Record Work Activities, Turn Into AI Automation

Why Recording Your Work Actually Matters Right Now

Here's the honest truth: you already know how to do your repetitive tasks well. You've done them hundreds of times. But when you try to explain that process to someone else—or worse, to a developer who'll build an automation—something gets lost in translation.

What if you could just show the AI instead of telling it? That's the entire premise of tools like Screenpipe, Rewind, and Recall. They record your actual work—your clicks, your keystrokes, your tab switches—and turn that recording into a blueprint for automation.

This matters for managers especially. According to McKinsey research from 2024, knowledge workers spend roughly 31% of their time on administrative tasks that could be automated. If you're managing a team, you're probably watching people repeat the same data entry, email sorting, or report-building steps daily. Recording those workflows means you can automate them in weeks, not months, without needing an engineering team.

How to Record and Capture Your Workflow

Start simple. Pick one task that you do at least twice a week—something that takes 10-30 minutes and feels repetitive. Don't try to record your entire workday on day one.

Install Screenpipe (free, open-source) on your Mac or Windows machine. It runs quietly in the background and captures everything on your screen along with your activity. The key is privacy: it only stores data locally on your machine unless you specifically push it somewhere. Fire it up, then perform your task exactly as you normally would. Don't optimize or rush. Just work naturally.

The recording captures the sequence: you open Salesforce, navigate to the Opportunities tab, filter by stage, copy data into a CSV, then paste it into a Google Sheet where you add formulas. Every step. Every pause. All of it.

When you're done, stop the recording. You now have a video-like transcript of your actions that an AI can actually understand and replicate.

Turn Your Recording Into an AI Agent Blueprint

This is where it gets powerful. You take that recorded workflow and feed it to an AI model like Claude or Gemini.

Here's a real example: Sarah is a sales manager managing a 6-person team. Every Monday morning, she spends 45 minutes pulling weekly revenue figures from her CRM, cross-referencing them with a spreadsheet of target quotas, then writing a Slack summary for her team. It's not hard work, but it's tedious and error-prone when she's rushing.

Sarah records herself doing this exact process on a Monday. She imports the Screenpipe recording into Claude's analysis. She writes: