By Jeffrey Shear, J Shear Consulting

Twenty hours a week is half of a full-time employee. In most growing businesses, that time already exists. It's just buried in copy-and-paste, re-keyed data, chased approvals, and reports someone rebuilds by hand every Monday morning.

This isn't a guess. In a well-known Smartsheet survey, more than 40% of workers said they spend at least a quarter of their work week on manual, repetitive tasks, and about 60% estimated they could save six or more hours a week through automation. Across even a small team, finding 20 hours is a conservative goal.

The catch is that most companies go looking for it the wrong way.

Why buying a tool first doesn't work

The typical approach is to buy an automation platform and then look for things to automate. The result is a handful of disconnected workflows, no measurable savings, and one more subscription.

There's an old rule in technology that still holds: automating a bad process just produces bad results faster. The audit comes first. The tools come last.

The five-step automation audit

1. Pick one team and one week

Don't try to audit the whole company. Start with a team that handles high volume and plenty of hand-offs. Finance, operations, customer service, and sales support are usually rich territory. Keep the scope small enough to finish.

2. Capture the recurring work

Ask each person a simple question: "What do you do every week that you'd hate to explain to a new hire?"

That question surfaces the workarounds, spreadsheets, and manual steps nobody documents. For each task, note roughly how often it happens and how long it takes. Estimates are fine; precision isn't the goal.

3. Look for the tell-tale signs

Certain patterns almost always signal recoverable time:

• Copying data from one system and pasting it into another
• Re-keying information from emails, PDFs, or forms
• Spreadsheets acting as the "glue" between systems
• Chasing approvals through email threads
• Status reports or KPI dashboards assembled by hand
• "Checking" tasks that exist because nobody trusts the data

4. Prioritize with a simple score

For each candidate, multiply weekly hours by an ease score from 1 (hard) to 3 (easy). A task that consumes five hours a week and is easy to fix (score: 15) beats a ten-hour task that requires a major system change (score: 10). Flag anything with compliance or financial risk for extra care.

5. Eliminate, simplify, then automate — in that order

Before automating anything, ask whether it should exist at all. A surprising amount of work turns out to be a report nobody reads or an approval step left over from a problem solved years ago. Next, simplify what remains. Only then automate, starting with tools you already own: the workflow and AI features in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, native integrations in your CRM or accounting system, or lightweight connectors like Power Automate or Zapier.

Common findings and typical fixes

A composite example

Consider a 60-person property management company, a composite of what I see regularly. We audited the operations and finance teams over two weeks and identified about 26 hours per week of recoverable work. The biggest items were vendor invoices re-keyed from email, a Monday KPI report that took one analyst most of a morning, and an onboarding process spread across four inboxes.

Two items were simply eliminated: a duplicate report and a redundant approval. The rest were automated almost entirely with licenses the company already paid for. Within 60 days, the team had recovered roughly 22 hours a week — and the analyst who used to build the Monday report now spends that time on the analysis leadership had been asking for.

Making the gains stick

Recovered time has a way of quietly disappearing. To keep it:

• Baseline before you start so you can prove the savings.
• Assign an owner to every automation. Unowned automations break silently and become a new kind of risk.
• Decide in advance where the time goes. "Higher-value work" is too vague. Name the specific work it will fund.
• Re-audit quarterly. Processes drift, new tools arrive, and the next 20 hours are usually already forming.

Three pitfalls to avoid

• Automating the exceptions. Design for the 80% of cases that follow the rules; route the rest to a person.
• Automation sprawl. Dozens of undocumented workflows built by different people are tomorrow's maintenance problem.
• Forgetting the people. The staff doing the work know where the waste is. Involve them early, and be clear that the goal is better work, not fewer people.

Start small, start now

You don't need a transformation program to get started. Pick one team, ask the new-hire question, and score what you find. Most organizations discover their first 20 hours within a couple of weeks — and the momentum from that first win makes everything after it easier.

If you'd like help running an automation audit, or turning the findings into a prioritized plan, I'm happy to talk it through.