Built a workflow that saves me about 11 hours a week. It's not glamorous but it works. Here's what it does and why I almost didn't build it.
not an ai agent, not anything impressive looking. just a boring n8n workflow that i put off building for about four months because it seemed too simple to bother with
what it does: every morning it pulls my unread emails, runs them through a classifier i built, tags them by urgency and category, drafts a one-line summary for each, and drops everything into a notion inbox sorted by priority. if something is flagged urgent it sends me a push notification before i even open my laptop
took me maybe 6 hours to build. runs every day without me thinking about it. i've tracked my time for the last two months and it's saving me between 9 and 13 hours a week depending on email volume
the reason i almost didn't build it: i kept waiting to build something more impressive first. kept thinking this was too basic, too obvious, not worth posting about. which is exactly the trap i think a lot of people in this space fall into — waiting for the perfect complex use case while the boring high-ROI ones just sit there
the classifier is the only interesting part technically. i'm using claude via api to categorize by type, urgency, and required action. accuracy is around 94% after a few weeks of tweaking the prompt. the other 6% i correct manually and use as training signal to improve the prompt
what's the most unglamorous automation you've built that actually changed how you work day to day