Why I Started Automating
I used to tell myself "I can do it faster myself," every time I thought about automating a process. It was a classic trap. I was convinced that setting up a system would take longer than just "grinding it out" one more time because an automation wouldn't produce exactly what I want.
But then I hit a wall. I was working 60-hour weeks on top of my other work, staring at a calendar full of tasks that felt like busywork, and realized I had zero energy left for actual strategy. I was an employee in my own business, not the CEO. That's when I decided to shift my mindset from "doing tasks" to "building projects."
Automation wasn't just a hack, it was the only way to scale myself.
Automation #1: The Tweet Enhancer with Grok Projects
The biggest time-suck for me was social media. I'd spend hours staring at a blank screen, trying to craft the "perfect" thread or witty tweet. I had the ideas, but packaging them for engagement? That was painful.
🔧 The Fix: I built a dedicated Grok Project specifically for refining my rough thoughts.
💡How It Works: I just get the idea and experiences out in a Google Sheet. Then, I feed that raw text into my "Tweet Enhancer" project in Grok which produces a CSV output to schedule in Publr.
Grok is trained on my preferred style - narrative, hook-led, and valuable. It takes my word vomit and formats it into a clean, engaging tweet or a structured thread. It's not 100% perfect, but it gets me 90% of the way there in seconds.
❓What You Need:
- Google Sheet with raw tweet ideas
- Grok Project with instructions for enhancing your tweets. Important! Specify the tone and style that matches the way you write tweets.
- Publr account to schedule your social media posts
🕓 Time Saved: This simple switch saved me about 5 hours/week. No more writer's block.
Automation #2: Keyword Research on Autopilot with Antigravity
If social media was a time-suck, SEO was a rabbit hole. I used to lose entire afternoons jumping between Ahrefs, Google Trends, and spreadsheets, trying to find that perfect low-competition keyword.
🔧 The Fix: I handed the heavy lifting to Antigravity, my AI agent.
💡How It Works: Instead of manually sifting through data, I just give Antigravity a broad topic, like "productivity for founders." It goes off and scans the web. It analyzes search intent, checks volume, and most importantly, looks for "competitor gaps" (aka things my competitors are missing).
It comes back with a report saying, "Hey, everyone is writing about X, but no one is answering specific questions about Y." It also returns a list of secondary keywords and potential search queries. That's gold.
❓What You Need:
- Antigravity downloaded and a
keyword_research.mdfile with instructions for the agent (save this in a .agent/workflows folder)
🕓 Time Saved: This cut my research time by another 5 hours/week.
Automation #3: The Blog Draft Generator with Antigravity
The final piece of the puzzle was the actual writing. Even with a keyword, the "Blank Page Syndrome" is real. Starting a 1,500-word article from scratch takes a lot of activation energy.
🔧The Fix: An end-to-end workflow to go from Idea -> Draft.
💡How It Works: I combined the first two steps into a complete pipeline. improving upon my initial experiments.
- Input: I provide the topic, the target audience, and the goal of the post.
- Process: Antigravity runs the research > builds an outline with key headings > asks for my approval > and then writes the full first draft.
It's not about letting AI write for me, it's about letting AI write with me. It builds the structure and fills in the blanks, so I can come in and add the personal stories and nuance.
❓What You Need:
- Antigravity downloaded and a
blog_creation.mdfile with instructions for the agent (save this in a .agent/workflows folder)
🕓 Time Saved: This is the big one. It easily saves me at least 10 hours/week per article.
The Compound Effect of These 3 Automations
When you do the math, that's at least 20 hours a week. But the real value isn't just the time, it's the energy.
By automating the "drudgery" - the formatting, the data gathering, the initial drafting - I protect my brain power for the things that actually move the needle: strategy, networking, and building the product. 20 hours of "Founder Work" is worth 100 hours of "Busy Work."