The week you are aiming at
Not a robot week. A week where the four or five small dull jobs that used to sit in your head now arrive on your screen already half done, and your attention goes to the parts that actually need you.
Five lessons in, you have the pieces. Reusable context so nothing starts from scratch. Scheduled tasks so the recurring work is not waiting on you to remember it. A method for choosing what to automate. And, most importantly, a way to notice when one of them quietly breaks.
This lesson assembles them.
In plain English
- Automation plan:
- The one page record of what you have set up, when it runs, and how to stop it.
- Prompt pack:
- Your saved collection of instructions that worked, kept where you can copy them in two seconds.
- Health line:
- The opening lines of a routine's output that name its sources and when they last changed.
Build this outside the site
LearnAI has no accounts and stores nothing about you. That is deliberate: no sign up, no password, nothing of yours on somebody else's server. It also means this site cannot hold your automation plan for you.
So the capstone lives in your own document. Open whatever you genuinely use, a note on your phone, a page in your work wiki, a plain text file, and paste the blocks below into it. Then keep it in the same place as your standing context from lesson two, because those two pages belong together.
Put it somewhere you open weekly. An automation plan filed in a folder you visit twice a year is a plan that will not survive its first stale source.
The plan template
MY AUTOMATED WEEK
STANDING CONTEXT (lesson 2)
Where it lives: [workspace or document name]
Last reviewed: [date]
Contains: my role, my audience, my tone rules, my hard rules,
and these reference files: [list them]
WHAT RUNS, AND WHEN
Monday morning: WEEK OPENER
Reads: [source] Produces: due, slipped, nothing heard
Off switch: [where you go to pause it]
Friday afternoon: WEEK WRAP
Reads: [source] Produces: a draft update I edit and send myself
Off switch: [where]
First working day of the month: CHASE LIST
Reads: [source] Produces: overdue items and draft messages
Off switch: [where]
THE RULES I DO NOT BEND
[ ] Every routine opens with a health line naming its sources and dates.
[ ] Nothing sends to another person without me reading it first.
[ ] Nothing touching pay, pricing, legal terms, safety or someone's job
is automated beyond preparing a draft.
[ ] Facts, figures and dates are checked by me, not taken on trust.
[ ] Nothing confidential goes into standing context.
THE MONTHLY TEN MINUTES
Date I do this: [pick one and put it in your calendar]
[ ] Did each routine actually run and land?
[ ] Did I read it, or skim and ignore it?
[ ] Are all the sources still current and still mine to access?
[ ] Is the reason I set it up still true?
[ ] Anything I admitted ignoring gets rewritten or switched off.
Checkpoint
Your plan is a one page record of what runs, what it reads, and how to stop it. Keep it where you will actually see it.
The prompt pack
Four instructions you will reach for most. Paste them under the plan and edit until they sound like your work rather than a course example.
ABOUT ME
I am a [role] at a [size and type of organisation].
I write mostly to [audience, and how formal they expect me to be].
HOW I WRITE
Short plain sentences. [British / American] spelling.
Under [200] words unless I say otherwise.
Words I never use: [your list].
RULES THAT DO NOT BEND
Never invent a date, figure, price or name. Write GAP instead.
If my request is ambiguous, ask one question before writing.
No opening compliment, no closing offer of further assistance.
Run every Monday morning.
HEALTH LINE first: which source you read, its date, how many items.
If the source is missing, reply SOURCE MISSING and stop.
If nothing has changed since last week, say NO CHANGES SINCE and the date.
Then four sections, bullets only, under 200 words.
DUE THIS WEEK: item, owner, day. Dates exactly as written in the source.
SLIPPED: anything past its date, with how many days late.
NOTHING HEARD: no update for 14 days or more.
ONE THING TO DECIDE: the item most likely to block others this week.
Write NO DATE rather than estimating one.
Run every Friday afternoon.
Turn this week's notes into a draft update for my manager.
HEALTH LINE first: what you read and its date.
Four sections, one line per item: DONE, MOVED BUT NOT FINISHED, BLOCKED,
NEED FROM SOMEONE ELSE.
Under 180 words. No adjectives, no padding, no summary paragraph.
End with CHECK THIS: anything you were unsure about or had to assume.
Draft only. Do not send anything anywhere.
Take me through my routines one at a time and ask me, for each:
did it run every time, did I actually read it, are its sources still current,
and is the reason I set it up still true?
Then tell me which to keep, which to rewrite, and which to switch off.
Recommend switching off anything I admit to ignoring. Be blunt about it.
MY ROUTINES:
[list them]
One routine, not five
โ Weak prompt
Prompt
Set up all three routines plus standing context this afternoon, then review everything in a month.
Output
Three routines created. Standing context saved.
Nothing gets refined, two of them land at the wrong time, and by week three you are ignoring all of them.
โ Good prompt
Prompt
Set up the Monday week opener only. Run it for four weeks. Each week, note the one thing I keep fixing by hand, then rewrite the instruction to fix it. Add the second routine only after that.
Output
Week opener running. Fix noted in week two: dates were being reformatted, instruction updated.
One routine, refined until it needs no fixing. That one survives. The afternoon of five does not.
Pick the routine that maps onto the worst half hour of your week. Run it for a month. Fix the one thing you keep correcting by hand. Only then add the second.
The reason this works is that a routine is never right on the first attempt. You will find that the dates come back in the wrong format, or that it pads a two item list into three paragraphs, or that it cheerfully invents a status for the one project nobody has updated. Each of those is a one line correction to the instruction, and you can only spot them by living with the output for a few weeks. Set up five at once and you will never make those corrections, because five imperfect routines is just noise arriving on a schedule.
Three well established routines beat eight aspirational ones, and the difference shows up on exactly the kind of week where you need them most.
Be honest at the monthly review. A routine you skim is one you have already stopped trusting, and every one you tolerate makes the next real signal easier to miss. Switching something off is a success, not an admission of failure.
What you have actually learnt
You can hold your context in one place so no conversation starts from nothing. You can schedule the dull weekly jobs and get them back half done. You can tell a good candidate from a bad one using frequency, annoyance and the cost of checking. And you know that the real danger is not a dramatic failure but a quiet one, which is why every routine you build now says what it read and when.
The thread through all of it: automation moves your attention, it does not remove your responsibility. The routine drafts. You decide.
That is the course. Finish the quiz and the Autopilot badge is yours.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4Why does the capstone plan live in your own document rather than on this site?