🧮 Teacher's Workbook: The AI Audit

Deep-dive class · 90 minutes · 20 slides · pairs with the projector deck · companion page: the Business page

This room is different from every other class in the kit: these people run things. Chambers of commerce, business meetups, downtown associations — owners of bars, crews, shops, and one-person empires, some diagnosed, some suspecting, all tired. They will be more skeptical than a library room (they've been pitched software every week of their lives) and more motivated (their leak is measured in payroll). The class's spine is the audit's one rule of order — no automation before counting — and its credibility rests on the same honesty as everything else we teach: the 5–10 hour target is a target, the study numbers are general-population, and nobody has studied ADHD business owners. Say all of that out loud, early. In a room of owners, the speaker who promises least is the one they believe.

Open the projector deck → ← All classes

THE SHAPE OF ITWhat this class does

People walk in with a business that runs them. They walk out with the machine dumped out of their head, sorted into four piles, and a homework card naming their worst leak and its smallest fix. By the end, the room should be able to:

What this class deliberately does not do: promise hours, promise outcomes, or treat ADHD. AI does not cure, diagnose, or treat ADHD, and no study shows any AI tool improves ADHD outcomes. The class also never frames automation as headcount reduction — the hours come back to the owner, not out of the staff. If a room smells "fire people with AI" on you, you've lost the good ones.

BEFORE THE ROOM FILLSMaterials & setup

Bring:

Logistics: business rooms skew earlier and busier than library rooms — expect stragglers through the first ten minutes, and build your show-of-hands slide to catch them. Ask the organizer in advance whether the room is owners, managers, or mixed: the class works for all three, but your examples shift (managers don't own the payroll number; aim their math at their own hours instead). Wifi matters more here than in other classes because the 0:33 sprint needs everyone's phone on an AI app — tell the organizer to have the wifi password on the wall.

If the slot shrinks to 60: cut the volunteer segment at 0:50 to two voices, run the 0:33 sprint at seven minutes, and compress slides 2–3 into one beat. Never cut: slide 5 (the honest part), slide 6 (the two rules), or the pop quiz — the no-automation-before-counting rule IS the class.

AT A GLANCEThe run sheet

ClockSegmentWhat's happening
0:00TitleThe promise: audit started, leak named, first automation picked
0:04Show of handsWhere did last week go? Building the right room
0:08The uncounted machineRepeat work is invisible because no instance feels countable
0:12Why ADHD owners feel it doubleBorrowed structure + the switching tax
0:16The honest part5–10 is a target; zero ADHD-owner studies; we count instead
0:20The two rulesPostcard rule (business edition) + never a silent move
0:24The four wordsYAP MAP TAP SNAP, aimed at a business
0:28Watch me yap a barDoug's live 90-second machine dump — 29 years of material
0:33⚡ Sprint: yap YOUR machine10-minute timer, phones out, count-in
0:45The audit gridONLY-ME / REPEATS / RULES-BASED / WAITING
0:50Share-outWhat surprised you? Volunteers only
0:54Pop quizSix shiny automations vs. one counted week
0:58Count one honest weekThe tally sheet; finished work, not activity
1:02The real numbersMIT 40% · agents 14/34% · the honest hole
1:07Price the leakHours × rate, in their own heads. Let it be quiet.
1:11TAP one automationSmallest draft-and-approve workflow; examples by industry
1:16⚡ Sprint: the homework card5-minute timer: leak, fix, first 10-minute step
1:22Kaizen + Friday 20The loop that keeps it alive past February
1:26What this is notNot a miracle, not a firing squad, not a treatment
1:28Go countCOUNT · PRICE · PLUG · REPEAT — send-off

SLIDE BY SLIDEThe segment guide

0:00 The AI Audit

Goal: promise something countable in the first minute — this room buys deliverables, not inspiration.

Say

"Welcome. Quick honesty before anything else: this is not a get-rich-with-AI talk, and I'm not selling software. I ran bars for 29 years, I have ADHD, and this class is the system I wish somebody had handed me — a way to find out where the hours in a business actually go, and to take some of them back. By the time you leave tonight, three things will be true: your business will be dumped out of your head and sorted into four piles, your worst time leak will have a name, and you'll have an index card with your first automation on it. Phones welcome. You'll need them."

