🌿 What AI Actually Does In My Week

When people find out I use AI all day, every day, they usually expect something cinematic - robots booking my flights, some glowing dashboard. The truth is much less shiny and much more useful: AI runs the boring load-bearing bits of my week. The Monday sorting, the prep, the drafts, the remembering. None of it would make a good demo video. All of it is why my week holds together.

Some context so you know who’s talking: I run my business from a laptop in South Thailand, and I spent six years before this building the back ends of 40+ online businesses - so I’ve seen a lot of systems, most of which people abandon by February. The ones that survive are always the unglamorous ones. What follows is the five rituals that survived contact with my actual life, which I’ve come to think of as my Five Anchors - one at each end of the week, three holding up the middle. For each: what it is, how I actually do it, and the bit I’d tell a friend over coffee that I wouldn’t put on a poster.

I do all of this in Claude - I basically live in the desktop app - but every prompt here works in ChatGPT too.

Anchor 1: The Monday sort-out

What it is. Fifteen minutes, first coffee of the week, before I let email anywhere near me. I dump everything on my radar into Claude and get back a week that’s been looked at by someone calm.

How I do it. I open my planning chat and paste this, filled in with whatever’s true that Monday:

Nick this one, fill in the blanks:

Monday planning. Here's everything on my radar this week, in no order: [dump it all - deadlines, calls, half-promises, the thing you're dreading, the thing you keep forgetting].
Fixed commitments: [things with actual times attached].

Give me:
1. The 3 things that would make this week a win if nothing else happened.
2. A rough shape for the week - what belongs on which day, matching heavy tasks to the days with most open space.
3. One thing on my list you'd challenge - something that looks like it doesn't need to happen this week, or at all.
4. The very first task for this morning, small enough to start right now.

The bit I’d tell you over coffee. Item 3 is the one that earns its keep. Every single week there’s something on my list out of momentum rather than necessity, and I’m too close to see it. Having something neutral say “why is this even on here?” has killed more pointless tasks than any productivity method I’ve tried. And I’ve tried them all. I have ADHD; trying productivity methods used to basically be my hobby.

Anchor 2: Prep before client work

What it is. Before any client call or working session, I spend five minutes getting my head back into that client’s world - because switching between different businesses all day means my brain is permanently mid-context-swap.

How I do it. Each client lives in their own Project in Claude, with the running history of what we’ve done. Before a call I ask:

Nick this one:

I've got a call with this client in 20 minutes. From everything in this project: remind me where we left off, what I said I'd do (and whether I've done it), any open questions from last time, and 3 things it would be smart to raise. Keep it to bullet points I can scan in 2 minutes.

The bit I’d tell you over coffee. The “what I said I’d do (and whether I’ve done it)” clause has saved me from walking into calls having cheerfully forgotten a promise more times than I’d like to admit in writing. If you don’t fancy Projects, a running note you paste in works fine - the value isn’t the feature, it’s arriving at the call as the person who remembers.

Anchor 3: Content drafting

What it is. Guides like this one, newsletters, posts - anything where a blank page is involved. I never start from blank. I start by talking.

How I do it. I ramble at Claude first - voice mode on my phone if I’m out, typing if I’m at the desk - just saying what I want the piece to do and every half-formed thought I have about it. Then:

Nick this one:

Turn everything I just said into a rough first draft. Keep MY phrasing wherever it was good - don't smooth out the personality. Mark any gaps where I clearly have more to say but didn't finish the thought, like this: [MORE HERE?]. It should read like my messy thinking tidied up, not like an article about my topic.

The bit I’d tell you over coffee. The instruction to keep my phrasing is the whole game. Ask AI to “write a post about X” and you get the same beige paste everyone else gets. Ask it to tidy up something you actually said and the result sounds like you on a good day. The draft is scaffolding; the voice has to be mine, because the voice is the product. I rewrite plenty. But rewriting is a completely different sport to starting, and I know which one my brain will actually show up for.

Anchor 4: The everything-notebook

What it is. One long-running chat that functions as the junk drawer of my brain. Ideas on a walk, half-thoughts about the business, a book recommendation from a beach bar conversation, “possible guide topic??”, things I’d otherwise scribble somewhere and lose. It all goes in the notebook chat, unsorted, at any hour.

How I do it. There’s no prompt for putting things in - the entire point is zero friction, you just say the thing. The prompt is for getting things out, every week or two:

Nick this one:

Go through everything I've dumped in here since we last sorted. Group it: ideas worth developing, actual tasks I should move to my real list, things worth keeping as reference, and stuff that was clearly just a passing mood. Be honest about the last category.

The bit I’d tell you over coffee. “Be honest about the last category” matters, because a good notebook needs a bin. Not every 11pm idea is a keeper, and letting something else say “this one was a mood” spares me hoarding forty ideas of which six are real. The notebook works because capture is instant and sorting is somebody else’s job. My somebody else just happens to be software.

Anchor 5: The Friday wrap

What it is. Ten minutes on Friday afternoon closing the week down properly, so next-Monday-me inherits a tidy handover instead of a mystery.

How I do it:

Nick this one:

Friday wrap-up. Here's what actually happened this week versus Monday's plan: [quick, honest summary - done, not done, surprises].

Give me: what genuinely moved forward this week (be specific, I will downplay it), what's still open and whether anything open is urgent enough to handle in the next 30 minutes, and a short "Monday note" written to future me - where things stand and what to pick up first. Then tell me I'm done for the week.

The bit I’d tell you over coffee. “Be specific, I will downplay it” is in there because my brain files finished work under “that was nothing” and unfinished work under “evidence”. Ending the week with an accurate list of what moved is quietly great for morale. And yes, “then tell me I’m done” is a bit silly, and yes, I need it - some weeks permission to stop is the hardest deliverable.

The thing I still do badly

Full honesty, because these lists always sound suspiciously perfect: replying to messages. Claude drafts my replies beautifully - warm, clear, thirty seconds’ work - and then some of them sit in drafts for two days anyway, because the bottleneck was never the writing, it was me pressing send. AI has fixed a lot of my week. It has not fixed the part of me that treats “send” as a commitment ceremony. Knowing which of your problems are actually writing problems is, honestly, half of using this stuff well.

Straight talk time

The Five Anchors work because they’re attached to moments that already exist in my week - first coffee, pre-call nerves, Friday wind-down. Copied cold as “a system”, they’d last a fortnight. Steal the shape, but bolt each piece to a moment you already have. And none of this replaces the work itself: the anchors organise the week, they don’t do the client work, and the drafts are drafts until I’ve made them mine.

The five-minute version of this guide

Start the everything-notebook. It’s the only anchor with no schedule and no rules, it takes zero discipline, and two weeks from now the first sort-through will convince you better than I ever could.

When you’re ready to put a couple of these on a repeat schedule - meals, money, the life admin sweep - Let AI Do Your Admin has five ready to go.