Most AI advice is written for a person who does not exist. Someone with a clear desk, a quiet morning, and ninety uninterrupted minutes to “optimise their workflow.”
That is not your day. Your day has a school run, a client who needs you now, a dog, a head full of seventeen open loops, and about four windows where you can actually think. So here are the ways I use AI that fit a real day. Not the day you wish you had. The one you are actually living.
Use it as the place to dump, before you do anything
This is the one that changed things for me. When my head is full and looping, I do not try to sort it myself. I open AI and brain dump. Everything. The half-formed idea, the worry, the thing I keep forgetting, the decision I have been circling for a week.
Then I ask it to help me make sense of it. Not to do the work. To hold the chaos while I think.
For a brain like mine, that is not a productivity hack. It is an external brain. Somewhere to put what I cannot hold, that does not get tired, does not judge, and does not need me to arrive already sorted. When everything lives in your head, your brain does the only thing it can. It shuts down to protect you. Getting it out is the whole game.
Use it to start, not to finish
The blank page is where most of us lose the hour. Staring at nothing, knowing what we want to say, unable to begin.
You do not need AI to write the thing for you. You need it to break the blank page. Give it the messy version, the bullet points, the voice note you typed out badly, and ask it for a rough first draft to react to. Reacting is easy. Starting is hard. Let it do the starting.
Then you make it sound like you again, because a first draft from a machine always sounds like a machine. The editing is yours. The blank page was never the bit you needed.
Pick one repeating task and hand it over properly
Not ten tasks. One. The thing you do every single week that drains you and does not need your actual brain.
The same proposal you rebuild from scratch. The weekly update you rewrite every Friday. The replies that follow the same shape every time. Pick one. Set it up once, properly, so it works for you on a bad day. Then leave it.
The mistake is trying to automate everything at once and burning out on the setup. One repeating task, done well, gives you back more than ten half-built systems ever will.
Stop using it for the wrong job
Here is what I do not do. I do not use AI to replace my judgement, my voice, or the thing only I can see. I had a client come in for what she thought was a ChatGPT lesson. What the session actually found was a competitive advantage worth around £15k a year that she could not see, a missing content strategy, and a whole new revenue stream.
No tool would have found that. That was someone standing far enough back to see what she was sitting on without knowing it. That is the bit only a thinking partner can do. Use AI for the heavy, repetitive, blank-page parts. Do not ask it to do the seeing. That bit is yours.
You are not behind on this
If you have read this far thinking everyone else has cracked AI and you are miles behind, stop. You are not behind. You have been carrying more than most people will ever understand, and you have kept the whole thing standing. That is not a deficit. That is the exact brain this stuff rewards.
You just have not been shown how to point it at the right thing, in a way that fits a real day.
That is what we do in the room on the 7th of July.
Stop Winging It With AI is a small in-person workshop in Dorchester on the 7th of July. Ten spaces. No fluff. You leave knowing exactly which parts of your day AI should be holding, and which parts need you. It is £35. Grab your seat here.
Want to get your foundations clear first? Start with the free Business Foundations Workbook. That is where this all begins.