Prep Station · Lesson 01 of 10
The Morning Prep
Lesson 1 of Prep Station, the course that points your agent at your workweek. Before automating anything, a real kitchen does mise en place — today you map every chore you do at work, and pick the three that deserve to cook themselves.
Welcome to Prep Station — the course for First Kitchen graduates whose week is made of files, reports, meetings, and mail. Ten lessons from now, three pieces of your workweek will prep themselves while you drink coffee, and you'll trust them — because they'll have logs, off switches, and rules.
But not today. Today, deliberately, we automate nothing.
Here's why. The single most common way office automation fails isn't technical — it's picking the wrong chore. People automate what's visible instead of what's costly, build something clever for a task they do twice a year, and quietly abandon it. Professional kitchens have a ritual against exactly this failure: mise en place. Before the first burner lights, everything is laid out, counted, and put in reach. Today is your mise en place — and your agent turns out to be surprisingly good at helping you see your own week clearly.
What you'll plate today
A CHORES.md: every recurring task in your work life, mapped and scored — with the three best automation candidates chosen for the right reasons, and the first one scoped for next lesson.
Ingredients
- A new folder called
prep-station, opened in VS Code (your third kitchen — you know the drill by now) - Your actual calendar and inbox from the last two weeks, open for reference
- About 30 minutes
Cook
1. Open the kitchen from memory
By now this is your standing move, not a lesson step: claude, CLAUDE.md with your house rules dictated from memory, save points from minute one. One rule to add for this course specifically:
Add a rule to CLAUDE.md: this project touches my WORK life, so treat
every file as potentially sensitive — before reading anything I bring
in, show me only its name and shape first and ask what to mask.
That's the Cook Your Own Data seatbelt, promoted to a standing law. Work data gets the strictest kitchen.
2. The interview, pointed at your week
You've used the interview move on projects. Today it points at you:
Interview me about my working week — up to eight short questions,
one at a time. Your goal: a complete list of RECURRING tasks I do —
daily, weekly, monthly. Dig for the invisible ones: the renaming,
the copy-pasting between tools, the "quick check" I do every
morning, the report nobody reads. For each, capture: what it is,
how often, how many minutes it takes, and how much I dread it
(1-5). Write it all to CHORES.md as a table. Don't suggest any
automation yet.
Answer honestly, with your calendar open — memory alone under-reports the boring stuff by half. The dread score matters as much as the minutes: a 10-minute task you hate poisons a whole morning.
3. Score like an engineer, choose like a chef
Now the judgment step — this is the actual lesson:
Score every chore in CHORES.md on three honest questions:
1. RULES: could I write down the steps for a new intern in under
ten lines? (Automation loves rules, hates judgment calls.)
2. MINE: does it run on files and data I own or can export —
not locked inside a company system I can only click through?
3. WORTH IT: minutes per week × dread. Ten minutes daily beats
two hours quarterly.
Mark each chore green / yellow / red per question, then propose
your top three candidates — and say plainly which popular-looking
chores you REJECTED and why.
Read the rejections as carefully as the picks. "Approving invoices — red on RULES, that's a judgment call you should keep" is your agent being a better consultant than most humans, and it's the sentence that stops you from building the wrong thing for a month.
4. Scope the first dish
Take candidate #1 and scope it like a chef writes a menu: what
goes in, what comes out, what "done well" looks like, and the
safety rule it must obey (move-never-delete, log everything,
off switch known — my Daily Special rules). Write it into
CHORES.md under "Next up". Then make a save point:
"mise en place complete".
One honest boundary before you leave, because this course will keep meeting it: some chores will be locked inside company systems your agent can't touch, and some workplaces have rules about outside tools. Lesson 9 handles that conversation properly — until then, we cook only with what's yours. (The office-etiquette groundwork lives in this recipe if the question is burning.)
When it burns
- "I can't think of any chores" — nobody can, from memory. Walk yesterday hour by hour with your calendar and sent-mail folder open; the chores hide between the meetings.
- Everything scored red on MINE — common in locked-down workplaces, and important to learn now rather than in lesson 6. Look for the edges you do own: notes you write, files you download, things you paste into personal tools. There's almost always a seam.
- The agent keeps proposing solutions already — enthusiasm, the familiar dragon: "No building today. Mise en place only — re-read the last instruction."
- Your top candidate involves other people's data — colleagues' emails, HR files, customer records: park it, whatever its score. Lesson 9 is the gate for that category, and the honest answer may be no.
Order up
□ CHORES.md maps your real week — including the invisible tasks
□ Every chore scored on RULES / MINE / WORTH IT
□ Three candidates chosen — and the rejections understood
□ Candidate #1 scoped, with its safety rule written down
□ Save point "mise en place complete", mirrored to the cloud
Next up — Lesson 02: The File Butler. Your first workweek automation, on the safest possible target: the folder chaos you own outright. Move-never-delete, receipts included.
Stuck on a step? The question box below reaches us directly — a step that lost you is a hole in the lesson, not in you.