Write down what actually happens

The gap

Ask anyone to describe a task they do daily and you will get the clean version: six steps, all necessary, all in order. Watch them do it and you will count fourteen steps, three of which are checks they do not know they are doing and two of which exist only because of a decision someone made in 2019.

The clean version is the one people automate. The fourteen-step version is the one that actually works. This gap is where most automation projects die.

How to close it

Do the task and narrate it out loud, writing each line as you go. Not from memory afterwards — memory reconstructs the clean version. Write it while your hands are moving.

For each line, capture three things:

• What you did. The literal action.
• What made you decide to do it. The trigger. Often this is something you looked at and did not consciously register.
• How you knew it worked. The check. If you cannot name one, write “no check” and circle it. You have just found a real problem.

The three things you will find

Invisible checks. You glance at a number and it looks right, so you continue. That glance is a validation step and it must survive into the automation, or the machine will proceed happily past the exact condition you have been silently catching for years.

Dead steps. Steps that made sense once and now do nothing. Delete them from the process before you automate it. Automating a dead step preserves it forever, and in five years nobody will dare remove it because nobody will know why it is there.

Branches you forgot. “Unless it is a Tuesday.” “Unless the file is empty.” “Unless it is one of the old accounts.” Every one of these is a branch. Write them down. They do not go away when you automate; they turn into edge cases that fail at 2am.

Do it three times

Once is a description. Three times is a process. The differences between your three write-ups are the honest measure of how ready this task is — and if run two and run three are identical, you have something worth automating.