Plenty of annoying work needs judgment, and judgment is yours.
Ten places to look first
The call note is number one on my list. There are nine more, and most people are leaking at least four of them right now without ever having counted.
Read them, mark the ones that are yours, and start with whichever one has the biggest second number.