Do

Say "I ran bars for 29 years" early and plainly. In a business room, that one line buys more trust than any slide.

Watch for

Latecomers — business rooms drip in. Don't restart; the 0:04 hands slide catches them up naturally.

0:04 A show of hands

Goal: make the invisible problem communal before naming it.

Say

"Show of hands. Who ended last week with no idea where the hours went? Keep them up. Who worked the whole week and couldn't tell their spouse what on? Who has a to-do list old enough to vote? Look around the room. Every hand up belongs to someone running a real business — this isn't a laziness problem, it's a counting problem. Nobody in this room needs to work harder. Most of you need to work less, in specific places you can't see yet."

Do

Count the hands out loud, warmly. "That's… basically everybody" gets the first laugh and sets the no-shame tone.

Watch for

The skeptic with folded arms. This class converts skeptics with the pop quiz and the honest-numbers slide — don't chase him now.

0:08 The uncounted machine

Goal: explain WHY the hours are invisible — repeat work never feels worth counting.

Say

"Here's the trap of a business with a lot of moving parts. Every moving part generates repeat work: the schedule, the supplier order, the invoice you have to chase, the same ten customer questions. And repeat work has a sneaky property: no single instance feels worth counting. Fifteen minutes on a schedule swap? Not worth writing down. Forty minutes retyping a quote at 9pm? Just Tuesday. It never becomes a line item — so it never gets fixed. Your accountant can tell you where every dollar goes. Tonight we start building the same report for your hours."

Do

Deliver "Your accountant can tell you where every dollar goes" slowly — it's the sentence owners repeat to each other after class.

Watch for

Nodding at specific examples. Note which one landed — reuse that industry in your later examples.

0:12 Why ADHD owners feel it double

Goal: connect the business problem to the brain without shame — structure and switching, not character.

Say

"Two reasons this hits harder if your brain works like mine. First — line one — when you left a job to run your own thing, you left free structure behind: the schedule someone else made, the boss who chased the invoice, deadlines that arrived from outside. Research on ADHD entrepreneurs points at borrowed structure, not willpower, as the fix — we did a whole post on it. Second — the switching tax. A chaotic business doesn't just have many tasks; it makes you switch between them all day, and for our brains every switch costs a full re-start. Here's the reframe the whole night sits on: the audit doesn't ask you to switch less by trying harder. It finds the switches a workflow can absorb for you."

Do

Lines reveal one per press. Give the switching tax a lived example from your bar days — mid-order, phone rings, supplier's shorted the case, where was I?

Watch for

The visible relief when structure-not-willpower lands. This is the class's emotional beat — don't rush off it.

0:16 The honest part, up front

Goal: label the 5–10 hour target correctly before anyone can accuse you of a funnel promise.

Say

"Now the part I do in every class, early, on purpose. AI does not cure ADHD. It does not diagnose ADHD. It does not replace therapy, medication, or coaching, and it can be confidently wrong. And specifically for tonight: nobody — nobody — has run a study measuring AI time savings for ADHD business owners. When I say our target is five to ten hours a week, that word 'target' is doing real work: it's built from general-population studies you'll see at the end, applied to the kind of repeat work businesses are full of. It is not a promise. The entire point of the audit is that you stop borrowing other people's numbers — including mine — and produce your own."

Do

Slow down. This is the trust slide. Business audiences have been promised 10x by every software rep who ever bought them lunch.

Watch for

The skeptic's arms uncrossing. This slide is usually the moment.

0:20 Two rules before anyone types

Goal: install both safety rules as non-negotiable house rules before the first exercise.

Say

"Two rules, and they're both about protecting people. Rule one, the postcard rule, business edition: nothing goes into a chatbot you wouldn't write on a postcard — and in a business that means no customer names, no card numbers, no payroll details, no employee write-ups. Person A, Supplier B, Employee C. Your customers didn't consent to being pasted into an AI. Rule two: never a silent move. Every draft an AI writes for your business — the invoice chaser, the review reply, the schedule — gets your eyes before it touches a customer. Not because automation is scary. Because AI can be confidently wrong, and the approval step is the design, not the training wheels."

Do

Both rules reveal as lines. Have the room say "never a silent move" back to you once — call-and-response plants it.

