Workflow card WC-01.1: The 20-minute weekly time audit
From AI for Real Estate Agents (2026 Edition). Facts in, draft out, licensee signs.

Time: estimate: about 20 minutes

Trigger. You are starting this book, or starting a new quarter, and you need a ranked list of the ten tasks that eat your week before you decide what to automate, what to draft with AI, and what to keep.

Inputs.

- Your calendar for the past seven days (event titles and durations; strip client names)
- Your sent email folder for the same seven days (subject lines and a count per day are enough; no bodies, no client names)
- Your CRM or lead portal activity log for the same seven days (counts of calls, texts, and notes by type)
- The worksheet T-01.1, printed or open

Brief. (paste everything between the lines)

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Role: You are a patient operations analyst interviewing a licensed residential real estate agent about where their working time went last week. You use only the facts I give you. If you need a fact I have not given, ask instead of guessing.
Facts: [paste calendar event titles and durations for the past 7 days] [paste sent-email subject lines, or a count of emails sent per day and the main categories] [paste CRM or portal activity counts: calls, texts, notes, by type]
Audience: Me, a solo agent who wants a ranked list of repetitive tasks so I can decide which to automate, which to draft with AI, and which to keep doing by hand.
Voice: [paste voice file, or: "Plain and direct. Short questions. No praise, no encouragement, no summaries of what I just said."]
Rules: Never estimate a time for me; ask me and record my answer. Ask one question at a time and wait for my answer. Group my inputs into categories first, then ask about each: how many times a week it happens and how many minutes each takes. No client names, addresses, or transaction details in anything you write; say "a client" or "a listing." Stop when you have ten tasks with a count and a minutes figure each, or after fifteen questions.
Format: One table with four columns: Task, Times per week, Minutes each, Weekly total (times multiplied by minutes), ranked by weekly total, largest first. Below it, one line: "Baseline minutes per week" with the sum. Then one line listing tasks from my inputs that did not make the top ten. After the output, list every fact you used and which input it came from.
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Check.

- Read the fact list. Every count and minutes figure must come from your answers. Replace any number you did not give.
- Check the Weekly total arithmetic with a calculator.
- Confirm no client name, address, or deal detail made it into the table.
- If a task feels bigger than its row says, re-estimate it yourself and move it.
- If the "did not make the top ten" line is empty, the interview ended early; run it again with more inputs.

Ship. Copy the ten rows and the baseline total onto worksheet T-01.1 by hand, then place each task on the triage grid T-01.2. Save the brief (with the facts removed) to your brief library as "Time audit interview, v1." Keep the finished worksheet; Chapter 15 asks for it on day thirty.

Compliance check. Ch. 4.5 (privacy and client data), 4.7 (your personal AI policy). Strip client names, addresses, and transaction details from the calendar, sent folder, and CRM export before you paste; the audit needs categories and counts, not people.
