I want to be really honest with you about something: the last time I manually built an Excel spreadsheet was 2023 and when I think about going back to that, I genuinely feel a little sick.
Not because spreadsheets are the enemy, but because I now know what it’s like to not spend my time that way, and that is a door I have zero interest in walking back through.
We’ve Been Doing So Much the Hard Way
Here’s what I think about a lot: how much of what we do every single day as entrepreneurs is just.…manual labour that doesn’t have to be. Building spreadsheets from scratch, writing the same kinds of emails over and over and over again, formatting documents, drafting content, thinking through strategy alone at our desks when we could have a thought partner available to us any time we need one.
We’ve normalized the hard way so completely that most of us don’t even notice we’re doing it anymore, we just accept it as the cost of running a business.
The Moment Things Shifted for Me
When I started building my AI system I wasn’t thinking about spreadsheets specifically, I was just trying to create more capacity across everything I was managing, and what I found was that the time I was spending on all these manual, repetitive, this-could-absolutely-be-done-another-way tasks started to just… disappear. Not because the work stopped needing to get done, but because I stopped being the one doing all of it manually. And the interesting thing is that it wasn’t dramatic, it was just quietly, consistently better…and once you experience that you genuinely cannot imagine going backwards.
Why Are We Still Doing Things Manually?
I think about this question a lot, and honestly the answer is usually one of three things: we don’t know there’s another way, we tried AI and it felt too generic to be useful, or we’ve been so buried in the doing that we haven’t had space to step back and ask whether the doing even needs to look the way it does.
None of those are character flaws, they’re just gaps in information, in setup, in time to think, and they’re completely fixable.
The women I work with aren’t any less capable before they build their AI system than they are after, they’re just spending their capability on different things. Before, it goes toward the manual, the repetitive, the time-consuming tasks that feel productive because they’re getting done but aren’t actually moving anything forward in a meaningful way. After, it goes toward the thinking, the decisions, the creative work, the things that actually need a human and specifically need them.
What’s Actually Possible
I run multiple businesses, and my system costs less than $100 a month, uses no fancy software, requires no technical background, and means that I am not manually building spreadsheets, not drafting content from scratch every time, not holding every detail in my head or spending hours on tasks that could be handled another way. I have workflows, automations, and I have figured out how to set many of my tasks to be run on autopilot by AI – running reports on schedule, deep research every Monday, the list goes on.
That’s not a flex, it’s just what becomes possible when you set things up properly, and it’s available to anyone who’s willing to learn how. The funny thing with AI is, that we all started at the same spot.
So if you’re still doing everything the hard way, I just want you to know that 2023 Linnden is not the goal….and she’d be the first to tell you so.
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