# How to automate the non-creative parts of your creative job Source: https://aaronmakelky.com/blog/automate-non-creative-work Last updated: 2026-10-27 It can probably do most of your repetitive, tedious, logistical, garbage work, and you don't need technical chops to set it up. October 27, 2026 · 6 min read AI Workflows · Automation · Notion AI · Claude Cowork · Linear It can probably do most of your repetitive, tedious, logistical, garbage work, and you don't need technical chops to set it up. By Aaron Makelky Every creative deals with some amount of logistics, and not the fun kind, like when UPS delivers a baked ham. Scheduling, formatting, copy-pasting, down-and-uploading — the stuff you have to do to move content through your workflow and out into the world. Not everyone hates all of it. But most of us hate most of it. I’m good at this stuff, and I still hate it. So I ruthlessly automate it. With the AI that’s out there today you can pretty easily automate almost anything. Including your creative process — but presumably, hopefully, you know better than that. Instead, look for anything repetitive, manual, or mechanical, and try automating that. I’m a world-history teacher-turned-marketer, and I’ve got all kinds of automations running, all the time. All you need is a chatbot and the will to spend an hour or so connecting apps and prompting the AI until it knows what to do. A few examples might help you see what’s possible. Here are three ways I use AI to automate stuff that slows me down, bums me out, and saps my creative energy. ## The data entry you loathe Getting any content uploaded — to a social app, YouTube, a blog, or anywhere — requires a lot of tedious, garbage work. It feels like data entry, and if you have to do it regularly, it likely eats a good chunk of your time. I’ve largely eliminated that feeling and snatched back the time with this automation. When the video team finishes a project, the producer sends me a Notion doc. It has all the context and info I need: topic, schedule date, YouTube link, transcript, and so on. I used to create a new entry on the Notion social calendar, take all of the context and links, copy-paste 5-7 things to it, fill out a few fields for my tracking purposes, and write the copy. Then switch tabs to the scheduling tool, paste the copy, and upload the video. Once it went out, I’d go back to the Notion social calendar, mark the platforms it went out on, and mark it published. The whole process probably took me 30 minutes, 7-10 times per week. A killer. Now I just type “/calendar” in Notion. That triggers Notion’s AI bot to create everything above — except the copy — and add it to a new entry on the social calendar. It takes a few seconds. I spend my time and brain power thinking about how to package the video across channels, then writing the copy. I did this just by going into Notion’s AI tool and writing a new instruction. You could do the same with Claude or ChatGPT. ![Notion AI instructions page for a /calendar command: create a new Social media cal entry from the current page, extract subject, schedule date, status, month, asset type, platform, links, and context, then fill in the new page](/images/blog/automate-non-creative-work/notion-calendar-instructions.jpg) Instructions to Notion’s AI. Took about a minute to write, saves me hours The next step is to connect Notion AI to my scheduling tool, Sprout Social (as soon as Sprout’s API can handle that), at which point I’ll be able to schedule and post a video without filling out a single field in a single tool. For now though, I’ve automated about 80% of the process. ## The app you never want to open Mine is Linear, a project management tool built for engineers. I’m not an engineer. Nor do I want to spend 20 minutes every morning poring over all the tasks I’ve been assigned to see which ones I should tackle that day. You may not use Linear or have any idea what it is (lucky you), but I bet you use some task-management tool, and I know you have work that lives in apps, browser tabs, or workspaces that force you to context switch, break your flow, and mutter obscenities when you visit them. I’ve set up an automation in Claude that checks Linear the hour before I log in every day. It looks for tasks that are overdue or due in the next two weeks. It prioritizes them for me, then it schedules time for me to work on them. It even drops links to everything I need to know for the project, right into the calendar entry. When I’m done, I just type “document the work” into Claude. It adds relevant links to the task in Linear, then marks it done. Number of times I open Linear while completing a task: zero. I did this using Claude Cowork, which is kind of like vibe-coding for idiots — or creatives. I’d encourage you to try it (or Codex if you use ChatGPT) and to use it instead of the main chatbot for automations like this. You can connect it to any apps you work in, work with local files more easily, and even let it do things across apps that used to be in different tabs. Setting up automations starts with just telling Cowork what you want to do, and when. I use it as my Linear gofer and to create other automations, like taking a meeting transcript from Notion, extracting my follow-up tasks, and adding them to Linear; or going through my Gmail inbox every morning, telling me what I should read and what meetings I have. ## The files you can never find This year I realized I had a slide deck problem. Not only because I had made “final_v4_for_real_this_time” versions of dozens of presentations. But also because I had been creating presentations in three completely different ecosystems. Google Slides for one series of projects, Canva for a bunch of personal decks, and then all my work slides in Figma. Whenever I needed to update an old presentation, either for a different audience or because something changed — which is always, since some of my slides address which AI models are best for which work, and that changes weekly — I first had to think about where the heck the original was. Once I’d hunted it down, I had to click through all the slides I’d made nine months ago to find the one that needed updating. Now I just give Claude a general description of which deck I want to update and what I want to change. It finds the deck, finds the slides that need updating, then hands me a punch list telling me exactly where I need to go and what I need to change. It takes less than a minute, and it’s never gotten it wrong. ![Claude chat with a slide-by-slide punch list for a 90-minute agent skills workshop deck, grouped into an opening block and a skill anatomy block, with project files listed on the right](/images/blog/automate-non-creative-work/claude-slide-punch-list.jpg) I don’t let it touch my slides. I’ve used tools that claim to create beautiful slides for you, but none of them are as good as a junior designer. When I go to update slides, or create a new deck, I’ll do it myself. Now that I’ve automated all the annoying stuff, I’ve got the time. ## Are you automation-curious? The slide decks are pretty unique to me. Maybe all of these are. The idea is: make AI do the least creative, most annoying parts of my job. If you’re automation-curious but not sure where to start, just pick one non-creative thing you don’t like doing, or that you struggle to find time for. Then ask your AI chatbot of choice how to automate it, and follow directions. You won’t even have to think very hard. Because wouldn’t you rather be thinking about something else? Like the ham, baked with honey probably, that UPS just delivered. Originally published April 30, 2026 in [Fort Human](https://forthuman.substack.com/p/dont-want-ai-near-your-creative-work), Descript's newsletter. ## Related pages - [All field notes](/blog) - [Your AI app should not own your work](/blog/your-ai-app-should-not-own-your-work) - [I gave every AI agent its own Linear account](/blog/linear-multi-agent-workspace) - [Meeting Note Clerk](/tools/meeting-note-clerk) - [How to use Cursor Automations](/blog/how-to-use-cursor-automations) - [About Aaron Makelky](/about) ## Sources and references - [Fort Human: How to automate the non-creative parts of your creative job](https://forthuman.substack.com/p/dont-want-ai-near-your-creative-work) - [Aaron on X (@theaaron)](https://x.com/theaaron) ## Common questions ### What parts of a creative job should you automate with AI? The repetitive, manual, or mechanical parts. Aaron's examples are the data entry of uploading a video, sorting tasks in a project tool, and hunting down an old slide. He still writes the copy and builds the slides himself. ### Do you need to code to set these automations up? No. A chatbot and about an hour of connecting the apps you already use is enough. Aaron wrote one instruction in Notion AI. Claude Cowork handles the Linear and file jobs, and Codex can do the same work in ChatGPT. ### Where should you start? Pick one non-creative thing you don't like doing, or that you struggle to find time for. Ask your chatbot how to automate it, and follow its directions.