Hi, I’m [your full name]. I used to be a [first job], but I somehow landed a job at Pinterest as a [dream job]. I manage the sales team that works on the [a brand you love] business. Did you know they sell [noun]? Their results are [adjective]. At this rate, I think we should open an office near their headquarters in [where you grew up]. The office would be [adjective]. We’d stock the kitchen with [your favorite food], let employees bring their [noun] to work, ban all [pet peeves], and go [verb-ing] every Thursday. The team will definitely blow their goals out of the [noun]. And when they do, I’m taking everyone on a trip to [the last place you went on vacation].

It worked well because people could be funny without having to think too hard, and the final read-alouds gave everyone an easy way to share a little about themselves.

I’ve now turned it into a GPT, so people can just plug in their answers and get the full paragraph back, ready to read. It’s free in the GPT Store in case you want to use it for your own team.

In particular, there are two functions I still think are underused, especially for anyone who wants to create lightweight workflows:

• IMPORTRANGE

• QUERY

Let me share a recent example of why these functions are so useful and how nicely they can work together.

A real-life use case

Our Associate General Counsel keeps a running list of what they’re working on in a Google Sheet, with items grouped by category.

Recently, our Partnerships team wanted visibility into that queue so they could check in on the status of their deals without constantly pinging Legal.

The QUERY function is basically SQL for Sheets. You write a SELECT statement over a range of cells.

On a separate tab, I filtered the master list down to just the Partnerships-related rows:

=QUERY('Full List'!A:I,"SELECT A,B,C,D,E,F,I WHERE A = 'Contract: Partner' ORDER BY D")

No surprise: if you try to include a column in the SELECT statement that’s not in the provided range, the formula errors out.

At that point, I could have simply shared the AGC’s sheet and restricted access to the “Full List” tab. But that doc had other tabs, and it’s cleaner and safer to keep the “viewer” version separate.

That’s where IMPORTRANGE comes in. It pulls data from one Google Sheet into another automatically.

In a brand-new Google Sheet, I imported the filtered tab:

=IMPORTRANGE("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/XX","Partnerships!A1:J200")

The result was a dedicated sheet the Partnerships team could bookmark and check anytime for the current status, with no extra work needed from Legal.

Note: when you use IMPORTRANGE, Google Sheets will return #REF! and prompt you to “Allow access.” That’s normal.

What AI suggested

I was happy to find that AI (Claude, in this case) landed on the same solution I did.

It first suggested creating a Partnerships view using QUERY or FILTER. Once I explained that the source spreadsheet had other tabs I didn’t want exposed, it added the next step: use IMPORTRANGE to pull that filtered view into a brand-new sheet.

I hadn’t discussed this exact scenario with Claude beforehand, so this wasn’t it just parroting my own answer back to me.

A quick note on Gemini in Sheets

Since Gemini is built into Google Sheets, I’m really curious to see where this goes.

I’ve been testing it out, and it’s pretty cool that you can ask it to do things you previously would have had to do manually. For example, I asked it to conditionally format a column, and it did.

But it’s not fully there yet. I also asked: “Can you make a tab isolating just the Contract: Partner values?” The result was nonsensical.

Gemini will surely make workflows like this easier to build in the future. Until then, knowing a few formulas is still a real advantage.

I’ve owned terriblyorganized.com and suddenlyrevops.com for years, always intending to publish under them. But now, Suddenly Automated is the one that fits. It captures exactly what I’m trying to do: take the stuff I’ve learned and revisit it with an eye toward automation.

A lot of this isn’t on the internet. I’ve searched. Many times. And when the answer wasn’t there, I’d end up going internal: asking a colleague, thinking back to what a previous company did, or building the solution from scratch.

AI makes this more worth documenting, not less. In theory, it should be able to answer the exact questions I used to hunt for. In practice, it still needs structure: clear processes, good examples, and a source of truth. So this Substack is me building a library of how I work: the approaches, workflows, workarounds, and the “gotchas” that get learned, forgotten, and re-learned on repeat, so both humans and AI can use them. And while part of this is about creating a reference for AI, part of it is about pressure-testing what I’ve always done and asking: is there a better way now?

I also genuinely love this stuff. I like documentation. I like making things repeatable and efficient. I like building workflows that don’t collapse the second one person goes on vacation. One reference-check question I always come back to is: “What did <NAME> do at your company that still exists today?” That’s the kind of impact I want to have.

Most posts will be about RevOps. Some will fall outside of it. But all will be about the ways I’ve tried to organize or automate the chaos around me.

Good stuff ahead.