Part I

Map Out Your Current Workflow

None of the rest of this handbook is worth your time if you don't start from this basic premise: work on automating a process that is already valuable to you.

Do you send a recurring email with certain bits of data to your colleagues or business partners every week? Do you wake every morning to a consistent routine managing your CRM? Do you have a process for triaging every customer support request?

All of these are fair game: they provide value to the bottom line of your business, and you could conceivably train another employee (or now: an agent) to take it off your plate.

If it feels unreasonable to ask a junior employee to take a workflow off your plate, it's probably unreasonable to configure an agent to do it too. We don't want you to come up with vague ideas like "I'm not currently reading all my emails, but I wish I could do that, and let's build an agent to help me read them all." At the very least, the value you create will be very limited. Focus on automating a process that is already valuable to you. We'll help you save time doing it, and maybe do it better - but the "better" part is just gravy.

Tip

The workflows we're sharing here with our newsletter curation flow are fairly linear: it's a first step, followed by a second step, followed by a third, etc. We recommend you get started by automating a straightforward workflow like this. But in advanced cases, you may have more complex needs.

Read Anthropic's post on Building Effective Agents to learn how to adapt - you can extend what you learn in this handbook to start configuring and prompting Goose to execute on those frameworks. We expect in the long run, agent-orchestrators like Goose will solve this for you in the background with less prompt engineering required on your side.

For us, we knew we had been writing the Weekly Pulse for several months already. We had a pretty standardized process for how we came up with news items, filtered out noise, wrote a good narrative, and published it to our audience. Our readers love the Weekly Pulse, so we know we're going to keep delivering that newsletter for a long time to come. It's conceivable that we could hire a junior employee to help us manage this process.

So we wrote down everything we do to produce an edition. We had layers and layers of sub-bullet points, but we're abbreviating it here for readability:

Before: The Manual Process

The Weekly Tasks

Sourcing

  • Save interesting links throughout the week across all platforms
  • Weekly review of Reddit, HackerNews, X, GitHub, Discord (impossible to catch everything)
  • Check Google News, PulseMCP rankings, new servers
  • Read all stories and note whether they are interesting or not and why

Organizing

  • Compile saved links
  • Cut less interesting stories
  • Find canonical links, deduplicate, categorize
  • Choose headliner topics

Drafting

  • Finalize story order/arc
  • Write first draft of blurbs while re-reading links
  • Add MCP server/client stats and PulseMCP links

Polishing

  • Add bold emphasis where appropriate
  • Run a typo check
  • Run a check on whether links are correct

Publishing

  • Generate og:image for newsletter
  • Format and push to CMS
  • Final proofread

Sending

  • Set up new email campaign
  • Format content
  • Send preview
  • Final proofread and link checks
  • Send/schedule send

Here's your action plan:

  1. Identify all the time-based tasks
    (daily, weekly, monthly) you do for your business
  2. Identify all the trigger-based tasks
    ("when I receive X," "when someone pings me Y")
  3. Choose one workflow.
    Pick something that is both valuable to you and something you feel you might be able to delegate at least part of to a junior employee
  4. Write down the steps in excruciating detail.
    You won't be able to do this off the top of your head. Allocate extra time the next time you're executing it, and take notes as you do each step.
  5. Break it down further.
    We separated into "Sourcing", "Organizing", "Drafting", etc. Each of these is fairly isolated from the others - you could imagine a junior employee owning one of those for you, while you still own the next step.

Now we know what problem we're solving. Let's move into planning out the project.

Part II →