i timed my monthly investor update and ~80% of it was just gathering inputs

Did this out of curiosity last month. The actual writing was maybe 15 minutes. the other two hours was me being the courier, pulling granola call notes, last month's metrics out of a sheet, and the three open gmail threads with investors into one place so i could even start.

For years i assumed the writing was the bottleneck. it wasn't, it was the assembly. so i handed the gather step to one of those desktop ai agents that can read granola, gmail and a metrics doc inside the same task instead of me tabbing between them. it came back about 80% drafted and i edited the rest.

the draft quality wasn't the surprise. Not opening six tabs to rebuild the month was.

if you write a recurring update, where does your time actually go, the thinking or the input-gathering? mine was almost all gathering and i had it backwards the whole time. written with ai