I came back from a four-week multi-country trip thinking I was on top of things. You'd think four weeks of airports, planes and hotel rooms would have given me ample chance to keep up with emails, Slack and Notion. Nope. The complete opposite.

I remember opening my laptop the next morning at the kitchen table, deliberately facing the balcony so the view would inspire me. Four hours later, I hadn't moved. My coffee was stone cold. I hadn't looked at the view once. And I was only halfway through my horrendous backlog.

Even as someone who talks for a living about AI, I'd forgotten to actually use it.

The downside of not being in an office isn't just loneliness. For me, it's the loss of micro-connections. The "oh, have you done this yet?" in the corridor. The "don't let me forget to send that" as you grab a coffee.

Working remotely, with a team scattered across timezones, those moments just don't happen. And the small stuff falls through the cracks.

It doesn't show up in a single day. It builds up over time. I call it minutia drift. The minutia matters, and the slow leak of it compounds quietly until one morning you're four hours into your inbox with cold coffee and hot dread.

After that morning, I spent a week being properly intentional about embedding AI into the boring parts of my work. Not the sparkle. The bits that drift.

What's stuck:

None of that is clever. None of it would impress anyone at an AI conference. That's my entire point.

The best bit is you don't have to be an AI guru to even do this.

Step 1 - Download Claude on your laptop.

Step 2 - Click on the Claude Cowork tab.

Step 3 - Just start describing what you want it to help you with. Think of it like writing an SOP, but this time, you have an AI ready to connect to your tools and execute on your behalf.

There you go. I’ve saved you another webinar, AI newsletter or even worse, a paid course. You'll learn more in five minutes of doing this than five hours of learning about it. I tell every client the same thing.

I was never a good notetaker. I used to apologise for having a bad memory, but the truth is I just never wrote things down. I'm a natural empath, I want to be in the conversation, not looking down at a notepad. So I stayed in the conversations and lost the details. Every frigging time!

AI note-takers have genuinely fixed something I'd been a bit ashamed of for years.

That was one of the real “aha” moments for me. Not "look what AI can do." More like "here's a thing about myself I'd half given up on, and now I haven't."

The test I now run before pointing AI at anything is one question:

"Is this the part of the work that actually needs me?"

If yes, I do it. If no, I find a way to hand it off. AI doesn't have to do it perfectly. It just has to do it well enough that I'm not starting from zero.

Knowledge is more or less free now. Anyone can ask Claude to act like a CMO and get a decent answer. The thing that still has real value is you. Your experience. Your judgement. The endless “can you just make it pop” eye rolls you’ve either endured or triggered. The empathy you bring into a room, even a virtual one.

Moving data around and clicking buttons isn't where the value lives anymore.

So hand the boring stuff over. Scheduling. Note cleanup. Follow-ups. Research prep. Augmented memory. Keep the clever stuff for yourself.

It's the only part anyone's actually paying you for.