Don't Replace Your Job, Replace Your Chores

There’s a climate of fear and excitement around tech right now. People keep telling me two things: they can do anything now, and their job will be gone in six months. I don’t know the answers to those questions.

But here’s a useful strategy in the meantime: only you can do what you’re best at.

There’s a longer game than raw productivity gains. Chip away at the edges of what drains your energy. Chip away at your chores.

Our jobs are not singularly focused. At least not yet, it’s not going to be an AI loop that goes over and over incrementally hill climbing against an optimization goal. What we actually do at work is wide. Review docs, check pings, respond in this thread, update the Notion page, copy the status into the other Notion page, check Asana, prep for the meeting about the meeting. None of this shows up in the job posting for “Senior $YOUR_TITLE Here” but it’s half the job. Some of those tasks are more fun than others.

A personal strategy I’ve found quite helpful: automate your chores so that you have time to focus on what gives you energy.

Anything about my job that sucks. And sucks here just means something you need to do that is part of the job for sensible reasons, but drains your energy instead of giving it to you.

At the end of each week, I do a little retro about where I spent my time, what gave me energy, what was taking it away. A practice I’ve found helpful is to identify those draining things, which I’d call chores, and figure out how to turn them into something AI can handle.

A specific example: I’ve set up my own system for task tracking, prioritization, and status updates. These are not necessarily super fun things that everyone loves. But now, instead of one mega-long Notion doc of scatterbrained tasks, I live in Claude Code.

Every week I run a week-start command that helps me prioritize what actually matters and what I should be focusing on. It prepares meeting status update notes so I don’t have to spend 20 minutes figuring out what did I do last week, what do I need to write up, what do I need to copy and paste into a couple different meeting docs.

Day to day I have a day-start and day-end command, which helps me keep track of what I’ve accomplished, what’s going well, what’s not. It also generates a randomized ASCII art animal with an inspirational quote each morning, which is probably the most important part of the whole system.

At the end of the week I run a week-close command and it writes status updates in the stakeholder business language that lands well, “did X for Y% increase.” (For the people who aren’t in your day-to-day but need to understand the impact in a single sentence.)

Automating your chores gives you the bandwidth to focus on what you love. The things you do better than everyone else naturally, your comparative advantage, in economic terms, to make it sound fancy. Freeing up your bandwidth to be more you leads to better craft. A compounding gain in a skill where getting better at it is the point.

Don’t replace your job. Replace your chores. Free up your energy to pursue the things you love.