Module 4 · Scale and maintain · Lesson 11 of 13 · 10 minutes to set up
Automate repetitive work
The recurring parts of the week — digests, rollups, prep — arrive on a schedule instead of being assembled.
The BMS scenario
You're spending Friday copying bill statuses into an update that Quorum could produce on its own.
When to use it
Any time you do the same lookup or the same update more than twice.
Why it matters
Every hour spent manually reassembling a status you could subscribe to is an hour not spent on the judgment calls only a person can make — reading a stance, drafting the 'why it matters' line. Automating the assembly protects that time without losing the person's judgment over the top of it.
Before you start
- A written list of every recurring thing you assemble by hand, with how long each takes.
- Clean sheets and searches underneath them.
Field guide
- Automation trigger / schedule
- Match the cadence to the meeting or audience it feeds — set it to arrive before the meeting, not exactly at it, so there's time to notice a problem.
- Source search or sheet feeding the automation
- Automate only sources that are already clean; a noisy source just gets delivered on a schedule instead of fixed.
- Narrative / summary layer over the data
- Use Quincy to draft this, but always edit it — this is the one part of the recurring task that still needs a person's read.
If your situation is different
- If the recurring task is inconsistent week to week (different bills, different asks), don't force it into one rigid automation — automate the stable data pull and keep the variable judgment manual.
- If the audience for the recurring update changes mid-session, update the recipient list on the existing automation rather than building a parallel one for the new audience.
- If you've only got time to automate one thing this week, pick the task that costs the most time, not the one that's easiest to automate — the point is to buy back hours.
Step by step
Steps describe the general Quorum workflow. What your seat shows depends on the BMS subscription — check with your Quorum admin if a control isn't there.
- 1
Write down the repeated task
Name the trigger, the data and the audience — 'every Friday, status of tracked bills in my states, to the state team'. That sentence is the automation spec.
Do this in Quorum
- 1.1Name the trigger, the data and the audience for the repeated task — 'every Friday, status of tracked bills in my states, to the state team'.
- 1.2Write that sentence down; it is the automation spec, not a summary of the task.
- 1.3Mark the two most time-costly recurring tasks; automate those first.
You know it worked when: You know which two tasks you're removing and can state the trigger/data/audience sentence for each.
- 2
Replace lookups with alerts
Anything you check on a schedule becomes an alert or digest on the saved search behind it.
Do this in Quorum
- 2.1For each, identify the underlying saved search or sheet — automation needs a stable source.
- 2.2Fix the source first if it is noisy; an automation on a bad search just delivers bad results faster.
- 2.3Replace any manual lookup you do on a schedule with an alert or digest on that source.
You know it worked when: Each automation points at one named, clean source.
- 3
Replace status decks with a shared dashboard
Send the dashboard link instead of a rebuilt slide. Live beats point-in-time, and it takes zero minutes to produce.
Do this in Quorum
- 3.1Replace a hand-built status deck with a shared dashboard link instead of a rebuilt slide.
- 3.2Set up the scheduled delivery or agent and choose the cadence to match the meeting it feeds.
- 3.3Time the delivery to arrive before the meeting, not after.
You know it worked when: The first delivery arrived on time and correct, and the dashboard link replaced the rebuilt deck.
- 4
Use Quincy for the narrative layer
Ask Quincy to draft the 'what changed and why it matters' paragraph over the top, then edit it before it goes out.
Do this in Quorum
- 4.1Ask Quincy to draft the 'what changed and why it matters' narrative paragraph over the automated data.
- 4.2Edit that draft before it goes out — automate the assembly, not the judgment.
You know it worked when: The narrative paragraph was edited by a person before it went out.
Common mistakes
Automating a noisy or untuned search.
Fix: Fix the source search first — automation makes a bad source faster to deliver, not better.
Half-configuring an automation and leaving it running.
Fix: Automate one task fully rather than several partially; a half-configured automation is worse than none.
Sending the raw automated output without a narrative layer.
Fix: Have Quincy draft the 'what changed and why' paragraph and edit it before sending.
Keeping the manual version running 'just in case' indefinitely.
Fix: Run both for two cycles, confirm the automation is trustworthy, then stop the manual version for real.
Prompts to run in Quincy, inside Quorum
Quincy is the agentic layer in Quorum — it works on your live data. Copy a prompt into Quincy after you log in. If you want the steps explained first, ask the site guide.
- "Draft a three-bullet 'what changed and why it matters' summary from this week's tracked bill status changes."
- "Turn this dashboard's current state into a short paragraph for a leadership email."
Practice it now
- 1) Automate your weekly rollup this week and diff it against the version you'd have written by hand.
Done looks like this
- Recurring outputs arrive on schedule.
- No one on the team assembles them manually.
When to stop and ask
If a scheduled digest or dashboard delivery isn't firing on the cadence you set, or recipients report inconsistent delivery, confirm with a Quorum admin or the BMS account team (Michael Fuentes, michael.fuentes@quorum.us) before rebuilding the automation from scratch.