The Six-Figure Habit

Hey friends, I hope your week is off to a great start. This week we are discussing Standard Operating Procedures, otherwise known as coverage docs, backup plans, or handoff docs.

This week

If you ask ten EAs how they document their work, you will get ten different answers, and most of them will end with some version of "I keep meaning to document this." I have been one of those EAs more times than I want to admit, because the work always feels too urgent to stop and document, and writing it down feels like overhead until the day you actually need it. Then it feels like a pop quiz.

The reason documentation matters more right now than it did even two years ago is that it has become one of the most important AI-readiness steps you can take. The EA whose work lives entirely in her head can only execute that work manually, which means every time she takes a vacation, gets pulled into a board prep cycle, or covers for a colleague, the work waits or someone else does a rough version of it. The EA whose work is documented can hand pieces of it to a backup without missing a beat, push parts of it into automated workflows, and use AI to scale the steps that used to require her physical presence in every loop. Documentation is the bridge between your judgment and your AI fluency, because the judgment that lives in your head cannot be amplified by anything, while the judgment that lives in a structured prompt or a clear SOP can be deployed across new contexts at a scale you cannot reach by hand.

The same documentation that lets AI amplify your work does something else at the same time, which is to make the scope of what you actually do legible to leadership. Most of us have been trained to be invisible by design, and we treat the smoothness of an executive's day as our highest professional achievement. That instinct served us well in an earlier era, and the work has expanded since then to reward visibility too. The EAs whose work is documented and producing visible leverage are the EAs leadership invests in, gives bigger projects to, and brings into more strategic conversations. Documentation is what turns invisibility into legibility, and legibility is what leadership notices and rewards.

The job posting from Issue 4 comes back to this

If you remember the job posting I shared in Issue 4, the one at the major technology company for a Senior Executive Technology Specialist with a pay range of ninety-eight thousand to one hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars, the very first responsibility listed was "building documentation and runbooks for executive workflows." That role exists, in part, because most EAs have not yet built the documentation muscle, and so companies are creating a separate role to do it. The work is being priced at six figures right now, and the EA who is already documenting her workflows is already doing the work that role is being created for. She is just not being credited for it yet, which is a problem with two fixes: do the work, and make the work visible.

Here is the prompt to run today

This prompt is built to be low-friction and tailored to your actual workflow. The interview opens with a few quick context questions you answer with a single number, then asks you to describe the process in your own words and uses your description to shape everything that follows. The AI keeps asking until it has what it needs to draft a useful SOP, and almost every answer is a single number rather than a full sentence.

Open your AI tool of choice and paste this in:

A note on automation

This prompt is intentionally focused on documenting the process for a human to execute, not on automating any of it. There is a deeper reason for that boundary, which is that LLMs work best when you feed them work in building blocks rather than asking for everything at once. The natural sequence for any workflow runs brainstorm, idea, outline, process, automation, and each block sets up the one after it. Documenting the process is one block. Building automation on top of that documented process is the next block. Try to skip steps and the AI does each one less well than it could have. Documentation first, automation later, and the automation half is a future issue.

A note on what to document first

Pick the workflow you run most often. Not the most complex one, not the most impressive one, the one that shows up in your week the most reliably, because that is the one where the documentation will pay you back fastest in time saved and visibility gained. The complex once-a-quarter board prep can wait until you have built the muscle, and the muscle is built by documenting the work that repeats. Once you have the first SOP done, the next one will take half the time, and the one after that will feel like a habit instead of a project.

The other thing worth saying is that the SOP does not need to be perfect to be valuable. It needs to be good enough that someone else can pick it up and execute, and the version you build today is going to be the version you improve next week and the week after, because nothing pressure-tests an SOP like watching another set of hands try to follow it. The first draft is the unlock, not the finished product, and the EA who has a rough SOP for ten workflows is in a stronger position than the EA who has a perfect SOP for one.

Your move this week

Run the prompt, document one workflow, and put the finished SOP somewhere your executive and your team can actually see it. The visibility is the whole point, because the documentation is not the asset by itself, the documentation plus the visibility is what shifts the conversation about your role. Send a quick note to your manager letting them know you are building out documentation for your workflows, because that note alone is doing strategic work for you while you go about the rest of your week.

If you want a head start on the prompts that pair with this one, the free starter library for subscribers includes a documentation prompt, a handoff briefing prompt, and the workflow tracker from Issue 1, all of which work better together than any one of them works alone. The full library is available for EAs who want the complete toolkit, and every prompt in it is built to make the work you already do more visible, more scalable, and more obviously valuable to the people who decide what your role is worth.

→ Grab the free starter library at theforcemultiplier.co

Coming up next

We are getting into iteration. Specifically, the prompts in your library that you tried, that did not quite work, and that you almost threw out. I have a graveyard of those, including a scheduling agent I tried to build at least four times. The next issue walks through what changed when one of those almost-worked prompts finally clicked, and why the tools are moving fast enough that patience with the tooling is becoming a real competitive advantage.

You are built for this work, and I mean that.

Please do not wait on the sidelines while the rest of us figure it out.

Come figure it out with us.

Go multiply.

Sabrina

The Force Multiplier