Producing
Handing over
A repetitive task only you know how to do, and that nobody has ever written down.
How it goes
do it yourself- Explain it out loud, as though to someone taking your place tomorrow, and have it transcribed without formatting.
- Ask for a set of working instructions from that: the steps in order, the special cases kept apart, and the list of decisions you make without noticing.
- Give it to someone and watch where they get stuck. Those places, and only those, are the ones to rewrite.
What you get out of it
A document that did not exist, and that is worth well beyond the exercise. You also see which part of the task is genuinely yours: the part that resists being written down, and it is almost never the part you would have named.
Going further
Count the steps the instructions describe with no condition and no judgement attached. Those are the ones that could become a fixed sequence, and telling them apart from the rest comes before any serious automation.