The Delivery Audit A 20-minute pass over every automation you own, to find the ones running in the dark. Companion to "The automation nobody sees." You don't need any tools open to start. A list andtwenty minutes. Step 1 — List them (5 min) Write down every automation you currently have running. Zaps, Make scenarios, n8n workflows, Kitsequences, scheduled reports, dashboards, recurring exports, anything on a timer. Include the ones you forgot about. Those are the point. If you built it more...
16 days ago • 2 min read
Ten weeks since my last email. The automation guy went quiet again, and this time the reason is a bit embarrassing. I built the AI Agent Workflow Starter Kit and wrote this email announcing it. Then I never pressed send. It has been sitting in drafts for months while I got on with everything else. Turns out being busy is a very reliable way to ship nothing. So here it is, as I wrote it. The hardest part of building an AI agent system isn't the technology. It's the blank page. You know what...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
I once spent £300 on an Iron Man figure because I "earned it." This was my productivity reward system. Hit a revenue milestone, buy a collectible. Complete a major project, add to the collection. Sounds smart, right? Gamify your work. Create incentives. Make the grind feel like a game. Here's what actually happened: Month 1: Hit the milestone, bought the figure, felt genuinely motivated. Month 2: Missed the milestone, bought the figure anyway "for future motivation." Month 3: Tight month...
3 months ago • 1 min read
I run about 2.5–3.5 people's worth of work. Not because I'm exceptional at productivity. Because the automations are good enough that I keep saying yes to things a normal human capacity wouldn't allow. For the past couple of years, I've been the "automation guy" who makes everything look effortless. Client newsletters, social media pipelines, system builds, strategy calls. And I genuinely love it. But behind all that efficiency is a human who still has to think, decide, and solve problems....
4 months ago • 1 min read
I need to tell you something a bit embarrassing. A few days ago, this newsletter sent an issue that was broken. The formatting was wrong. Subject lines leaked into the body. It looked like someone had pasted a template scaffold and hit send without reading it. It was me. I'm the someone. The Automation Wizard, automation-wizard-ing himself into a mess. So it felt like the right moment to share the test I use to make sure AI-assisted content is actually worth sending. It's one question: Remove...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Hello there, friend! You might've noticed it's gone a little quiet from me. No dramatic reason — I've had my head down building automation systems (the irony of the automation guy being too busy to email is not lost on me). But while I was heads-down, I kept picturing you still doing the manual, 2am, copy-paste version of running your business — the exact thing automation is supposed to rescue you from. So I'm back. Consistently, this time. And I want to make the quiet up to you with...
4 months ago • 1 min read
I've been using the same one-sentence test for about six months now. It works on anything: a LinkedIn post, a newsletter, a sales page, a course lesson, a caption. The test is this: if you removed the AI and just had more time, would you have written roughly the same thing? If yes — it's yours. The AI helped you move faster, but the thinking was already there. If no — if the content only exists because of AI — that's slop. And your audience can smell slop. They can't always name it, but they...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Last week, I thought I was running out of space on my NAS (Network Attached Storage, basically my central storage of hard drives at home). The warning lights were flashing, the drives looked full, and my brain immediately shifted into problem-solving mode. I started mapping out backup tiers, sync rules, and cleanup scripts. I even looked at buying another 16TB drive I didn’t really need. After an hour of overthinking and mapping, I noticed something ridiculous. Both recycle bins—local and...
11 months ago • 1 min read
There’s a special kind of panic that comes when you realize you might have just broken something that really matters. Mine started with one small file — a cryptographic key used to publish a client’s Android apps on the Play Store. We were hours away from handing everything back after years of collaboration with a major client. The transition needed to be clean and professional. And then I couldn’t find the key. See, a few years earlier I had made what I thought was the responsible choice: I...
11 months ago • 1 min read