Tuesday mornings used to start with me opening the calendar and guessing. Three meetings. Two names I vaguely know. One block that just says "sync". By the time I worked out what I needed, the first call had already started. The fix was not a longer prep ritual. It was five quiet minutes with an
Brief your day from your calendar in five minutes Read Post »
Monday inboxes have a way of looking bigger than they are. Fifty unread messages. Half of them are FYI. A few need a real reply. One or two are actually urgent. The rest can wait until Wednesday and nobody will notice. I used to answer from the top down and burn the first hour. The
Triage your inbox in 15 minutes Read Post »
Sunday evenings used to sneak up on me. I would open the calendar, see a wall of meetings, and feel behind before Monday even started. The fix was not a longer review. It was ten quiet minutes with AI and a short look-ahead. The idea is simple. You already know what is coming. You just
Beat Sunday scaries with a 10-minute look-ahead Read Post »
I used to walk into meetings with a plan that only I had poked at. It sounded fine in my head. Ten minutes in, someone asked a question I had not thought about, and the whole thing wobbled. The fix was not more slides. It was five quiet minutes with AI before I opened the
Stress-test your plan before the meeting Read Post »
Most mornings I open my laptop with eight half-finished thoughts and no clear first move. The shopping list. The reply I owe. The thing I said I would chase. None of them are hard on their own. Together they put a fog over the first hour. I stopped trying to clear the fog by force.
Turn a brain dump into three next actions Read Post »
Most 1:1s go one of two ways. Either you walk in cold and spend the first ten minutes remembering what you said last time, or you over-prep with a document nobody asked for. There is a middle path that takes about five minutes and makes you look like you actually care about the other person’s
Prep for a 1:1 in five minutes Read Post »
Most of us take notes for a version of ourselves who remembers the meeting. That person doesn’t exist. Six weeks later you’ll read “chase Dan re: pricing” and have no idea which Dan, which pricing, or why it mattered. The fix is to write notes that work when you’ve forgotten everything, which happens to be
Teach your future self: notes AI can use later Read Post »
Almost everyone who uses AI regularly ends up building a prompt library. Almost nobody opens theirs twice. It usually becomes a beautiful document with folders, tags, version numbers and 47 prompts, roughly four of which you’ve ever used. Mine works because it’s small and deliberately a bit ugly. Here’s the shape of it. One file,
Keep a prompt library you will actually open Read Post »
Planning a trip has a way of expanding. You open one tab about Lisbon, and four hours later you’ve got nineteen tabs, three conflicting opinions about the best day for the aquarium, and no booking. The planning becomes the holiday, and not in a good way. AI is genuinely good here, as long as you
Travel planning that does not eat your weekend Read Post »
You can spot an AI rewrite from across the room. The sentences are all the same length, everything comes in threes, and there’s a closing line about unlocking potential. It’s grammatically fine and completely hollow, and your reader clocks it in about two seconds. The fix isn’t better software. It’s telling it what “good” sounds
Rewrite this for a busy human (without sounding fake) Read Post »
