If AI hasn't changed your week, here's why.

I know that's not what you came here to read. You want a prompt library, or a shiny new app. But the thing that actually shifted my productivity is that I sat down one afternoon and wrote down every task I'd done in the last seven days. It came out to around forty things. Some of them were one-offs, but about a third were things I knew I'd do again next week, and the week after.

The rule is: if a task shows up three times, I don't do it a fourth. By the third time, it's clearly a pattern. Those are the ones I hand off to Claude now.

If you've tried to "use AI" and it hasn't really stuck, my guess is you skipped the list. You tried to figure out how to use AI without figuring out what you actually do. The reason you couldn't get traction isn't the tools. It's that the first step was missing.

Here's the method. It's four steps and takes about an hour.

1. List what you did this week.

Not a typical week. The one you just finished. Every distinct thing: posted to Instagram, answered an inquiry, wrote a proposal, sent a reminder, edited a photo, reconciled receipts.

Get granular. "Posted to Instagram" is three different rows if the posts have different shapes in your head. A weekly reflection isn't the same as a product launch isn't the same as a behind-the-scenes.

Don't edit. Don't organize. Just list. It should take about twenty minutes and come out to maybe thirty or forty rows. If it's taking longer than that, you're overthinking it.

2. Mark what repeats.

Put a note next to each row. Daily, weekly, per client, per project. If you'd do it again next week, it repeats. If it was a one-time thing, leave it blank.

3. Find your threes.

Sort the list so the highest-frequency tasks are at the top. That's your queue. You'll be surprised by what's up there. It's almost never the glamorous stuff. It's the Monday caption. The monthly invoice reminder. The "here's your file" note. Small things you don't really think of as work, which is exactly why they take up your week.

4. Start with one.

Pick the single highest-frequency task. Open Claude. Paste three real versions of the thing. Three actual captions, three actual posts, whatever it is. Then say:

"I do this about [X] times a month. Here are three real examples of what good looks like. Give me a template I can personalize in under two minutes. Flag the parts that have to change every time."

Claude writes the template. You edit it until it sounds like you. You use it on the next real one. Then you move on to the next thing on the list. One at a time.

A few things worth knowing.

Admin is not a flex, but the admin is where your actual week lives, and a list of the week you actually had is worth more than any tool stack.

Start with the tasks you do most often. The quarterly thing you hate is probably not where your time is going. The every-Monday thing you don't even register is.

Don't expect the first version to be perfect. It won't be, and it shouldn't be. The goal isn't for Claude to do the task for you. The goal is for Claude to get it sixty percent of the way there so you can spend your time on the forty percent that actually needs a human.

One more thing, and this is the part I think is actually worth learning right now, more than any tool or any prompt. It's how to run loops. A loop is just the little cycle we did in step four. Show Claude three real examples, get a template, refine it, save it, do it again on the next task.

The bigger version of this, the one people are starting to build whole companies on, is stringing those cycles together so AI takes on multiple steps in a row without you touching each one. That's not this week's issue—you have to get comfortable running one loop before you can chain them—but that's where this is going, and that's the skill. The people I know who are actually getting more done with AI aren't using fancier tools. They're running more of these loops, and they're starting to chain them.

The tool doesn't matter. Spreadsheet, Notion, a piece of paper, whatever. Pick whichever you'll actually open tomorrow.

This is Issue #4 of me+machine. Every week: one way to make AI work harder for you. Nothing you need a tech background for.

Block an hour this week. List what you did last week. Identify what you’ve done more than three times. Pick one, and send it to Claude. That's the whole assignment.

me+machine

Your turn: What's something you've done more than three times this year and still haven't handed off? Hit reply. I read every one.