{"course":{"slug":"ai-for-small-business","title":"AI for a Small Business","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-small-business","level":"beginner","track":"work"},"lesson":{"slug":"find-the-two-tasks","title":"The Two Tasks Worth Doing","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-small-business/find-the-two-tasks","position":1,"of":88,"minutes":7,"answer":"Start from where your hours actually go (frequent, text-shaped, cheap-to-check work) not from what the tool can do.","keyIdea":"Start from where your hours actually go (frequent, text-shaped, cheap-to-check work) not from what the tool can do."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## The wrong question\n\nThe usual question is \"what can AI do for my business?\" It gives you a list of forty possibilities and you act on none of them.\n\nAsk a different one. Where did last week actually go?\n\nKeep a rough tally for five working days. Not a time sheet: a note on your phone each time you switch task. Owners are usually surprised by two things: how much of the week is made of words (reading messages, writing replies, explaining the same thing to the eleventh person), and how little of it is the work they think they do.\n\n## Three filters\n\nPut every item on that list through three questions.\n\n**Do you do it more than twice a week?** Savings are per-instance, so frequency is the whole game. Ten minutes saved on something daily is about 40 hours a year. Two hours saved on something you do every December is two hours.\n\n**Is it made of words?** These tools read and write text. They sort, summarise, draft, translate, extract, rephrase. They do not lift boxes, chase a supplier who is ignoring you, or know that Mrs Okafor always wants her order left with the neighbour.\n\n**If it came back wrong, would you notice cheaply?** You will be checking the output. If checking takes as long as doing, you saved nothing. If a mistake is silent and expensive (a wrong tax figure, a wrong dimension on a fabrication order) the checking has to be so careful that the tool stops paying.\n\nA task that passes all three is a real candidate. A task that fails one is not, however good the demo looked.\n\n> Figure: The two filters that decide a candidate. A two by two grid, rows You do it more than twice a week and You do it a few times a year, columns A wrong answer looks wrong and A wrong answer looks right: You do it more than twice a week and A wrong answer looks wrong: Enquiry replies, sorting, tidying notes. Frequent, and a glance tells you.; You do it more than twice a week and A wrong answer looks right: Quotes, dimensions, tax figures. The verification costs what doing it cost.; You do it a few times a year and A wrong answer looks wrong: The annual capability statement. Four hours saved, once.; You do it a few times a year and A wrong answer looks right: Rare and unverifiable. Leave it alone entirely.. Frequency multiplies the saving and the cost of checking divides it. A task that fails on either axis is not a candidate, however good the demo looked, and no amount of better prompting moves it.\n\n## What this looks like\n\nThree shapes of business:\n\n- A tailor in Lagos gets 30 to 40 WhatsApp messages a day. Twenty-five of them are \"how much for a two-piece?\", \"how long?\", \"do you deliver to Ikeja?\" Frequent, text, obvious when wrong. Strong candidate.\n- A physiotherapy clinic in Manila writes a short visit summary after each appointment. Frequent and text-shaped, but it is a clinical record, where a wrong detail is silent and serious. Candidate with a hard rule attached: the therapist writes the clinical content, the tool tidies the language.\n- A three-person agency in Bogotá writes six proposals a month. Frequent enough, text-shaped, easy to check. Strong candidate, as long as the price and the dates never come out of the model. Lesson three covers that.\n\n## The arithmetic, before you spend anything\n\nDo this on paper.\n\nHours the task takes now, per week. Hours you honestly think it will take with help, including the editing, which is where new users always undercount. Multiply the difference by 48 weeks. Then price your own hour: not what you charge a client, but what you would pay someone to take that hour off you.\n\nA worked case. Answering enquiries takes 5 hours a week and drops to 3. That is 2 hours a week, 96 hours a year. If your hour is worth ₹600, that is roughly ₹57,000 of time against a tool costing perhaps ₹24,000 a year. Clear yes. Run the same sum on \"writing my annual capability statement\" and you get 4 hours saved, once. Clear no, and it was the more impressive demo.\n\n## What to leave alone\n\nDeliberately ignore:\n\n- Anything you do a few times a year, however painful.\n- Anything a cheaper, dumber tool already fixes. A saved reply in WhatsApp Business costs nothing and answers \"what time do you open\" perfectly, forever. Lesson eight comes back to this.\n- Anything where you cannot check the answer. If you do not know enough about your local tax rules to spot a wrong answer, a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer.\n- Anything that is a people problem. No tool fixes a supplier who does not call back.\n\n## Pick two\n\nTwo tasks. Three at the very most. One person, one tool, for the first month.