Automate Your Agency

Why 5-Minute Skills Beat Big Automations

• Alane Boyd & Micah Johnson • Season 2 • Episode 110

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About the Episode

Chasing after that big automation win might be the very thing holding your business back. Alane and Micah have seen this over and over, teams planning one massive workflow while a dozen small, repetitive tasks quietly eat their time every day.

In this episode, they make the case for starting smaller than feels comfortable and why it adds up faster than you think.

3 things you'll learn in this episode:

  1. The two questions that tell you what to automate first, repetition and inconsistency
  2. How Skills stack into a full cross department workflow, one small piece at a time
  3. The math behind small automations, five Skills that each save five minutes a day add up to two full weeks back every year

Tools & Platforms Mentioned

  • Claude Cowork
  • Cowork Starter Kit
  • ClickUp
  • Asana

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This episode is brought to you by Biggest Goal.

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Alane Boyd (00:01)
Hey everybody, it's Alane Boyd.

Micah (00:03)
And Micah Johnson.

Alane Boyd (00:04)
And you're listening to Automate Your Agency. This week, we are going to be talking about what it means to start small when automating with AI.

Micah (00:13)
So, Alane, for this episode, we see this happen all the time. We've been guilty of it. Tons of people that we talk to, prospects. It is this whole shiny object syndrome, or just this appeal that we've all been trained for to solve these big ass things. Like, let's get that big win. Let's solve these big problems. And AI has

not told anybody this is what it's doing, but we have seen it over and over again, it flips the whole script on us.

Alane Boyd (00:46)
Well, and I think we want to solve big problems and we can't wait to automate a process. But our brain filters out so much of the things that we do when we're doing a repeatable process. So we forget how much nuance and how many steps are part of something.

Micah (01:02)
Yeah. there's a piece of me that is always trying to figure out like why do we go for this big win and think it's this thing. And I think part of it is because our brain filters out how complex even the simple things are until we sit down and try to write it out and then it's not so complex anymore. But we've never had a technology that allowed us to

spend fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, or even at most sixty minutes, and make something tiny repeatable. Prior to this, we've always had to set up databases and hire people and do these big huge things. But right now,

Alane Boyd (01:38)
Uh-huh.

Micah (01:39)
it's like, hey Claude, what we just did, can you make that a Skill? And

Alane Boyd (01:43)
As well.

Micah (01:44)
15 minutes later, that thing you do all the time,

a percentage of it is tackled by AI.

Alane Boyd (01:51)
We learned the lesson early on because we're building it for ourselves too when we saw how complex things got when we're trying to solve a massive problem. And one always comes to mind as an example for this. New client onboarding. We have an amazing automated process that creates the Dropbox folder, the Google Drive folder, creates

the template in our ClickUp account for new clients for the things that need to be done manually. Well, we had this great process that eliminated about two hours of manual work to just create those accounts. And when we built an AI agent Decker, our kickoff deck maker, we didn't add that to our new client onboarding process. We didn't make it in more of a massive process.

We took this one piece and made an agent with it.

Micah (02:41)
Yeah. we've tried a couple of different versions actually. We have an agent that we can just trigger and it's a separate agent that runs separately.

Alane Boyd (02:48)
Mm-hmm.

Micah (02:49)
And we also successfully did it with a Skill. And so right.

Alane Boyd (02:52)
Well, and that's how things have evolved now. When

when things had to be AI agents, we use Decker. But yeah, like you're saying, Micah, now, man, we can just create a Skill and run it instead of having to go into n8n and update that agent. It makes it a whole lot faster for the user. And we, it's a shareable Skill between our team of account executives.

Micah (03:13)
I think this is one of the first questions that comes up a lot is how do you identify what to and I hesitate to even use the word automate here, but

Alane Boyd (03:23)
Mm-hmm.

Micah (03:24)
how do you identify where to start is probably the way that I hear it worded the most.

Alane Boyd (03:31)
Mm-hmm.

Micah (03:31)
And it's just, you know, you look at all the stuff that we do in a business, all the operations. Where do we start?