Watch for

Someone asking "what about my CRM's AI?" Short version: same rules apply — approval gates and data you'd defend to the customer's face. Park deeper tool talk for after.

0:24 The four words

Goal: hand over the method's skeleton — familiar to returners, instantly graspable for new people.

Say

"If you've been to any of my classes, you know four words. Tonight they point at your business instead of your brain. YAP — dump the whole machine out of your head, by talking. MAP — sort the moving parts into piles. TAP — pick ONE leak and plug it. SNAP — save your place so next week starts from a card instead of from zero. Say them with me as they land. That's the entire audit. Everything else tonight is detail."

Do

The four words build one per press — say each with the room. Returners will say them unprompted; let them.

Watch for

New people looking lost — reassure: "If this is your first class, you just learned the whole method in four words. You're caught up."

0:28 Watch me yap a bar

Goal: model the messy dump so nobody performs "organized" during their own sprint.

Say

"Let me show you with a business I actually know. Ninety seconds, no order, no editing — every recurring task in a bar." [Then do it, live and messy: the Monday liquor order, next week's schedule, the two swap texts that broke it, the cooler count, the tip report, the health inspection binder, the 1am specials post, the review you keep meaning to answer, the ice machine guy, chasing the beer distributor's credit…] "Ninety seconds and I wasn't close to done. That was one head, holding all of that, for 29 years. Now watch what the sorting does with it — and then it's your turn."

Do

Rehearse this messy — but deliver it like it's falling out of you. Glance at no notes. The mess IS the demonstration.

Watch for

People mouthing their own lists already. Perfect — the sprint is downhill from here.

0:33 ⚡ Sprint: yap YOUR machine (10:00)

Goal: every person leaves this segment with their machine dumped into an AI app, messy and real.

Say

"Phones out, any free AI app — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever's on your phone. First, type this: 'Just listen until I say DONE.' Then dump every recurring task in your business. Talk it if you're comfortable, type it if you're not. The weekly stuff, the monthly stuff, the thing only you know how to do, the thing you do at 11pm that a calmer business would do at 11am. Fake names — Person A, Supplier B. Messy is the point. Ten minutes, starting on the count-in — helpers are walking around."

Do

Timer slide: 10:00 with count-in. Circulate. The two commonest rescues: people organizing while dumping (tell them to stop sorting — that's the AI's job) and people stuck at blank (ask "what did you do this morning before 9?" — the machine pours out).

Watch for

The owner staring at a three-screen dump looking stunned. That stun is the product. Ask them to hold onto it for the share-out.

0:45 MAP it: the audit grid

Goal: teach the four piles and aim the room's attention at REPEATS and RULES-BASED.

Say

"Now say DONE, and give it this instruction: 'Sort everything I said into four piles: ONLY-ME — genuinely needs my judgment. REPEATS — same task every week. RULES-BASED — a checklist could do it. WAITING — blocked on someone else.' Watch the piles appear. Two things to notice while it sorts. The hours hide in REPEATS and RULES-BASED — that's where the audit hunts. And the ONLY-ME pile — I say this with love, as a fellow owner — is usually smaller than your ego wants it to be. Half of what we defend as 'only I can do this' is a checklist we've memorized and gotten sentimental about."

Do

Lines reveal one per press. The ego line gets a laugh — let it land, don't apologize for it.

Watch for

People whose AI sorted into different pile names — reassure: the names matter less than the split between needs-my-judgment and doesn't.

0:50 What surprised you?

Goal: let the room teach itself — surprises from peers convert better than slides.

Say

"Volunteers — nobody's called on. What showed up in your REPEATS pile that you'd stopped seeing? Anyone have the AI put something in RULES-BASED that you'd have sworn was ONLY-ME? … And who found a task in there they'd been doing weekly that shouldn't exist at all? That happens in every room."

Do

Take three or four voices. Echo each one back with its pile name so the vocabulary sticks.

Watch for

The gold answer: someone realizing a whole task is deletable, no AI needed. Celebrate it: "The cheapest automation is deletion. That one's free."

0:54 Pop quiz

Goal: install the audit's one rule of order as a reflex: no automation before counting.