\n\nThat is not caution for its own sake. It is that you only learn what these tools are like on *your* work by using one on your work, repeatedly, until you can predict what it will get wrong. That prediction is the asset. Eight half-tried tools buy you eight shallow impressions and no judgment at all."},"check":{"question":"Priya runs a 12-table restaurant and has four jobs she would like off her plate. Which is the strongest first candidate?","options":[{"text":"Rewriting the descriptions for all 40 dishes on the menu, which she last touched two years ago","correct":false,"tempting":"It is the most visible improvement, but work you do once every couple of years saves almost nothing across a year."},{"text":"Answering the 15 to 20 daily messages about opening times, parking and whether there are vegan options","correct":true},{"text":"Setting next quarter's prices from her supplier costs and what nearby places charge","correct":false,"tempting":"It is the decision that moves the most money, which is exactly why an answer she cannot verify is expensive here."},{"text":"The annual tax return, which she dreads for three weeks beforehand","correct":false,"tempting":"It is the task she hates most, but it happens once a year and a mistake is both costly and slow to surface."}]},"prev":null,"next":{"slug":"what-the-machine-is-doing","title":"Fluent and wrong come from the same place","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-small-business/what-the-machine-is-doing"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'The Two Tasks Worth Doing', in AI for a Small Business. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-small-business/find-the-two-tasks (Accessed: 31 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"The Two Tasks Worth Doing","courseTitle":"AI for a Small Business","module":{"index":1,"slug":"where-it-belongs","title":"Working out where AI belongs in your business"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"Start from where your hours actually go (frequent, text-shaped, cheap-to-check work) not from what the tool can do.","hero":{"kind":"figure","figure":{"t":"figure","label":"Figure 1.1","figure":{"cols":["A wrong answer looks wrong","A wrong answer looks right"],"rows":["You do it more than twice a week","You do it a few times a year"],"type":"matrix","cells":[["Enquiry replies, sorting, tidying notes. Frequent, and a glance tells you.","Quotes, dimensions, tax figures. The verification costs what doing it cost."],["The annual capability statement. Four hours saved, once.","Rare and unverifiable. Leave it alone entirely."]],"title":"The two filters that decide a candidate","caption":"Frequency multiplies the saving and the cost of checking divides it. A task that fails on either axis is not a candidate, however good the demo looked, and no amount of better prompting moves it.","cellLabels":[["pick this one","a trap that pays for weeks"],["the flattering demo","not a candidate"]]},"alt":"Figure: The two filters that decide a candidate. A two by two grid, rows You do it more than twice a week and You do it a few times a year, columns A wrong answer looks wrong and A wrong answer looks right: You do it more than twice a week and A wrong answer looks wrong: Enquiry replies, sorting, tidying notes. Frequent, and a glance tells you.; You do it more than twice a week and A wrong answer looks right: Quotes, dimensions, tax figures. The verification costs what doing it cost.; You do it a few times a year and A wrong answer looks wrong: The annual capability statement. Four hours saved, once.; You do it a few times a year and A wrong answer looks right: Rare and unverifiable. Leave it alone entirely.. Frequency multiplies the saving and the cost of checking divides it. A task that fails on either axis is not a candidate, however good the demo looked, and no amount of better prompting moves it."}},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"the-wrong-question","runs":[{"text":"The wrong question"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The usual question is “what can AI do for my business?” It gives you a list of forty possibilities and you act on none of them."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Ask a different one. Where did last week actually go?"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Keep a rough tally for five working days. Not a time sheet: a note on your phone each time you switch task. Owners are usually surprised by two things: how much of the week is made of words (reading messages, writing replies, explaining the same thing to the eleventh person), and how little of it is the work they think they do."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"three-filters","runs":[{"text":"Three filters"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Put every item on that list through three questions."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Do you do it more than twice a week?","b":true},{"text":" Savings are per-instance, so frequency is the whole game. Ten minutes saved on something daily is about 40 hours a year. Two hours saved on something you do every December is two hours."