People ask what I actually do with Claude all day and I think they’re expecting something clever and technical. Honestly? It’s more domestic than that. Claude is less “futuristic AI assistant” and more “extremely capable person who lives in my laptop and never gets tired of me”.
So here’s the real list. Including the unhinged bits.
The morning briefing
I sit down after the school run, brain like a snow globe someone’s just shaken, and instead of staring at the screen trying to remember what today even is, I just ask.
Who needs a reply? What does this afternoon look like? What did I promise this week and where’s the doc?
Claude’s connected to my Gmail, my calendar and my files, so it answers from my actual life rather than guesswork. That school email that arrived at 9:47pm, buried under fourteen newsletters? Fished out and flagged before I ever saw the pile.
This alone is worth the subscription. And if you’re paying for AI and haven’t connected anything to it, this is the biggest thing you’re missing. Without the connections it’s a clever stranger. With them, it actually knows what’s going on.
The brain-on-fire dump
When my head won’t shut up, every task and worry and half-thought looping at once, I voicenote the lot straight in. No order, no punctuation, no dignity.
Then: make this a list, ask me what’s actually a priority, compare it against my calendar, put it in order.
Five minutes. The noise stops and the chaos has an order to it. As an ADHD brain, I can’t overstate what it means to have somewhere to put the swirl that doesn’t need me to arrive already sorted. That was the first thing AI ever gave me, long before it did anything clever.
The sparring partner
Every offer, every plan, every big decision goes through the same three questions. Reframe how we’re seeing this problem. Ask me clarifying questions until you’re 95% sure. What are the gaps and risks we haven’t considered?
Claude drafts in my voice because I’ve taught it my voice. Fed it my website, my old posts, the words I’d never be caught dead using. But it drafts, and I decide. Every time. Flip that round and everything you put out starts sounding like everyone else’s stuff, while your business quietly stops being thought about at all.
The unhinged bit
I am not polite to it. No “hello, sorry to bother you, please could you possibly”. It’s not Karen on the bus. It has no feelings, and it responds miles better to blunt and specific than to warm and vague.
When it’s being useless, I say so. Plainly. I have, on record, told it to stop being a knob. It doesn’t care. It’s not real. It’s basically your own reflection talking back at you, and being direct with it turns out to be quite good practice for being direct everywhere else.
Save the politeness for your clients and your nan.
What all of that adds up to
Look at the list again though, because there’s a pattern. Claude isn’t running my business. It’s holding the admin layer of it. The remembering, the sorting, the first drafts, the fished-out emails. The thinking, the deciding, the relationships, the actual craft? Still me. Has to be.
And none of it worked on day one. Claude turned up like the world’s smartest graduate, brilliant and completely clueless about my life, and everything on this list exists because I taught it. One afternoon of setup, then bits and pieces as I went.
That setup is the whole gap between “I pay £20 a month and I’m quietly disappointed” and everything I’ve just described. So I wrote it all down. Free guide, everything I’d do on day one, connections and voice and the lot.