Get an hour back before nine
Three small things - email triage, calendar review, day prep - that work on the first try, cost nothing, and don’t require you to connect anything to anything.
Most advice about using AI at work starts too big. Build an agent, wire up your inbox, automate your pipeline. That’s three weekends of setup before you find out whether it helps, which is why most people quit at step one and conclude the whole thing is hype.
So start with the smallest version that has ever worked: copy and paste. No integrations, no permissions, nothing touching your company’s systems. You are going to move text into a chat window and read what comes back. That’s the whole method, and it’s enough to buy back most of a morning.
Stop reading your inbox in the order it arrived
Take the subject lines and senders from your unread mail - just that, no message bodies - and paste them in. Ask which ones need a decision from you today, which need a two-line reply, and which can wait a week. You’ll get a sorted list in about eight seconds.
The value isn’t the sorting. It’s that you stop opening messages in the order they arrived, which is the single worst prioritization scheme available and the one nearly everyone uses.
Find the meeting you should not be in
Paste tomorrow’s calendar as plain text. Ask two questions: which of these has no clear decision to make, and where do I have less than fifteen minutes between commitments.
The second question is the useful one. Nobody looks at their day and counts the gaps, so nobody notices they scheduled four back-to-back calls with no room to prepare for any of them until they’re already failing at the third.
Write the three sentences you’ll need anyway
Combine the two lists above and ask for a short brief: what has to happen today, what you’re waiting on someone else for, and what you can drop without consequence. Read it, disagree with a third of it, and go.
Disagreeing is part of the process, not a failure of it. The model has no idea which of your commitments actually matter. What it does reliably is force the list into the open where you can argue with it, which is the part you were skipping.
Before you paste anything
Subject lines and meeting titles are usually fine. Message bodies, customer names, contract terms, anything covered by HIPAA or a vendor agreement - not fine, unless your employer has told you which tool is approved and what may go into it. I run a governed AI program for a living, and the rule I use is simple: if you’d hesitate to put it in a shared spreadsheet, don’t put it in a chat window.
Do these three for a week. If they hold, you’ve earned the right to automate one of them - and by then you’ll know which one, which is a better starting point than any template you’d have found online.
Michael Gross, CISM
I’m Director of IT for a multi-brand manufacturer in Northwest Arkansas, running a governed AI program on a deliberately lean team. Before that: CIO at a federal Medicare quality contractor, virtual CISO across a healthcare portfolio, program manager over a $2B technology portfolio at the Department of Labor, and twenty years in the Navy - eight of them in nuclear operations on a submarine.
I write here because most of what’s published about AI comes from people who never have to live with the result. I do, so I write from that seat.
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