Sort your recurring work into the three groups and set a check for each one.
Open your calendar, your sent email folder and the documents you've worked on recently, and keep all three open while you do this exercise, which takes about 25 minutes. You need them in front of you because memory alone tends to miss routine tasks, and routine tasks fill most of a working week.
The exercise takes the three groups from Lesson 7.3, "Decide what to hand over, what to assist, what to keep", and applies them to your own work. You'll sort your ten most common tasks into delegate, assist or keep, write a check for every task where AI assists, and put one task in your calendar to practise by hand each week.
Look back over the last two weeks. Go through your calendar, your sent folder, your recent documents and your chat history with any AI assistant you use. From these, write down the ten tasks you do most often.
Make each task specific. "Emails" is too broad to sort, because different email tasks carry different stakes. Replying to supplier queries about delivery dates is one task, and writing the weekly update to your manager is another, with a different cost if you get it wrong. Include small tasks as well, such as formatting reports, booking meetings or summarising calls. List tasks even if you don't use AI for them at the moment, because the map covers all of your work and should include more than the places where AI already is.
Put each task into delegate, assist or keep. Use the two questions from Lesson 7.3: how much does it matter if the output is wrong, and does doing it yourself keep a skill you need?
Next to each task, write one short reason. A good reason is specific enough that someone else could read it and see why you made the choice. "Low risk" is too thin, while "Errors would be obvious and it's only for me" is an acceptable reason.
You don't need to get this perfect. If a task could go either way, put it in the stricter group for now, and move it to a different group later if you find it belongs there.
This is the most important step, because it turns Lesson 7.1, "Why we trust confident machines too much", into a habit. For every task in your assist group, write down the check you'll do before you use the output.
A good check names what you compare against what. "Compare every figure to the source spreadsheet" is a check, and "Review it" is not. Other examples are rereading the client's original email and confirming every question is answered, checking every name, date and amount against the booking system, and running the code on test data before deploying it.
Where the output leaves your team, also write down the named reviewer, the person responsible for reviewing that output before it goes out.
Siew Ling, the accountant from Lesson 7.1, did this exercise. Here are six of the ten tasks on Siew Ling's map, which are example tasks:
Reformatting the trial balance export for the monthly pack: delegate. Errors would show immediately when totals don't match. Monthly variance commentary for managers: assist. It goes to the finance director, and errors could mislead decisions. Check: compare every direction word and figure to the variance table. Reviewer: Siew Ling. Replying to supplier queries about payment dates: assist. A wrong date could damage the relationship. Check: confirm each date against the payment run schedule before sending. Deciding which overdue customer accounts to escalate: keep. It's a decision about customers, involving judgement built over years. Reviewing the bank reconciliation: keep. These are final numbers, the stakes are high, and it is the core skill that lets Siew Ling spot errors everywhere else. Summarising new accounting standard updates: assist. Siew Ling needs to know them accurately. Check: read the standard setter's official summary for anything the AI summary says affects the company.
Last, pick one by-hand task to do once a week entirely without AI, so you keep the skill behind it. It can be a task from your keep group, or an assist task whose underlying skill you identified as fading in Lesson 7.2, "Skills you lose when you stop practising them".
Put it in your calendar as a recurring event and name the task in the title. On a busy Monday you then see the specific commitment in front of you, instead of a vague word like "practice".
Siew Ling chose to write the first draft of the variance commentary without AI every Monday of close week, and then compare it with what the assistant would have produced.
While making the map, Siew Ling found that three of the ten tasks were in the wrong group. Two were assist tasks that had been treated as delegate and sent on after a glance. The third was the bank reconciliation review, which Siew Ling had been doing with AI and has now moved to the keep group.
Your finished map has ten rows, each with a task, a group and a one-line reason. Every assist row has a written check, there's a named reviewer wherever output leaves the team, and one recurring by-hand task is in your calendar for the coming weeks.
Your map may turn up something similar. Open your calendar and sent folder now and begin the list.
Fill in a map of ten tasks with the group, reason and check for each. Then put one weekly by-hand task in your calendar.
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