Show Notes
AI is changing how we work. Start by auditing your own skills, documenting your actual workflows, pruning wasted steps, and then build automation that scales your output rather than chasing buzzwords.
The core idea: you first, then your clone
- Don’t rush to “clone” yourself. Cloning only pays off after you truly understand and optimize how you work.
- Turn your skills (sales, marketing, coding, design, etc.) into concrete steps and SOPs (standard operating procedures).
- After you map and simplify your current process, you’ll know what to automate and what to keep human.
Audit first: document, prune, and optimize
- Do a one-week calendar audit:
- For each work block, write down exactly what you did.
- Identify every step in the task and the skills involved.
- Goal: reduce steps and remove unnecessary parts.
- Kill or merge steps where possible.
- The payoff is a cleaner process you can automate without sacrificing quality.
- Why this matters: automation without a streamlined process just multiplies inefficiency.
From manual to agentic to agent
- Sequence you’ll follow:
- Document and optimize the process (SOPs).
- Create agentic workflows (a map of steps that can be automated, with a human in the loop where needed).
- Move toward agents and sub-agents that can perform tasks with some autonomy.
- Definitions:
- Agentic workflow: a defined, repeatable path that a system can execute, with clear steps.
- Agent: a workflow that can complete steps and make decisions, sometimes with tools.
- Sub-agent: a specialized helper that handles a subset of tasks.
- Start with a friendly tool to learn the ropes (training wheels).
Practical tooling: pick a starter platform
- Make.com is recommended as a beginner-friendly starting point.
- It’s a low-friction way to learn how to chain actions across apps.
- You don’t need to go deep into coding to start automating basic tasks.
- Key approach:
- Spend a weekend learning a simple automation.
- Stack rank tasks by difficulty and ROI; start with the easiest high-impact wins.
- Don’t automate sensitive or high-risk flows (e.g., payments) until you’ve proven the process manually.
ROI and guardrails: automate what matters
- Automation should improve results, not just reduce typing.
- Risks:
- Automating garbage processes hurts ROI and relationships.
- Keep human oversight for quality, tone, and accuracy.
- The point: start small, prove the value, then expand.
A concrete example: your YouTube workflow (Parker’s case)
- Pipeline idea (simplified):
- After recording: draft a transcript, generate subtitles, write a description, chapters, and titles.
- Upload to storage, publish, and then prepare variants (translations, snippets, social cuts).
- Clones can handle posting, metadata, and even multi-language versions over time.
- Why this works: you’ve built the process manually enough times to codify it, then you automate the repetitive parts, maintaining your style and quality as you scale.
When to push to the next level: agentic to full clone
- You’re ready for the next leap once you’ve automated enough steps to remove repetitive, time-heavy work.
- You’ll then graduate to full or near-full clones that handle recurring tasks and report back what they did, allowing you to focus on higher-leverage work.
- The payoff: significant time savings, faster iteration, and more consistent outputs.
One-week action plan to start now
- Pick one role or task (e.g., content creation, outreach, or posting).
- Do a 1-hour/week audit for that task:
- List every step, with a quick time estimate and the skill required.
- Identify 2–3 steps to remove or consolidate.
- Build a simple agentic workflow for the remaining steps (start with Make.com or a similar tool).
- Rank the remaining steps by difficulty and ROI; target the easiest high-impact tasks first.
- After you automate a step, review the results and adjust until you’re confident in the outcome.
- If you’re technical, you can push toward a more automated end-to-end flow over a weekend.
Final takeaways
- The fastest path to productivity isn’t more prompts; it’s a disciplined audit of how you work, followed by careful automation of the right steps.
- Start with a low-friction tool, prove ROI, then progressively increase autonomy with agentic workflows and agents.
- Stay focused on outcomes: automated steps must render real business value and protect quality.
Links
- Make.com - Learning and building agentic workflows
- Google Cloud - Scalable hosting and processing for clones
- EOS Worldwide - Entrepreneurial Operating System for auditing and optimizing business processes