I built a workflow once but my team still starts from scratch

Tuesday morning I open Slack and see three messages from my team asking where the client report process is. I know I figured it out two weeks ago with Claude. I scroll back through my chat history for twenty minutes before I find the thread. The prompt I used is buried under follow-up questions about formatting and data sources. I copy the last version and paste it into a new message for Sarah.

She replies twenty minutes later asking what columns to pull and which filters to apply. I realize the version I sent her is missing the decision steps I worked through in the original conversation. I spend another hour rebuilding the logic in a shared doc. By lunch the team still hasn't started the report.

Later that week I get a calendar invite from my director asking why the Q3 summary is late. I explain the handoff issue. He nods and says "we've all been there." The meeting ends without a fix. I go back to my desk and open another chat window, knowing the next person who needs this will start from zero again.

By Friday I've spent roughly four hours across the week either hunting through old conversations or rewriting instructions for teammates. At $39 an hour that's about $156 in time that produced no new output. The report eventually gets done, but only because I stayed late Thursday to walk two people through the steps myself.