A checklist is a workflow waiting to happen

If you've already written a checklist for a task — the steps you personally walk through every single time — you've done most of the hard work of designing a workflow. The checklist is the workflow's blueprint before it ever touches software.

This is the easiest entry point for anyone new to automation, because you're not designing something from imagination, you're translating something you already trust. I still start every new build by pulling out my own checklist first. Each line on the checklist becomes a step. Each place you'd normally pause and check something becomes a condition or an approval. You don't need to invent logic from scratch; you just need to notice where the checklist already has decision points built in.

If a task in your business doesn't have a checklist yet, write one before you think about automating it at all.

Try this today: dig up a checklist you already use and mark each line as either something a workflow could do or something a person still needs to decide.