written by Coach JoyGenea and Claude AI, Image by ChatGPT
custom AI Prompt to go with this article at the bottom, don’t miss out.
You Are Still Doing Work That Should Not Exist on Your Desk
If you opened your email before you got out of bed this morning, we need to talk.
Not about your morning routine. About the fact that you, the person whose time is worth the most in your entire operation, are still doing cognitive tasks that have no business requiring your brain. And the worst part? You are probably proud of it.
The Real Cost of “Staying On Top of It”
I tested an app called Lindy this week. It is an AI assistant that moves through your calendar and email, labels priorities, and generates daily reports. Out of the gate, it was mediocre. Not because the tool was bad, but because I handed it a mess.
That is the thing nobody talks about in the AI conversation. Junk in, junk out. If your systems are broken, automating them does not fix them. It just runs the broken version faster.
So I did something that took about twenty minutes and changed my entire week. I went to Claude, which knows how I work and what I prioritize, and asked it to write the instruction set for Lindy. The new AI tool got up to speed in one conversation. The next morning, Lindy.ai flagged a prospect who had responded to an email that would have been buried. I closed that sales call before most people had their second cup of coffee.
The Time Audit You Have Been Avoiding
Here is the thing about high performers. You are very good at working. You are not always good at auditing what you are working on. I know this from all of my years of coaching and facilitating mastermind groups for high performers.
Do a time audit. One week. Write down everything. Not the version of your day you want to have, the version you actually have. Every task, every context switch, every thing you do that you quietly hate but have never stopped doing.
The items you do not want to put on the list? Those are the most important ones. Put them on first.
When you have that list, take it to your AI. Not as a journal entry. As a prompt. SEE THE PROMPT BELOW FOR A COPY/PASTE VERSION, again, don’t work so hard at this.
“Here is what I did this week. Here is what I should not be doing. What on this list could be automated, and what tools exist to do it?” The AI will give you options. You pick one. You start there.
Train the Tool Before You Trust It
Most people treat AI like a vending machine. Insert prompt, get output, move on. I love this line, a lot of people really do use it like that and it is level one. It is useful. It is not leverage.
Level two is when the AI knows you. Your patterns, your priorities, your preferences, your blind spots. That takes upfront investment, and most high performers skip it because slowing down to train something feels like lost momentum. That calculation is wrong.
An AI that knows you is an operator. An AI that does not know you is a slightly smarter search engine.
The founders getting the most out of AI right now are the ones who treated their first month with it like an onboarding. They trained it. They corrected it. They gave it context. Now it runs tasks that used to live only in their head. I can list off hundreds of these tasks right now.
Upgrade the System, Then Automate It
Here is the part nobody wants to hear. When I started using Lindy, it did not just show me what I could automate. It showed me how broken some of my systems were. That was on me, not my team, not the system, ME. It was an ever evolving system from over 20 years. Yicks.
My calendaring setup was not designed to be handed off. My email process had gaps that made it impossible to explain to a tool. These were not automation problems. They were system problems. My human assistant did their best with them and my AI assistant said, “I can’t comprehend.”
Before you automate, ask whether the thing you are trying to hand off is worth handing off in its current form. If you cannot explain the system clearly enough for an AI to follow it, that is the signal the system needs a rebuild first.
The good news: you can use AI to help with that too. I asked it directly, “Here is what I am trying to accomplish. What would a better version of this process look like?” It gave me a cleaner structure in about four minutes that would have taken me a week to figure out alone. I then used the Claude chrome extension and had it make the changes for me.
The Challenge
This week: do the audit. One honest week of tracking, heck even a day will help. Then sit down with your AI and ask the question.
You are not the bottleneck because you are not smart enough. You are the bottleneck because your brain is being used for work it was never supposed to own.
Fix that first. Everything else gets easier.
If you would like help implementing AI into your life, schedule a free coaching session with me and find out what coaching and AI tools for unconventional leaders could do for you.
Coach JoyGenea
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This ARTICLES PROMPT
THE TIME AUDIT ACTION PROMPT
Copy this. Fill in your list. Paste it into your AI.
I just completed a time audit of my week. I am a [founder / business owner / senior leader] in [industry or type of business]. Below is a categorized list of everything I spent time on.
Tasks I hate doing or that drain me: [List them here]
Tasks that are a time suck but feel necessary: [List them here]
Tasks I know someone or something else could do: [List them here]
Tasks where I am the only one who can do them and they directly drive revenue or growth: [List them here]
Based on this audit, I need you to do four things:
- Tell me which tasks on this list could be fully or partially automated with AI tools available right now, and give me a specific recommendation for each one, not a generic list of apps.
- Tell me which tasks I should stop doing entirely, delegate to a human, or batch so they stop interrupting my highest-value work.
- Tell me where I am currently underinvesting my time based on what I have told you about my role, and what I should be doing more of to increase my value to the business.
- Give me a priority order. What is the single highest-leverage change I can make first, and what does week one look like if I actually do it?
Be direct. I am not looking for a general framework. I want specific, actionable recommendations based on exactly what I gave you. If something is unclear, ask me before you answer.
Video Transcription:
So this week, let’s talk about AI, where it’s at, and if you are an unconventional leader, an unconventional thinker, one of the simplest and easiest ways AI can be… You can move it from level one where you’re using it kind of as a search tool, a little bit of a research tool, and actually move it into being an aid and a big support for some of your weaknesses.
