If you are not sure what to automate first, that is normal. Work rarely arrives labelled as a process. It is just the things you do, mostly kept in your head rather than written down anywhere, and it takes a bit of effort to see the shape underneath.

This guide is one way to do that. It walks through picking a task, writing down how you currently do it, and working out which parts Formt can take over. It takes about fifteen minutes, and it helps to have a notebook or a blank document open. It works the same whether it is your first workflow or your twentieth.

A workflow is any piece of work that starts at a predictable moment, follows roughly the same steps each time, and ends with something produced or sent. Every workflow has three parts.

The trigger. The thing that says start now. Usually a schedule (the first of the month, every Monday at 8am) or an event (a form gets submitted, an invoice goes overdue, a job changes status). If you are the trigger, that counts too. Some workflows are ones you run yourself when you need them.

The steps. The individual actions, in order. Each step needs something to work with and hands something on to the next one. Pulling the numbers gives you data. The summary needs that data. The PDF needs the summary. The email needs the PDF. That chain is what makes it a workflow rather than a list of chores.

The result. What exists at the end that did not exist before. An email in someone's inbox, a PDF, a new row in a spreadsheet, a post published. If you cannot point at a result, the work is probably a responsibility rather than a workflow.

If you have ever explained a task to a new hire, you have described a workflow. The steps you listed are the workflow.

The work worth automating is rarely the hardest thing you do. It is the small, dull, recurring thing you keep putting off, then rushing through because it has to get done. Pick one of these and write it at the top of your page:

• What did you do this week that you also did last week?
• What do you keep in your head so you do not forget it?
• What do you put off until it becomes urgent?
• What do you hand off to someone else, then chase to make sure it happened?
• What would fall through the cracks entirely if you were away for two weeks?
• What do you copy from one place and paste into another?

This is the step people skip, and skipping it is why the rest gets hard.

Describe the task exactly as you do it today, start to finish, in whatever order it actually happens. Include the boring parts. Include the parts that only happen sometimes. Include the part where you check something on your phone, or wait for someone to get back to you, or squint at a spreadsheet to work out which row is the right one.

Do not think about what a computer could do, not yet. If you filter while you write, you will leave out the messy middle, and the messy middle is usually where most of the time goes. You will also talk yourself out of the whole thing before you have seen it written down.

Write it as though you were explaining it to someone starting on Monday. If you find yourself saying "and then obviously you have to", write that down too. The obvious parts are still steps. You are done when you can read it back and it matches what you actually do.

Now go back over what you wrote and mark it up. Find the moment it starts and label it the trigger. Find the point where the work is finished and label that the result. Everything in between is a step, so number them.

Here is what that looks like for a simple one: on the first of the month, you pull last month's numbers out of the spreadsheet, write a short summary, turn it into a PDF, and email it to the client.

Trigger. The first of the month.

Step 1. Read last month's numbers from the spreadsheet.

Step 2. Write a summary of those numbers.

Step 3. Turn the summary into a PDF.

Step 4. Email the PDF to the client.

Result. The client has this month's report.

Go back through your steps and put each one into one of three groups.

Automate it. The step follows a rule, uses information that exists somewhere Formt can reach, and produces something predictable. Reading a spreadsheet, drafting an email, making a PDF, posting to Slack, updating a record, doing a calculation.

Automate it, but check it first. The step is mechanical but the output matters enough that you want the final say. Formt can pause before any step, show you exactly what it is about to do, and wait for your approval. You can change what it produced before letting it continue. An email you would never let software send on your behalf becomes a workflow that drafts it, shows it to you, and sends it once you say so.

Leave it to me. Some steps are genuinely yours. If you look at each case and decide what to do based on things you know but could not really explain, that is judgement rather than process, and it should stay with you.

Your workflow is everything except the leave it to me steps. Where those steps sit tells you what to do with them.

At the end. The workflow stops there. Say you do a client review every month: Formt can pull the numbers and write them up, but reading it and deciding what you actually think is yours. The workflow ends after the write-up, and the summary is waiting for you on the first of the month.

At the start. Do that part yourself, then trigger the workflow with whatever it needs to run.

In the middle. Usually still one workflow. It can pause and ask you for whatever that step produces, a number you looked up, a decision, a short note, then carry on once you have answered. The exception is when the wait is not really on you. If the next steps only happen once a client replies or a document comes back, that second half has its own trigger and probably belongs in its own workflow.

Nothing new to work out. Choose AI Generate and describe the workflow you landed on, from its trigger through to its last step.

Say which steps you want to check before they run, and which ones need you to fill something in partway through. If you sketched a rule next to a step, include that too. For example, you might type: every Monday at 8am, pull my outstanding invoices from Xero, filter to the ones more than seven days overdue, draft a polite reminder email for each customer, let me review them, then send them from my own domain.

That is somebody typing up their notes, and it is enough for Formt to build a working first version. It does not need to be tidy, and you do not need to know what any of the steps are called inside Formt.

Once it is built, you will see the whole thing laid out on a canvas, every step and how they connect. If a step does not look right, or you are not sure what it does, ask in the chat and change it from there. Describing the change works the same way as describing the workflow did.

The canvas shows you the shape. Running it shows you whether it works. Do a test run before you put anything on a schedule. Formt shows you each step as it happens, what went into it and what came out, so when something is off you can see exactly where.

Point the output at yourself for the first run. Put your own address in as the recipient, or use a contact or a copy of the spreadsheet you have set aside for testing. Reading your real data in is fine and makes the test more useful. It is the sending and the writing back you want to keep to yourself until you have seen it work. If the workflow loops over a list, run it against one item rather than all two hundred.

Expect to change something after the first run. Almost everyone does. Building a rough first version and adjusting it is much quicker than trying to get it right first time. The parts you marked to check before they run help here too, since they give you a look at what is about to happen before it does.

Some work is a poor candidate no matter how you slice it. Recognising it early saves you the effort.

Work that rarely comes up. If it only happens once in a blue moon, setting up the workflow costs more than just doing it manually.

Work you have not done manually yet. Automating a process you have never run usually means automating your guess about it. Do it by hand a few times first.

Work that only exists in your head. If there is no data anywhere, only your memory of what happened, there is nothing for a workflow to work with.

A few things that help.

Browse the template library. Seeing what other businesses run is often faster than generating ideas from scratch. Look for something adjacent to your work and adapt it.

Ask us. Tell us what you spend your week on, and we are happy to help you work out where to start.

Tell us what is missing. If your workflow needs a tool Formt does not connect to yet, let us know which one. Requests from customers are a big part of how we decide what to build next.