Midlife Mavericks
In October I sat down to review my company’s standard operating procedures, the SOPs. I had a feeling a lot had changed.
I opened the old ones, one by one. They were all archived. None of that work was being done by a person anymore.
In January I hired an assistant and, to hand the work over, I wrote a manual for every task. Posting content on social media and on the website. Downloading expenses and uploading them to the accounting software. Nine months later, almost none of it exists as anyone’s job. It all moved to Claude, the AI I work with, in routines that run on their own on set days, without me having to ask.
Email is where it shows most. I built an agent that handles my work email three times a day and leaves me replies already written, ready for me to review. Anyone who works in Outlook knows what it’s like trying to find anything in there. It is painfully inefficient.
Meetings, same story. I spend a huge part of my week in them, and both the prep and the follow-up have become automatic. Once a week the “broom wagon”* comes through to make sure nothing was left undone. For someone who lives in meetings as much as I do, it’s an incredible help.
Writing is still mine. I write a lot and I like writing, but Claude is great at the first draft and at editing me without mercy. It also helps me give the writing structure. Then it breaks the long pieces into social media posts and publishes them, which was exactly one of my assistant’s tasks. Nothing goes out until I approve it.
It even does things nobody was doing, because I didn’t have the capacity to do them. SEO is the big one. It has brought me loads of new leads and it has had a direct impact on the business, in money.
The question I was left with was this: if this happened in nine months, what will next year look like?
Take the list of what you do every week, what you copy from one place to another, what you file. A year from now, how many of those tasks will still be anyone’s job?
When I started, in June 2024, I had the free version of ChatGPT and zero technical experience. In March I wrote about that start, and said AI was saving me thirty hours a week. Since then almost nothing has stayed the same. The technology moved, but so did I.
Claude is now where I do almost everything, on the Max plan. ChatGPT is just for images. Wispr Flow, which lets me dictate text anywhere, stays, and I’m a big fan. Notion AI and NotebookLM stayed too. My automations moved from Make and Zapier to n8n. I dropped Perplexity and I’m testing Descript for video.
It was at home, in my personal life, that it really opened my eyes. I had projects shelved, the kind you keep putting off because you know they’ll eat weeks. The biggest one was the photos. Hundreds of thousands of them, piled up over ten years of swapped computers and external drives, with files moved from one drive to another to sort out later. Duplicates everywhere and no structure at all. Claude cleaned up and organised the lot in a weekend. By hand, it would have been weeks and weeks.
Then came the rest. School emails, which now go straight into the family calendar on their own, along with the birthday party invitations. Ten thousand personal emails to sort. My fiftieth birthday party. The research for the gift vouchers I give. Not having to put anything into a calendar by hand is a massive help, especially with two school-age kids.
There’s a new habit that wasn’t possible in March, because the technology wasn’t there yet. I go for a walk, talk to Claude in voice mode and get through a pile of things as I go. I work while I walk, and it forces me away from the computer. It’s a great habit.
Nine months of this also taught me some less pleasant things.
An automation that breaks can do it without making a sound. In July I found out that the connection pulling in the metrics from one of my social media accounts had died the month before.
And I’ve had to get used to the fact that being a few steps behind is the normal state for anyone working with AI. Nobody is on top of everything, not even the people selling courses swearing they are. What matters is the gap between what you already know how to do and the problem in front of you today. I find this really hard. It’s a daily fight.
If AI is going to do so many people’s work, it matters who decides how it works. Someone has to set AI’s limits and the ethical processes that keep it inside them, and that needs saying. I read a lot more about this now than I did in March, and I’m still very worried. It’s all speeding up and women are barely in the rooms where this gets decided, in politics and on the committees that write the rules.
AI is biased, and anyone who uses it seriously can see it. I see it almost every day. What Caroline Criado Perez describes in Invisible Women about the real world is happening exactly the same way in AI. I keep recommending it. There’s another book that opened my eyes to the violence against women that AI has made possible: Laura Bates’s The New Age of Sexism.
As for March’s thirty hours: technology saves me a lot of time, and it also eats a lot of it. Give it twenty-four hours a day and it eats all twenty-four. Give it thirty-six and it eats thirty-six. For a Type A personality, the kind who can’t stop, it takes enormous discipline.
One of my best friends often tells me: “But you are incapable of stopping and enjoying that time. You’ll spend it immediately on something else.” She’s right. I’ve spent whole afternoons rebuilding systems that already worked, feeling wonderfully productive. It’s like spending three hours tidying the kitchen instead of making dinner.
I’ve set up a rule inside Claude to rein me in. When I start building systems I don’t need, it tells me: “Oh, come on. Now you’re just inventing things.”
I started with the free version of ChatGPT and one question. That’s exactly where I’ll start next week, when I teach an hour on this at the Executiva Bootcamp in Lisbon, in Portuguese, with very little theory. Each of us with a phone in hand and any app, we’ll teach AI to write the way we write. Then we’ll move on to email and the calendar.
Comment below. If you have questions about any of the tools or routines in this piece, ask them here and I’ll answer. I read every response.
*In cycling, the broom wagon is the van that sweeps up the stragglers at the end of a race.
This article was first published in Portuguese in my weekly column Oh pá, não me lixem! for Executiva.
