When a team shrinks, the work doesn’t. It gets redistributed, usually to whoever is most reliable, until that person is the one answering emails at 11 p.m.
Why start with a week, not a tool
The numbers from this year are hard to read. In CEP’s State of Nonprofits 2026, 73% of nonprofit CEOs report increased demand for services. About 30% of nonprofits have reduced their staff size, most of them by more than 10%. Almost half of CEOs, 45%, name staffing as their biggest challenge, and 46% say their own burnout is very much a concern, up from just under 30% the year before. Nonprofits cut 28,696 jobs in 2025, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas data reported by the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
When you’re that stretched, the temptation is to buy something. A new platform, a new app, a new AI tool. But automating a task you haven’t measured is a guess. Sometimes it’s a good guess. Often it automates the wrong thing, or locks a broken process into software.
One week of honest tracking fixes that. It costs about ten minutes a day per person, and it tells you exactly where the hours are going.
Monday: log everything
Everyone on the team keeps a simple log in a shared sheet, in 30-minute blocks. Four columns are enough:
- Task, in plain words: “entered new intake forms,” not “admin.”
- Minutes spent on it.
- Tool used: the spreadsheet, the CRM, email, paper.
- Does this repeat? Daily, weekly, monthly, or once.
Be clear about one thing on day one: this measures the work, not the people. Nobody is being graded. If staff think it’s a performance review, the log will be fiction by Wednesday.
Tuesday: mark the retyping
Keep logging, and add one mark: R for any task where you typed information that already exists somewhere else. The client’s address that’s already on the intake form. The gift amount that’s already in the bank deposit. The outcome number that’s already in last month’s report.
Retyping is the clearest automation candidate there is. It is pure transfer, with no judgment in it, and every retype is a chance for a copy error.
Wednesday: mark the waiting and searching
Add two more marks. W for time spent waiting on someone else before you could finish: an approval, a signature, a missing number. S for time spent looking for something: the latest version of a file, last year’s budget, the email with the attachment.
Waiting and searching rarely show up on anyone’s job description, but they eat whole afternoons. They usually point to a process problem, not a software problem.
Thursday: mark who it’s for
For each task, note who benefits: client, funder, donor, or internal. This is the column that tells you what to protect. Time with clients is the mission. Funder reporting is the cost of keeping the lights on. Internal busywork is the first thing to shrink.
Friday: add it up and pick
Total the minutes by task across the team, then sort by hours per month. For each of the top ten, run it through four questions:
- Does it repeat at least weekly?
- Does it follow the same steps every time?
- Are the mistakes in it copy errors, not judgment calls?
- Would anyone miss doing it by hand?
Four yeses: automate it. Three: look closer. Two or fewer: leave it alone, or fix the process first.
Common first candidates include intake that gets entered into more than one system, reports assembled by copying numbers from several files, scheduling back-and-forth, and receipts or acknowledgments that follow a template. Your list will be your own, which is the point of measuring.
Leave three kinds of work off the list, even if they take hours: anything that is a relationship, anything that depends on judgment about a person’s situation, and anything that is broken. If a process doesn’t work by hand, automating it just makes it fail faster.
What this buys you
Automation won’t bring back a position you lost, and anyone who tells you it will is selling something. What it can do is take the retyping and the copying off the plates of the people you still have, so the hours go back to clients, donors, and rest.
If you run the week and want a second set of eyes on the results, book a free call and bring the sheet. Turning that list into working automations is what our custom automation work is for.
If you had to guess right now, how many hours a week does your team spend retyping?
Sources
- The Center for Effective Philanthropy, State of Nonprofits 2026: What Funders Need to Know, May 2026.
- Eden Stiffman, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, How a Year of Funding Whiplash Reshaped the Nonprofit Work Force, February 4, 2026. Job-cut figures from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