Say

"Pop quiz — shout it out. The AI hands you six exciting automation ideas the moment your piles appear. What do you do?" [Let the room answer, then reveal.] "Say no. Count one honest week first, then pick. Here's why this rule exists: the week of tallies tells you which leak is actually the worst, and it's almost never the one that sounds coolest. Six automations tonight is a January overhaul wearing a lab coat — and we all know what happens to January overhauls."

Do

Quiz slide: audience answers before the reveal. If most get it right, say so — "This room learns fast" — momentum matters at the hour mark.

Watch for

The tinkerer who already built something during the sprint. Gently: "Keep it — and still count the week. The count will tell you if you plugged the right leak."

0:58 Count one honest week

Goal: make the tally sheet feel doable, and plant the activity-vs-finished-work distinction.

Say

"The counting is low-tech on purpose: the printed sheet on your seat, on the counter or the dashboard, tally the minutes every time you touch a REPEATS or RULES-BASED task. Paper beats an app you'll abandon by Wednesday. And one instruction that will save you from the internet: count FINISHED work, not activity. In software studies, AI made raw activity jump forty to a hundred and eighty percent — motion everywhere — while finished, shipped work rose about thirty. Faster typing is not faster finishing. An afternoon of exciting prompting that ships nothing is a leak wearing a productivity costume, and it goes on the tally sheet like everything else."

Do

Hold up the printed worksheet while you say it. Physical paper in the hand doubles follow-through intent.

Watch for

"Can't the AI track my time?" — honest answer: it can help summarize, but the tally has to happen at the counter, and paper is the only tracker that survives a rush.

1:02 The real numbers behind the target

Goal: show the evidence for the 5–10 target — with every label attached.

Say

"Where does my five-to-ten-hour target come from? Three real numbers, ranked by trust. MIT ran a randomized controlled trial — the gold-standard study type — with 453 professionals doing writing tasks: forty percent less time, quality up eighteen percent, published in Science. A field study of 5,179 customer-support agents: fourteen percent average productivity gain, thirty-four percent for the newest workers. Both measured repeat writing and messaging — which is exactly what your REPEATS pile is made of. If your week holds ten hours of quotes, replies, listings, and follow-ups, a forty-percent-flavored dent lands in the five-to-ten neighborhood. That's the reasoning, out loud. And the honest hole, one more time: zero studies on ADHD business owners. Your tally sheet is your own study, with an n of one, and it's the number I trust most in this room."

Do

Lines reveal one per press. Give each number its source label in the same breath — number-then-source is the anti-hype rhythm.

Watch for

Someone photographing this slide. Point them to the site — the same numbers live on the Business page with the same labels.

1:07 Price the leak

Goal: convert hours to dollars in every head simultaneously — then let the silence work.

Say

"Hours are abstract. Payroll isn't. So: take a guess at your leaked hours — you'll replace it with the real count next week — and multiply by what an hour is worth to you. What you'd pay someone to do the repeat work, or what an hour of your selling time earns. Six hours at thirty dollars is a hundred and eighty a week. Call it nine thousand a year. That's illustrative arithmetic — it's only as real as the two numbers you feed it, which is exactly why we count before we multiply. Now do yours, in your head. I'll wait." [Wait. Genuinely. Ten full seconds.]

Do

The ten-second silence is the class's second theater moment. Don't fill it. Watch faces change.

Watch for

Someone saying their number out loud, unprompted. Thank them, don't top them, move on — one real number from a peer beats ten from a stage.

1:11 TAP: plug ONE leak

Goal: define what a plugged leak looks like — smallest workflow, AI drafts, owner approves.

Say

"After the counted week, you plug ONE leak — the biggest one on the sheet. And 'plug' means the smallest workflow where the AI drafts and you approve. Bar people: a schedule drafter that reads your rules note and writes next week's grid for you to fix. Trades: yap the walk-through in the truck, the written quote drafts itself for your corrections. Shops: the reminder and rebooking messages, drafted in your voice, approved in a weekly batch. Agencies: the Friday client-update run drafted from the week's notes. One leak. Not six. Every one of these has the same shape: the AI does the drafting — the part the studies say it's genuinely good at — and you stay the editor. Never a silent move."

Do

Pick the two examples matching industries actually in the room — you noted them at 0:08.

Watch for

"Which tool do I need?" — the honest answer: for week one, the free chatbot already on their phone. Tools come later, if ever; the impulse-purchase firewall on the site handles that conversation.

