Worksheet: inventory one week
Practicum for the task buckets exercise in Chapter 3 and the three-lever filter in Chapter 2. Time: one evening. Use your calendar and messages from last week, not your job description. Record what you actually did. Version: 2026-08-11.
Faster option: Use the interactive browser version. Enter your tasks and the tool calculates your exposure. You do not need to install anything, and your data stays on your device.
- List 10 to 15 tasks that took up your time last week. Be specific. Do not write "managed projects." Write "collected a contractor status update," "wrote to an unhappy customer," or "prepared a table for management."
- Put each task in a bucket: green, "AI alone"; yellow, "human plus AI"; or red, "human only." Judge the task by what today's tools can do, not by habit. If you are unsure, use the two questions from Chapter 3: Is the result digital? Can the work be done remotely?
- Assign each task a lever from Chapter 2: 1, new revenue; 2, cost savings; 3, attention and trust; or "none" if it has no lever. That kind of task keeps you busy but does not create value.
- Calculate the share of your time in the green and yellow buckets. This is your personal exposure. You are measuring your own week, not the profession as a whole.
| # | Specific task | Bucket: green / yellow / red | Hours per week | Lever: 1 / 2 / 3 / none | Decision: hand to AI / strengthen / remove |
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Result: time in green + yellow = ____% | tasks with no lever = ____
Three questions to answer afterward
- Which of my tasks have already become cheaper, even if I still do them by hand?
- Which tasks do I keep because they make me feel busy, rather than because they change a result?
- Which red-bucket tasks are almost missing from my week, and why? Does my role lack them, or am I avoiding them?
Three honest scenarios
- Put the list away: A year from now, your week looks the same, but the market values it less.
- Go faster inside the green bucket: This helps as a skill but fails as a strategy. Volume grows where the premium is moving toward zero (Chapter 2).
- Shift the weight: Set a six-month target of adding two or three red-bucket tasks to your week. This takes longer than learning new prompts, but it moves you toward work whose value is rising.
The full profession map, the Task-to-Outcome Map, appears in Chapter 9 and in the live version of this repository.
Version: 2026-06-10. Reassess the buckets every six months because the boundary keeps moving.