3 min read
I've been using AI tools almost every day for the past few months. Not to write things for me, exactly. More like using it the way you'd use a really organized assistant who also happens to know a lot about a lot of things. Planning my week. Drafting emails. Keeping a log of what I actually got done so I don't have to try to remember it on Friday.
At some point I crossed a line I hadn't planned to cross. I wasn't just using AI to help me with tasks. I was using it to run parts of my day.
So I'm going to do that on purpose for the entire month of July. And I'm going to write about it here, honestly, including the parts where it doesn't work.
It doesn't mean handing a robot your calendar and going on vacation.
Here's what I'm actually doing. Every morning I open a tool called Cowork, a desktop app that connects to Claude (Anthropic's AI, the same company behind ChatGPT's main competitor). I ask it to pull up my task list, check the punch list for the day, and put together a plan. It reads my Notion workspace — that's where I keep my notes, projects, and to-dos — and builds the day's priorities from what's actually there, not from what I tell it is there.
At the end of the day, I do a two-minute wrap-up with it. What got done, what carried over, what surprised me. It writes it up and posts it to Notion automatically. A month from now I'll have a full log of July without having kept a journal.
That's the core of it. But I'm testing a few other things too.
The morning planning session is the main one. The goal is to start the day with a clear list without me having to sort through everything manually and talk myself into priorities.
The daily wrap-up is the second piece. I've been doing this for a few weeks already and it's the part that's stuck most naturally. It takes about two minutes and I have an actual record of what I did instead of a vague sense of "I think I was productive?"
I'm also using it for content. I run a newsletter and post to a few social platforms. Every week I need to figure out what to write about, draft it, and get it out. That process used to eat most of a morning. I want to see how much I can hand off without the output feeling like it came from a machine.
The last piece is the one I'm most curious about: small decisions. Not big ones. The small ones that pile up. Should I send this email today or wait? Is this the right caption? Does this opening paragraph work? I've started just asking instead of sitting with it, and I want to see whether that speeds things up or just changes who I'm procrastinating with.
I launched a business this week. My daughter is on summer break starting today. I have a second baby due in October.
If there was ever a month to find out whether AI can actually help a person stay on top of things, this is it. I'm not running this experiment in ideal conditions. That's sort of the point. A tool that only works when life is calm isn't that useful.