For six months I started every weekend the same way. Behind; before I've even had a cup of tea. A list of overdue tasks that didn't get done during the week, some for clients, a lot for my own business, all just sitting there. Judging me.

Most Saturdays I'd work all day and barely make a dent. I'd end the day wishing I could stop time so I could finally get caught up and wondering where my little helper elves were. Why didn’t I ever wake up to everything all done for me? (That cobbler had it so frickin’ good. iykyk).

This past Saturday was different.

It started normally enough. Me sitting cross-legged in my chair, wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt, scrolling YouTube avoiding making eye contact with ClickUp.

I had my list of must-dos and no particular plan for how the day was going to go.

When I finally did get started, I sat back two and a half hours later and genuinely could not believe what had just happened.

It started with Pepper, my EA inside my Claude Co-Work setup, running my end-of-day call processing: she pulled every call I had the week before, created meeting minutes, added them to ClickUp, documented decisions and action items, created the to-dos.

Then I had Pepper review a job posting and create a weighted rubric for evaluating resumes. Once the rubric was built, I asked her to review 240 resumes against it, score each one, flag the strongest candidates, and put it all into a spreadsheet.

It came back colour-coded by score (nice touch, Pepper). Every resume was scored. The top ten highlighted in green. The reasoning documented. I spot-checked 20 of them against the resumes myself, and had to pick my jaw up off the floor when I saw how good the output was.

I remember a year ago, AI still couldn't tell you how many R's are in the word strawberry. Now it's doing a better job than I could scoring resumes.

Those two tasks alone would have taken me probably most of the weekend to do. 240 resumes? That's a lot.

But it was small potatoes for Pepper, and she wasn't near done.

After the resumes, she de-duped the applicant list against past candidates so I wasn't reviewing the same people twice.

Then she went through my inbox, identified emails from my top 50 connections over the past week, updated my CRM with anything relevant about what they're working on, and flagged me with tasks to follow up where timing matters.

Then she analyzed two weeks of my incoming email and broke it down by category. Turns out only 3% of the email I receive in a day is from people who actually expect a reply from me (potential clients, colleagues, friends), and 44.8% of it is newsletters. 🤯

Once she had a clear understanding of the type of email I get every day, she built me a new label structure for my inbox, created all the labels, and set up an automatic process to check my email three times a day so I don’t miss anything. She’ll check, label, archive what doesn't need me, leave what does, and draft replies where needed. Now, every time I open my inbox, I'm not starting from scratch or wasting time thinking about what to do first. It’s all prioritized and half the work is done!

She also pulled together an AI news and tools digest for me while she was in there (she knows how I like to keep my eye on what’s happening in the world of AI).

Still not done, though.

After that she drafted the onboarding and training plan for two new team members I'm bringing on.

She outlined every task I need to complete before their first day. What access to set up, what accounts to create, what they need from me before they can start.

She created study docs for each of them. Short one-pagers about me, my business, my clients, how we serve them, so they can get oriented without me having to explain everything live.

Then she built a full two-week plan, broken down by day and by hour. What I should be going through with them, in what order, paced so we move through the material without overwhelming them.

She looked at my actual calendar when she built it. She accounted for the blocks where I'm on calls or unavailable and filled those windows with tasks they could work through independently.

Then she created the whole thing in ClickUp. Not just a document to review, actual tasks they can open, work through, mark complete, and use to get comfortable in the system.

All of that 👆got done in two and a half hours and took 45% of my session credits*.

By the end of the weekend, I'd knocked off 22 of the 30 things on my list. The eight I didn't finish weren't a capacity problem. They need a team member who isn't available on weekends.

But the real win was that, on top of all of everything else, I also got through two 90-minute webinars I'd had open in a tab for over a week AND I migrated out of LastPass and into 1Password, a task I've been putting off for three years!

Oh, and I drafted this email.

I'm curious what you're doing with AI right now, if anything. If you've been using it for content drafts and brainstorming and not much else, I'd ask you to look at what else is possible. What's available now is not the same thing you tried six months ago.

If you have questions about how any of this is set up, reply and ask. I love talking about it and showing it off.

Xo,
Sandra

P.S. *I'm on the $140 USD/month CoWork plan. I have never once run a session and not had enough credits for what I needed to do. The cost is invisible to me now. The time it gives back makes sure of that.

P.P.S. I keep remembering more things. I also spent time this weekend getting clear on my presentation and lead magnet for Gemma Bonham-Carter's AI Unlocked Summit, where I'm speaking for the third year in a row. That work alone would normally take me weeks. It happened in a few hours, on a Sunday, in between everything else.

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