Learning Objectives
- Complete your first real automation with zero setup
- Understand what Claude can do for your work
- Build the habit of asking: could Claude do this?
🎯 What You'll Do: Run a real automation using Claude, no setup, no code, no waiting.
Meet Riley, Before Day One
It's Sunday evening. Riley Harper, Operations Director at a mid-sized financial services firm, is staring at her Monday morning routine: pull margin data from three systems, reconcile the numbers, format it into a report, add commentary, and email it to four people. Four hours, every single week.
She hasn't set up Claude Code yet. She doesn't know what an agent is. But she has a paid Claude account and the desktop app.
She opens it. Types: "Every Monday I pull margin data from three sources, format it into a table, add a brief commentary, and email it to my team. Can you help me build a process for this?"
Twenty minutes later, she has a draft. A real draft, not a template, not a suggestion. Something she can actually send. She installed nothing. She wrote no code. She just described her work.
That's where this lesson starts.
Before You Start
What you need:
Useful prep, optional but recommended:
If you've never used Claude beyond basic chat, two free Anthropic Academy courses will help you move faster here:
Not required. This course teaches everything from zero. But if you've done both, you'll spend less time on setup and more time building.
After this course:
If you want to go deeper, writing hooks directly in JSON, building with the Claude API, Anthropic Academy has free advanced courses that cover that ground. You don't need to. This course gives you everything needed to automate your work effectively as a business professional. The technical route is there if you want it.
What This Lesson Is
Claude isn't just a chatbot that answers questions. It can draft, format, analyse, and iterate, working through multi-step tasks with you, not just responding to them. This lesson shows you what that feels like before you set up anything more advanced.
Exercise: Your First Automation
⏱️ Total Time: 20 minutes
Step 1, Find the Task (10 minutes)
Think about one repetitive task from your working week. Not a project. Not a strategy. A task, something you do the same way, every time, that takes 20–60 minutes.
Good candidates:
Example prompts to get you started:
"Every Friday I summarise the week's project updates into a status report for my director. Here's the format I use: [paste your template]. Help me build a process that drafts this faster."
"I spend 30 minutes before every client call pulling together background, recent interactions, and key questions. Here's what I typically include: [list]. Help me automate this."
"I write about 15 similar emails a week, follow-ups, introductions, updates. They all have the same structure. Help me build a faster way to draft them."
Don't overthink it. Pick the first thing that came to mind when you read "repetitive task."
Step 2, Send the Refinement (5 minutes)
Open Claude (desktop app or claude.ai). Describe your task. Be specific: what do you do, what inputs do you use, what does the output look like.
Claude will produce something. Read it. Then send one refinement instruction, just one. This is the most important skill in the entire course.
Refinement examples:
One instruction. See what changes.
Step 3, Save Your Prompt (5 minutes)
Whatever you just wrote to start the task, that's your first prompt template. Save it somewhere: a note, a doc, anywhere you can find it next week.
Label it clearly: Weekly Status Report, Starting Prompt or whatever fits your task.
This is your first reusable automation. Not code. Not a system. Just a prompt that does consistent work, consistently.
Success Criteria
Before you move on, check these:
If all four are checked, you've automated your first task. It took 20 minutes.
Troubleshooting
Claude is asking me questions instead of just doing it?
That's normal, it's refining its understanding of your task. Answer the questions. It's making the output better. After one or two rounds it will stop asking and start producing.
The output doesn't match how I actually work?
Be more specific. Paste an example of something you've written before. Tell Claude: "Here's a real example of what I'm trying to produce: [paste it]." Specific examples always beat abstract descriptions.
Not sure which Claude plan you need?
Claude Pro or Team gives you access to the full model. Free tier works for this exercise but has usage limits. Claude Code (used from Lesson 1.1 onwards) requires a paid plan.
What's Next
That task you just automated? It might be your Quick Win, the automation we'll build properly in Module 1. In Lesson 1.1, you'll score it against a six-criteria framework and calculate exactly how much time it saves you per year.
If your prompt produced something useful, you're already ahead. Keep it. We'll build on it.