And I think that's where the big wins come in. All that little stuff, who cares? Doesn't matter. It's just not gonna move the needle. But what I was kind of alluding to in the beginning when we started talking about this a couple seconds ago or minutes ago, I don't know, it's all a blur Alane. is that, you know, we gloss over this

Mentally like you said, but we also have this technology that allows us to automate and and standardize these small things. And

Alane Boyd (04:10)
Mm-hmm.

Micah (04:11)
a hundred percent of the time I would say now there are bigger gains to be had by standardizing and automating a lot of little things quickly. It's like you get those

Alane Boyd (04:21)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Micah (04:22)
quick wins. I guess maybe that's what people could really be looking for.

Don't go for the big win, start with the quick win.

Alane Boyd (04:31)
and man, when you can do the small quick wins, then you can have your department heads being able to work through creating these on their own without having multi cross-department workflows that everybody has to agree on the outcome. Man, what's one small piece that we have control of in this department that we can create something? That is a whole lot

Micah (04:50)
So

Alane Boyd (04:51)
faster than a six month build.

Micah (04:53)
Yes, I'm kinda putting this together where you were going just a second ago of like, hey, we didn't add our kickoff deck maker to the big big workflow, to the big onboarding process is separate. And because it was separate, that makes it module. And because it's modular, we can actually trigger that whenever we want. And there's no confusion it is literally we need to make a kickoff deck. Let's do this.

That is it. And what you're talking about with these cross-department workflows, I don't feel like I have a good way to say this. And even though, we wanted to talk about this today, Alane, it's like by creating modular automations or modular agents or modular Skills, whatever you want to use, by leveraging AI to help you standardize and create these modular pieces, you're actually building the big workflow. But

Alane Boyd (05:44)
Mm.

Micah (05:45)
You're building it in these individual pieces, one piece at a time, getting a quick win for each piece. And after a week, two weeks, three weeks, you have enough of the modular pieces to actually fit together. But it's not all in one workflow. It is now the team doing their job working together, but department A has part of it, department B has part of it, and it's a cross-department quote unquote workflow fully standardized, automated,

where it can be, leveraging AI where it can be. I think that's the main thing that I want to try to convey to everybody listening is like that's the big win by doing the small wins.

Alane Boyd (06:26)
Yeah, and once you have these standardized and Micah, you're you're talking about creating Skills because they're typically easy to create. I mean, Claude Cowork just came out with record your Skill to create a Skill. And we're gonna be

Micah (06:39)
Yeah.

Alane Boyd (06:39)
talking about that in a future episode. But they're making it easier for teams to create these. I mean, in an essence, they're just an AI agent, but that Claude can create for you.

They're limited in

what they can do. And it's usually more so on an individual basis, but you have those pieces that then if it is cross-departmental and each person is taking responsibility for creating those Skills, then hey, you have those building blocks to build that automated AI agent in something like n8n.

Micah (07:09)
Yeah, I guess another way to say it or think about it is, Alane, if I were to take a percentage of the work that I'm doing and I can accelerate that or I can take a percentage of that, work that's busy work and remove that. And if you take a percentage of the work that you're doing that's busy work and remove that and shift that into Skills, it might take me an hour or two to build the Skills. It might take you an hour or two to build the Skills.

But now all that busy work has been eliminated in perpetuity, and we can use the Skills. And we're not redesigning processes, we're not redesigning how we're interacting together. We don't even have to redesign the triggers of where this starts. And both you and I, really anybody on a team, can learn how to build a Skill in a very short period of time. And if we start to imagine an entire team who

has reduced that busy work and added standardization in a way that takes very little training and very little time to do. We're looking at a new way to operate a business that hasn't been accessible before.

Alane Boyd (08:20)
So Micah, you had started and I switched the conversation a little bit, but where the teams do have a hard time understanding where to do this is where to start

and you have developed kind of a a process or a step by step guide for this.

Micah (08:36)
Yeah, we have a good starting point. I would say it's still a potential work in progress. We're adding this to our Cowork Starter Kit, which is for anybody who wants to roll out Cowork to their team or help themselves get it rolled out. it's a great place to start. We are shoving that full of resources and we're calling it the Start Small Methodology or Start Small Playbook.