In particular, if a bunch of your weaknesses are, um, linguist- you know, are, um, logistical types of things, it is fabulous for that. So this week, I’ve actually been testing out a software, an app called Lindy, uh, to use as a, an assistant. Basically, it goes through my calendar. It goes through my emails. It labels my emails actually, which ones are a priority, which ones are not.
It started out somewhat weak. I’ll be honest. Like, this is, was my approach. I signed up for it. Um, it’s on- Often you’ll hear in AI, everything is as good as what you put in, so junk in, junk out. So because I’ve built up three AIs that know me very, very well, Notion, Claude, and ChatGPT, the one I’m in particular using the most right now is Claude.
That knows me the best. I went over to Claude and actually asked it to create the instructions for this Lindy app. Lindy doesn’t know me. It, it’s like a brand-new employee. How can I quickly get that brand-new employee up to speed on what my preferences are, what I’m looking for, what information is valuable?
It worked so well. I put that in literally the first report the next day, really early in the morning. Huge time-saver for me. I was actually able to close a sales call because it pointed out that somebody had responded to an email, so I knew that… And my whole day started off that way, and I did not have to go through everything.
For me, that’s a big time suck when I’ve gotta read through all the emails to find the, the gold in all of that. So I’m really liking that. I also, I’ve been pushing its boundaries just in a week. How far can it go? How much information can it create for me, generate? What kind of reports? It now lists out all the things that my assistant will be working on that day in an additional section.
It’s… I’m definitely getting it there. I know you can do that with other agents and not have to pay a monthly fee, and I’ll look at that down the road. I recognized I did not have the time I did not wanna put in the time to write that agent at this point. I didn’t actually have enough data. So that’s what I’m gonna talk about next.
Figuring out what you could possibly automate with AI, and then figuring out what’s a good use of your time and energy. I used to tell people- when I was a professional organizer, I used to tell people this all the time. You need to do an audit of your day. Like, it’s, it’s a Covey thing. It’s a… I can’t even think of all the authors that talk about, you know, keep track of your day and what you do and figure out where your time is going.
That is an understatement. That is an understatement right now. You definitely wanna do that, and when you’re doing that, when you have that list of what your day is about and the things that you can’t stand, hate, should not be doing in any way, shape, or form anymore, like, you can see it on there so clearly.
You don’t even wanna write it on the list. I love that. My clients will be like, “Well, I didn’t really wanna put this on there.” I’m like, “That’s not an option. You need to put it… That’s when you really need to put it on there.” But that is also how you identify what can be automated, what should be automated.
You go through that list of what you don’t like, what is a huge time suck, what other people could be doing. We used… And so years ago when I had clients do that, we were figuring out when do they need an assistant, when’s the line, what will they delegate to them? Now, I’m having clients do that, we’re doing that through coaching and stuff, and we’re saying, “Okay, here are the things we’ve identified that are in your weakness.
How much of this can AI automate and, and assist you with and do 80 to 90% of the lift and you proof it? Let’s find out.” So that’s what you ask it next. I’m not kidding you. If you have trained your AI, which means that it understands you, you’ve spent some time, it- it’s gotten to know you, then you can actually put that list of things that you’re like, “I don’t think I should be doing these things.
Not the best use of my time.” You actually type that in and you ask the AI, the prompt is this: “I’ve done a time audit, h- and the results of that time audit, this list of items I should not be doing. They’re not the best. They don’t, you know, make me the most money. I think they’re a big time suck. What on this list could we automate with AI?
What on this list might there be apps and so forth that I could use that would simplify this?” It’s gonna give you responses to that, and then you can say… Then you, then you just pick through that. I work with the clients, we go through that, and then it’s, the next thing is what are three options for automating that?
So you just pick the one. One of the other really, really important things I’ve recognized, a lot of my systems I’ve been using for many years They are crappy. So I do not wanna automate junk. So as I was using Lindy, I’m like, “I need to change my calendaring system. This actually isn’t that effective. I can’t even explain it to this, and this can’t even understand it.”
That’s not a good system. I’m like, “It’s time for that to improve.” Same thing with my email processes. It’s been what… It’s been so good at identifying actually breakdowns in our system that are not simple or easy, and it’s also been really helpful. And then I’ve asked it, I’m like, “How could I do this easier?
What things are available now? What are your recommendations?” Oh, I don’t like that at all. Like, how about some, you know, could it look something like this? And I’ve co-collaborated with AI to come up with better upgrades and simpler solutions to things. That did not take a ton of my time. They were small moments, but they’re shifting the entire process, making it better, simpler, easier, and more prepared to continue automating, to continue in the AI world that is coming at us.
S- I h- I know this has been helpful. Now, my encouragement is to take this information, do the time audit, chat with your AI, and ask it, “What could be automated out of this? What can I simplify? Help me, help me use my time for the best and highest good,” meaning if it’s in business, making the most money, spending the most time in sales and marketing, in whatever may helps your business thrive and you’re the key part of.
Thank you so much. If you’ve… I want to hear your questions, please drop them in the comments, email me, text me, whatever. My name’s JoyGenea. I am an unconventional leadership coach and an international neurodiversity coach, and I am a champion for you different thinkers and encouraging you to learn and explore more about how AI can simplify your life.
Don’t get overwhelmed by it. Stay focused, but allow it to help you out. Bye now.