Most people can’t say which of their tasks repeat the most. They’re too busy doing them to notice.

We asked Jem co-founder and CEO Simon Ellis, whose WhatsApp-based HR platform serves more than 250,000 frontline workers, about the AI habit he relies on most right now…

Simon’s favourite use of AI right now isn’t a big project. It’s a small weekly habit that tells him what to automate next, so he doesn’t have to guess. He saw the idea on LinkedIn and says it was easy to build.

The review only works if the AI can see your week. Simon’s looks at Slack, HubSpot and his email. Most AI tools can now connect to these apps directly, so start with the 2 or 3 places where most of your working day goes.

Ask for something specific: review the past week and list the 5 tasks I did most often, or that took the most time. A narrow instruction gets a useful answer. A vague one, such as asking how to be more productive, gets generic advice.

Simon’s runs every Sunday night, so the results are waiting before the week starts. Tools like Claude’s scheduled tasks, available on all its paid plans, can run a task like this automatically every week, using your connected apps.

Finding the repeats is only half the job. Simon’s review also creates a skill or agent for each task, a saved set of instructions that handles it for him. One week it noticed he was sending lots of emails to prospects to book meetings, and offered a meeting-booking skill to do it instead.

Treat the suggestions as a shortlist, not orders. Try the ones that clearly save time, ignore the rest, and let the next Sunday’s review show you whether the task has stopped appearing on your list.

Instead of guessing what to automate, you get 5 tested ideas every week, based on what you actually did. Over a few months, the work that used to fill your week gets handled for you, one repeat at a time.

Simon’s full panel from The Open Letter Cape Town 2026 is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where he goes further than we could cover here:

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