We're making that part of this Cowork Starter Kit as well. I think I had two or three conversations today about this alone, which is where do we start? If we're going to start building stuff and we want to start small, how do we know what we're looking at? And I think there's a couple really clear indicators that I see over and over again. One is if it's repetitive, if it's something you do over and over and over again, then let's look at

What percentage of that could be done with the help of a Skill? It used to stop there. But if you also look at all right, what's the work that I do that's inconsistent or that my team does that's inconsistent? And that can be in the sense of inconsistent and man, I wish they would do it every day, but they don't, and that really sucks. Or man, yesterday's product was amazing.

Today's product is not amazing. And you have inconsistencies in either cadence and frequency or quality of the output. So repetition and then inconsistencies of when it happens or how well it happens, those now are all identifiers to say, whoa, hold on. Why are we doing it this way? Is there a better way to do it? And the biggest thing about starting with Skills, because it's easy,

is one piece, because it's automated is another piece, and because it ensures standardization. That consistency is so important for building anything.

Alane Boyd (10:31)
I have an example of this that's top of mind right now because I just built a Skill for it for my team. Is you know, Micah, I do a lot of interviews where I'm a guest on somebody's podcast, and I do typically one a week. And so we have a process that we've built out in ClickUp for everything from, we're pending getting scheduled to this podcast, to the podcast is live. And then when it moves there, my team creates LinkedIn posts.

for me from the episode. Well, what is becoming a backlog is I'm not liking the posts that are getting created. So they're spending time creating posts for me that then I'm going in and spending time editing the posts. And it's becoming where I don't have time to deal with this right now. So I'm not getting things out with my team as fast as I need to. Well, this follows exactly what you're saying.

It's repeatable. It happens every single week. And I need a standard way of doing it because sometimes they're really good. Sometimes I don't like the post at all. And it might take me half an hour to go through all these posts. Well, that's half an hour I'm taking away from somebody else. Well, now I've got three in my backlog because I haven't wanted to deal with it yet.

Micah (11:44)
So I think this is such a great example, Alane, because not only is it a great example of a great place to start, but what you're talking about, and this this I think is why I hesitate to continue to use the word automation for things like Skills in Cowork, because what you're talking about is this is where I think people get a lot of a lot of confusion around what it this actually is.

When I hear you describing that, my brain isn't going to, let's take that away from the team and let's run it through AI and let's automate it completely and take humans out. Mine goes the opposite direction and it's how are we going to create consistency so that the output that the humans are making is spot on for what Alane is looking for? And that's still a fantastic use for a Skill because the Skill doesn't have to do the writing.

The human can do the writing, the human can pass that to the Skill, the Skill can run through a series of checks and guidance that you've helped iterate in the Skill. And then the output is recommended changes to the original text to fit what Alane is looking for.

it's like taking your car into like, you know, a 40 point inspection. Like, do we have this? Do we have this? Is this done? Is this working? Or is this missing? Whatever post is being created, the Skill creates that consistency. It's like putting it through a factory machine and that's not a thing. Nobody knows what a factory

Alane Boyd (13:15)
Ha ha.

Micah (13:16)
machine is. But

You know, you put it through the factory machine and out comes the standard output that you're looking for. But

Alane Boyd (13:24)
Mm-hmm.

Micah (13:25)
you know, I think that's where there's a lot of confusion on people think, I've gotta build a Skill to produce the output. But you can use Skills to create guidelines and shapes and recommendations, but you build a Skill to create consistency.

Alane Boyd (13:42)
Yeah, basically I have three types of posts. One is what are the three takeaways that I talk about? Then there's another type that it's a quote post. And a third one is what did I enjoy about the conversation kind of thing. So I heard Brene Brown talk about this recently. And and this is kind of going off tangent a little bit, but

The way AI writes, it's too perfect. That's why we

can notice that AI wrote it. It's not a conversational writing. It's not even formal writing, like you would read, like a professor wrote to some type of documentation or something. we can identify it because it's not using just casual language, how we would speak. That's how we can identify

Micah (14:23)
Right.

Alane Boyd (14:24)
these things. So instead of the post being completely written, like you're saying by AI.

