The tasks worth automating first aren’t always the big ones. Small recurring tasks — some of which are also time-sensitive — are equally, if not more, important to go after. They’re well-suited for agents to handle entirely, and done right, they disappear from your active mindshare completely. Freeing up attention for the things you’d rather have it spent on.

Web check-in is one such example. Everyone knows the anxiety. The window opens and closes at some point before departure — I’m still fuzzy about exactly when, even after years of air travel. And there’s no natural moment to do it. Do you do it a day before? A few hours before? Eventually, most times, you find yourself doing it from your phone while in cab to the airport, fumbling through a clunky airline site, trying to gather the PNR from your email inbox while you’re at it.

Three minutes of actual work. Intermittent background processing that runs for a couple of days.

Now my AI agent every morning checks for any upcoming travel. If there’s a flight today or tomorrow, it invokes a skill file and handles the check in for me. The boarding pass lands in my Telegram with a message that it’s done.

The big automations get the attention. But it’s the small ones, the ones that create incessant background noise, that would be ideal candidates to get out of the door first.

What are the things like this you can think of that you wish you’d automated away? Those nagging recurring ones that create background noise and persistent low grade anxiety. Let me know, I’d love to take a stab at it and get it done for you.