For today’s blog, I uploaded the task assignment template to Gemini and ChatGPT PLUS and prompted each tool to create an April 2025 task assignment for fictitious team members.

Again, ChatGPT PLUS produced the superior result.

Solving pain points in your personal workflow is one of the benefits of AI.

I asked Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT PLUS to assume the role of a Team Lead and solve for assigning tasks fairly, providing transparency on task assignment, and creating documentary evidence of task completion. The prompt I uploaded was identical for both and is stated below.

ChatGPT PLUS produced the superior result.

ChatGPT PLUS attempted to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to analyze a workflow hand-written on a whiteboard. (I didn’t even know it had OCR capability.) The OCR failed. ChatGPT switched to “manual” analysis and provided a response to my request.

Some very interesting questions came out of that episode. I asked ChatGPT these questions, and ChatGPT provided some very interesting answers.

ChatGPT PLUS attempted to use Optical Character Recognition to analyze the whiteboard information. (I didn’t even know it had OCR capability.) The OCR failed. ChatGPT switched to “manual” analysis and provided a response to my request.

AI is an effective tool for identifying gaps and lack of clarity in workflows. If a team already has workflow diagrams, and has access to a company-approved AI tool, it can request a review of the workflow’s logic and expect to receive valid, actionable feedback.

Documenting workflows can be tedious. If ChatGPT can become a flowchart SME — producing good workflow diagrams from input such as photos of sticky notes or whiteboards — it has the potential for helping a team or a department reach its workflow clarity goals quickly.

I’ve wondered if it’s possible we baby boomers have been conditioned to view this stage of life as an end-of-our-potential outcome instead of as a continuation of the journey to our full potential? It’s the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.

ChatGPT is training me to become an effective trainer. And I’m training ChatGPT to become an effective workflow assistant. It’s a fun partnership, largely because neither one of us is sinking to snarky remarks spawned from communication frustration.

Using the free version of ChatGPT’s “Analyze Images” option, and an image of handwritten sticky notes, I conducted two tests. Results are shown below as Sample One and Sample Two. As you’ll see, the difference between the two samples lies in the prompt I asked ChatGPT.

Scenario: Your team is part of the Operations Department of a company that sells expensive equipment and offers loans to finance the equipment. The company has made the decision to eliminate paper documents in favor of PDF documents, which will be saved on a shared drive. Your team’s workflow begins and ends with paper documents, and you have been tasked with mapping your current-state workflow to the future-state workflow.

It’s helpful to create a visual map of your team’s current workflow and use it as a guide for envisioning the future workflow. It’s during the envisioning process that questions and potential issues emerge.

Not all bummers are avoidable - like when a side of your PB&J hurtles jam-side toward the floor and you try to catch it but smack your head on the open kitchen drawer just as the dog arrives. But when it comes to the processes and workflows that govern daily life in an organization, it pays to avoid certain bummers, including:

Current-state Lori isn’t even close to that average pace. To get there, over the next four months I must improve my running until I can run consistently a 9-minute-55-second pace for 13.1 miles. In order to improve, I need a baseline, knowledge of where I’m at today. This necessitates a tool that performs data collection with a high degree of accuracy.

My heart goes out to the LA residents who suffered such terrible losses from the fires. Your grief must be crushing. Courage and strength be yours.

Unless an organization is in start-up mode, it’s unreasonable to expect new talent to welcome a trial-by-fire onboarding experience. At some point, every organization - large or small - has to stop performing like a start-up in eternal chaos and start performing as a mature organization with mature workflows, mature SOPs, and established continuous improvement efforts.

As you lie in your hospital bed, groggy and groaning post-surgery, your phone blows up with texts from the untrained person. Questions ping in, one after the other in a barrage so relentless a nurse peeks in to ask if you’re good. Meanwhile, your frantic co-worker is waiting for answers to questions like:

• 12:41pm How do the boarding requests come in? Outlook email? If email, what is address? How to access email? How to prioritize requests - first in, first out? Who sends email requests? Do senders get an auto-reply stating the request is being scheduled? How to differentiate between a new request and a follow-up?

Learning how to run faster at age 65 carries some freaking difficult mental walls. For me, the most insidious wall is the phrase I’m too old. Crafty and evil, the phrase whispers, “Self-improvement is for the young. Go home and live vicariously through Golden Girls.” More than one guided training run has found me sobbing against the wily whisperer’s lie.

Paper. Post-its. Pens. These tools are all you need to jumpstart the creative process of mapping a workflow. They’re old-school simple, set an expectation of play, and allow participants to be physically engaged in both memorializing and solving the puzzle of their workflow.

Workflow documenting, aka mapping, can appear overwhelming if you’ve never done it before. How do you differentiate between a workflow and a procedure? And with multiple departments and teams performing multiple categories of work, how do you determine which workflows to map first? Here are 8 simple steps to determine which workflow to map first.

Workflow mapping is the act of transferring internal operations knowledge out of employee heads, memorializing it, and saving it in a shared location. Mapping can uncover duplication of effort, identify interrelated tasks and areas that can benefit from shared resources, and reveal how key data points move through the workflow.

During a webinar yesterday, a presenter stated, “AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows AI better just might.” It’s the type of statement that can elicit a crazed urgent-urgency to go all-in with GenAI, or other artificial intelligence, before steady preparation has concluded.