Issue #2: The Spreadsheet Tax

Command Center

The Spreadsheet Tax

Every business pays a tax that never shows up on the P&L.

It's the 20 minutes someone spends copying orders from one system into a spreadsheet. The Friday afternoon rebuilding the same report by hand. The "quick check" where two people pull the same number and get different answers, and then spend an hour figuring out which one is right.

None of it feels expensive in the moment. Five minutes here, half an hour there. But it adds up every single week, and it lands on your best people, because they're the ones who know how the pieces fit together.

That's the Spreadsheet Tax: the time you pay because your systems don't talk to each other.

Not all the copy and paste items are worth spending the time to fix, and the first step isn't a new tool. It's understanding where it is happening so you can identify low hanging fruit to fix it.

AI Corner

What is a token?

AI tools don't read words the way you do. They read tokens: small chunks of text. A short word is usually one token. A longer word might be two or three. A rough rule of thumb in English: 100 tokens is about 75 words.

Why should you care? Because almost everything about AI is measured in tokens:

You don't need to count tokens. Just know that what you give the AI, and how much, shapes everything it gives back. More on that when we get to context in a couple of weeks.

Experiments and Lab Notes

Clean up a messy project

This week's experiment: clean up a messy project. The long email thread, the meeting notes, the half-finished to-do list, and paste it into your AI and ask:

I usually use note-taking tools like Wispr Flow or Fathom to do this for me automatically. The most valuable use case I have is the internal meetings and standup that I have each morning with my team. This helps us stay organized and keeps us on track with next actions.

The useful part isn't the summary. It's seeing what's missing: the action nobody owns, the question nobody answered.

Book Note

Atomic Habits

Clear is talking about personal habits, but it's just as true for a business. Your goals say where you want to go. Your systems decide where you actually end up.

What I'm Working On

Why did I spend the time building that?

You've probably had this happen. You build something, come back months later to make a change, and think, "Why didn't I just do it this way?"

With AI, that gap has shrunk from months to weeks. Things I custom-built, thinking I was on the cutting edge, keep showing up in standard tools a few weeks later, usually done better. Now the thought is, "Why did I spend the time building that?"

Here's my latest example. I built a content generation engine for my team, so our documents, slides and infographics match our brand every single time. It took weeks of building a server and everything around it. Since then, Claude has caught up. Most businesses don't need an engine like mine anymore. A Claude Project with a handful of skills gets the same result.

Right now I'm working on a simple workflow to help a few clients set that up inside Claude directly, with no custom build. If keeping your team's documents on-brand is a constant fight, try it yourself: start a Project, add your brand guidelines and a couple of examples, and see how close it gets.