1:16 ⚡ Sprint: the homework card (5:00)

Goal: everyone leaves holding a physical card: worst leak, smallest fix, first ten-minute step.

Say

"Index card, five minutes, three lines. One: your worst leak — best guess tonight, the tally sheet will confirm or fire it. Two: the smallest draft-and-approve workflow that plugs it. Three: the first ten-minute step — and 'ten minutes' is a rule, not a vibe. If your step is 'set up a CRM,' it's too big; 'write my schedule rules in one note' is the right size. This card is your SNAP — next week starts from the card, not from zero. Count-in, go."

Do

Timer: 5:00, count-in, confetti at zero. Circulate and shrink oversized step-threes on sight.

Watch for

Cards with six leaks listed. Warmly: "Pick the one that costs the most. The others aren't going anywhere — that's what the Friday 20 is for."

1:22 Kaizen and the Friday 20

Goal: hand over the maintenance loop so tonight survives past its own dopamine.

Say

"Last piece — how this stays alive. There's a sixty-year-old improvement philosophy from Toyota's factories called kaizen: no heroic overhauls, one small improvement, continuously, forever. Honest label, because that's the house style: kaizen is a business practice, not an ADHD treatment, and nobody has studied kaizen for brains like ours. I teach it because its shape fits — it never asks for a willpower marathon, it pays in finished wins, and the thing you improve is different every week, which keeps it novel. The ritual is the Friday 20: twenty minutes, timer on. Read the week's notes. Pick ONE friction. Ask the AI for the smallest fix — and make it prove the smallness: under thirty minutes to set up, three steps or fewer, or shrink it again. Ship it, write one line in a ledger. Fifty-two tiny fixes a year quietly beat one giant reorganization that dies in February."

Do

Lines reveal one per press. "Dies in February" gets the knowing laugh — every owner in the room has buried that overhaul.

Watch for

The improvement-junkie glow. One warning, said kindly: tuning the workflow can become its own rabbit hole — the timer and the weekly cap are the fence.

1:26 What this is not

Goal: close the honesty loop — set the boundaries one last time while the room is warm.

Say

"Before the send-off, what tonight is not. It's not a miracle — the gains live in drafting and repeat work, and they demand your approval step to stay safe. It's not a firing squad — the hours come back to YOU, for the only-me work and, radical idea, your actual life. Nobody's payroll got shorter in this plan. Some things need an employee, an accountant, or a professional — not a prompt. And the standing rule of everything I teach: if AI doesn't make your next step smaller, it's not helping."

Do

Quiet, plain delivery. The anti-hype close is what they'll tell the organizer about.

Watch for

Heads nodding at "your actual life." That's the real product. Land the last slide on it.

1:28 Go count

Goal: compress the night into four words and send them out counting.

Say

"Four words to take home — say them with me as they land. COUNT — one honest week, on paper. PRICE — hours times what they're worth, no flinching. PLUG — one leak, smallest workflow, you stay the editor. REPEAT — twenty minutes, every Friday, forever. Your card remembers tonight for you; that's its job. The hours you're about to find were always yours. Go count them. Goodnight."

Do

Four-word build with confetti on the final press. Stay at the front — this room's best conversations happen in the walk-out line.

Watch for

Owners swapping numbers with each other on the way out. That's the class working.

BE READYTough questions from the room

Business rooms ask money questions and gotcha questions. Same rule as always: concede what's true instantly, never invent a number to escape a corner, and treat every hard question as free credibility.

"So how many hours will I actually save?"

"I don't know — and I'm the only speaker this month who'll say that. The studies I showed are general-population: 40% faster on writing tasks in a controlled trial, 14% average for support agents. Nobody has measured ADHD business owners, and your business isn't average anything. That's the whole reason the audit counts YOUR week instead of quoting mine. Come back in two weeks with a filled tally sheet and you'll have the only number that matters."

"Is this about replacing my staff?"

"No, and I want to be direct about that: everything tonight aims at the owner's leaked hours — the drafting, chasing, retyping, posting that YOU do at 9pm. The plan gives hours back to you for judgment work and for your life. If someone sells you 'cut headcount with AI,' notice they usually haven't run a rush with a short crew. People problems are people decisions, and they deserve better than a prompt."

"My customer data lives in my POS / CRM which already has AI. Same rules?"