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Is it made of words?","b":true},{"text":" These tools read and write text. They sort, summarise, draft, translate, extract, rephrase. They do not lift boxes, chase a supplier who is ignoring you, or know that Mrs Okafor always wants her order left with the neighbour."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"If it came back wrong, would you notice cheaply?","b":true},{"text":" You will be checking the output. If checking takes as long as doing, you saved nothing. If a mistake is silent and expensive (a wrong tax figure, a wrong dimension on a fabrication order) the checking has to be so careful that the tool stops paying."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A task that passes all three is a real candidate. A task that fails one is not, however good the demo looked."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"what-this-looks-like","runs":[{"text":"What this looks like"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Three shapes of business:"}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"A tailor in Lagos gets 30 to 40 WhatsApp messages a day. Twenty-five of them are “how much for a two-piece?”, “how long?”, “do you deliver to Ikeja?” Frequent, text, obvious when wrong. Strong candidate."}],[{"text":"A physiotherapy clinic in Manila writes a short visit summary after each appointment. Frequent and text-shaped, but it is a clinical record, where a wrong detail is silent and serious. Candidate with a hard rule attached: the therapist writes the clinical content, the tool tidies the language."}],[{"text":"A three-person agency in Bogotá writes six proposals a month. Frequent enough, text-shaped, easy to check. Strong candidate, as long as the price and the dates never come out of the model. Lesson three covers that."}]]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-arithmetic-before-you-spend-anything","runs":[{"text":"The arithmetic, before you spend anything"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Do this on paper."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Hours the task takes now, per week. Hours you honestly think it will take with help, including the editing, which is where new users always undercount. Multiply the difference by 48 weeks. Then price your own hour: not what you charge a client, but what you would pay someone to take that hour off you."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A worked case. Answering enquiries takes 5 hours a week and drops to 3. That is 2 hours a week, 96 hours a year. If your hour is worth ₹600, that is roughly ₹57,000 of time against a tool costing perhaps ₹24,000 a year. Clear yes. Run the same sum on “writing my annual capability statement” and you get 4 hours saved, once. Clear no, and it was the more impressive demo."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"what-to-leave-alone","runs":[{"text":"What to leave alone"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Deliberately ignore:"}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"Anything you do a few times a year, however painful."}],[{"text":"Anything a cheaper, dumber tool already fixes. A saved reply in WhatsApp Business costs nothing and answers “what time do you open” perfectly, forever. Lesson eight comes back to this."}],[{"text":"Anything where you cannot check the answer. If you do not know enough about your local tax rules to spot a wrong answer, a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer."}],[{"text":"Anything that is a people problem. No tool fixes a supplier who does not call back."}]]},{"t":"h2","id":"pick-two","runs":[{"text":"Pick two"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Two tasks. Three at the very most. One person, one tool, for the first month."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"That is not caution for its own sake. It is that you only learn what these tools are like on "},{"text":"your","i":true},{"text":" work by using one on your work, repeatedly, until you can predict what it will get wrong. That prediction is the asset. Eight half-tried tools buy you eight shallow impressions and no judgment at all."}]}],"check":{"question":[{"text":"Priya runs a 12-table restaurant and has four jobs she would like off her plate. Which is the strongest first candidate?"}],"options":[{"text":[{"text":"Rewriting the descriptions for all 40 dishes on the menu, which she last touched two years ago"}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"It is the most visible improvement, but work you do once every couple of years saves almost nothing across a year."}]},{"text":[{"text":"Answering the 15 to 20 daily messages about opening times, parking and whether there are vegan options"}],"correct":true,"tempting":null},{"text":[{"text":"Setting next quarter’s prices from her supplier costs and what nearby places charge"}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"It is the decision that moves the most money, which is exactly why an answer she cannot verify is expensive here."}]},{"text":[{"text":"The annual tax return, which she dreads for three weeks beforehand"}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"It is the task she hates most, but it happens once a year and a mistake is both costly and slow to surface."}]}],"order":[0,2,1,3],"why":null},"prev":null,"next":{"slug":"what-the-machine-is-doing","title":"Fluent and wrong come from the same place","minutes":10}}}