Exercise · 12 min · Lesson 5 of 8
Your first useful task
Pick a task you repeat every week and let AI produce the first draft.
Your task
Choose one task you did last week that took at least 30 minutes and is mostly writing or summarising. Remove any personal or confidential data, then ask your approved AI tool for a first draft, explaining who it is for and what a good result looks like. Time yourself, edit the draft until you would send it, and note three things: minutes saved, what you had to fix, and what you would tell the tool differently next time.
Guidance
The fastest way to learn AI is on your own work, not on invented examples. Good first tasks are frequent, text-heavy and easy to check: meeting notes, status updates, replies to common questions, summaries of long documents.
Avoid tasks where a mistake is expensive or hard to spot, such as legal advice, final figures for a client or decisions about people. You want a task where you can judge the quality of the result in a minute or two.
Your notes
Key takeaways
- Learn on real, frequent tasks that are easy to check.
- Keep high-stakes decisions out of your first experiments.
- Measure the time saved and the fixes needed to see real value.