"Same two rules, different contract. Your POS holds customer data under an agreement your customers accepted — that's different from pasting names into a free chatbot, which is what the postcard rule bans. For built-in AI features, the never-a-silent-move rule is the one to enforce: anything that messages a customer should show you the draft first, and if a vendor's AI can't work that way, that's a real strike against it in my book."

"I tried ChatGPT and it gave me garbage / made things up."

"It does that — confidently, sometimes. Two honest responses. First, that's exactly why every workflow tonight is draft-and-approve: the design assumes wrongness. Second, the audit's early jobs are nearly hallucination-proof on purpose — sorting your own words into piles and formatting a tally sheet can't invent facts, because the facts are yours. Where wrongness gets expensive — prices, legal wording, promises to customers — you stay the editor forever. The higher the stakes of a wrong answer, the smaller the task you hand it."

"Which tool should I buy? There's an AI thing for my industry every week."

"For audit week: none. The free chatbot on your phone does everything tonight needs. After the count, if a tool earns its way in, run the impulse-purchase firewall from the site first — paste its sales page into your chatbot and ask what it does that your current free setup doesn't. And my kaizen rule for tools: a new tool is an improvement only if it retires something — a tool, a step, or a standing worry. Subscriptions are leaks too. They just autopay."

"Isn't 'kaizen' just corporate buzzword stuff?"

"The word gets abused, sure. The practice — small improvements, continuously, owned by the person doing the work — has sixty years of factory pedigree behind it, and honestly, most owners in this room already do it by instinct; you just don't schedule it. The Friday 20 is nothing but a calendar slot and a size limit. And I labeled it in class: it's a business practice, not an ADHD treatment. I teach it because small-forever is the shape our follow-through can actually hold."

"I don't have ADHD — is this still for me?"

"Yes. The audit is just honest operations work; the four piles and the tally sheet don't card anyone at the door. What's ADHD-specific is the design constraints — voice-first capture, one leak at a time, twenty-minute ceremonies — because our brains punish anything bigger. Neurotypical owners tell me those constraints just feel like good design. Everyone's welcome to the hours."

"What's this cost? What are you selling?"

"Tonight cost you the chair you're sitting in. The method, the audit prompts by business type, the calculator, and these numbers live free at adhdyap.com — no account. Full disclosure: the site has a free ebook that asks for an email, and I teach classes like this one for groups. That's the entire operation. I'm allergic to selling hours-back promises to this audience — I'd rather hand you a tally sheet and be checkable."

PRINT MEStudent worksheet — the one-week audit

One per seat (this section prints clean on its own — use the print button up top). It's the whole homework: the grid, the tally sheet, the money line, and the homework card, on one page.

🧮 The AI Audit — my one-week count

The audit grid (from tonight's yap)

ONLY-ME = needs my judgment · REPEATS = same task every week · RULES-BASED = a checklist could do it · WAITING = blocked on someone

My three biggest REPEATS / RULES-BASED suspects:

1. ______________________________ 2. ______________________________ 3. ______________________________

📊 The tally sheet (minutes, every time I touch the task)

TaskMonTueWedThuFriSatSunTotal

Count finished work, not activity. An afternoon of exciting prompting that ships nothing goes on the sheet too.

💰 The money line (after the week — illustrative until counted)

Counted hours/week: ________ × what an hour is worth to me: $ ________ = $ ________ /week → × 50 = $ ________ /year

🔧 My homework card

My worst leak: ______________________________________________

Smallest draft-and-approve fix: ______________________________________________

First 10-minute step: ______________________________________________

🔁 The Friday 20 (weekly, forever)

Read the week's notes → pick ONE friction → ask AI for the smallest fix (under 30 min setup, ≤3 steps, or say SMALLER) → ship it → one ledger line.

📮 The rules

Postcard rule, business edition: no customer names, card numbers, or payroll details in any chatbot — Person A, Supplier B, Employee C. · Never a silent move: every AI draft gets my eyes before it touches a customer. · AI can be wrong. If it doesn't make my next step smaller, it's not helping.

Audit prompts for your business type, the calculator, and the honest numbers: adhdyap.com/business.html · AI supports an ADHD brain. It does not cure, diagnose, or treat ADHD — and it can be wrong.

AFTERWARDAfter class