It can pull those three takeaways out. It can pull a few quotes out for me, where then my team can then go in and mold the rest of the post for me. They don't have to dig through

Micah (14:39)
For sure.

Alane Boyd (14:40)
the whole episode to try to figure out what those things are, but they can still be that human that writes in in my voice since they know me.

Micah (14:49)
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean this is a story that I've been sharing with Alane. You'll probably be able to relate to this a lot, but I've been sharing this with a lot of clients lately. is I used to be on the belief that why would we even bother automating these little tiny things? It's five seconds, it's three seconds, it's five minutes, who cares? Like if we can't do that, what are we doing here? But as we scaled our previous business.

All of those little things add up so much. And it really came into play with Asana and ClickUp, where if something moves to a different status, we can have an automated comment, we can change a custom field, we can change the assignee, we can add a subtask. All of those things that you used to have to do manually, now you could automate away with project management tools like that, which has been fantastic and

absolutely should be done. But I was early, early in my career, I was in the camp of like, who cares? Why would I spend the time doing that? And I see that kind of echoing now through other teams with like Skills, like who cares? Why would I build this little Skill to do stuff? But it adds up and there's multiple benefits. One is the time, right? But two is you don't have to think about that shit anymore. It is it's out of your head. Yeah.

Alane Boyd (16:09)
Yeah. I was gonna say the mental load. Yeah. Is

is the mental load of the one more thing I have to do, something I've got to spend time on. And sometimes I don't enjoy those things. we all wanna work on the things that we enjoy doing.

Micah (16:21)
You mean you don't enjoy

changing statuses in ClickUp and Asana all day?

Alane Boyd (16:25)
Yeah, I don't

want to have to remember what subtlasks to add when I do that. So it's all comes down to like the work that I enjoy and being able to spend time on those things that I'm really good at and that, you know, I get to do versus these little things that eat up the day. I mean, by the end of the day, if I didn't have some of these things automated, all those little things just eat up. And I look back in my day and I'm like, well, shit, what the hell did I even get done? Mm-hmm.

Micah (16:49)
What did I do all day? I moved statuses

and changed this and turned knobs.

Alane Boyd (16:54)
Yeah.

Micah (16:54)
Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that it adds, just like Skills, is consistency. And so when you automate even the little things, that means the statuses are always changed at the right time. The subtasks, adding the right subtasks at the right time, always happen at the right time. There's never

I forgot to add that subtask. I didn't add any subtasks. It's always done correctly. So maybe to wrap up this little bit, because there's a lot more that we could talk about, but we'll definitely continue to expand this in future episodes, is if you were to just pick five basic, simple, quick wins, even if all they're doing is saving you five minutes in a day.

You could easily build, anybody listening to this could easily build five Skills for five things they do that saves them five minutes a day. If you do that, you're actually saving yourself, if you add that all up, two weeks of work a year. That is crazy to me.

Alane Boyd (18:01)
And it expands

so much further than that too. Like at face value, you're just saving yourself five minutes. But there's been already so much research around everything that you do that distracts you. It actually takes an additional 20 minutes to get into something else. So if you save five minutes of work that you have to do, you are most likely saving yourself 25 minutes of work.

Micah (18:25)
yeah, absolutely. And I mean, and I'm not even equating that into the equation, and we're not

Alane Boyd (18:31)
Mm-hmm.

Micah (18:32)
equating or we're not adding anything about the consistency and standardization, which further removes back and forth between you and other people on the team, or even yourself, just remembering, crap, I didn't add those subtasks. And now you gotta go back and add the 20 minutes for gear shifting and getting into different tasks.

It compounds so quickly that I guarantee that if anybody is listening to this, I know there's at least one person, thanks mom, and there's, you know, you do the five Skills five minutes a day. that alone you'll see the difference. You'll feel the difference. Your business will feel different.

Alane Boyd (19:12)
All right, everybody, that's a wrap on this episode. If you want to access the playbook that we put together about starting small, it is in our Biggest Goal Community at your.biggestgoal.ai. We have a free Cowork Masterclass and a Starter Kit for Cowork that we include this playbook in. Thanks for listening.


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Alane Boyd

Co-host
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Micah Johnson

Co-host