AI in 10 Minutes a Day

A letter or a bill turns up and you cannot tell what it wants. You take a photo of a real one, and ChatGPT or Claude reads it back in plain words, checks the numbers and names the first thing to do. It works on a free account.

That letter to the landlord or the insurer has been sitting in your head for weeks. You tell the assistant the whole messy story, then fix its draft four times: the facts, the tone, the length, and the reply you expect. You end with a letter you are willing to sign.

Leases, contracts and benefit packs hide their costs somewhere in the middle. You upload one long document and ask it questions until you have the three clauses that matter to you, each quoted with a page number. Then you open those pages and check the quotes yourself.

Before you spend real money, you get three options with dated prices and line them up against what you care about. The assistant also argues against its own top pick. You finish by opening two sources yourself, because a wrong price is where the money goes.

Much of what these tools can do is switched off at the start. This is the one setup lesson: you pick a paid plan, turn on memory, write standing instructions about yourself and find where apps connect. You also find the disconnect button before you connect anything.

Your inbox gets linked to ChatGPT or Claude with read access only, after you read the consent screen all the way down. Then you ask what you missed this week and get draft replies that sound like you. Nothing sends without you, and you practise disconnecting once.

Maya walks into meetings cold, and Luis looks for free time by scrolling his phone at red lights. Once your calendar is linked, the assistant reads your week back, finds a real open slot for a request you are holding, and writes prep notes for tomorrow's first meeting.

Four files called quote-final, and only one of them is signed. You link the one folder that wastes the most of your time, messy as it is. Then you find a lost document by describing it, summarise the whole folder and pick out the signed copy.

By now your saved prompts are scattered across three apps. You build one project called My Assistant, give it a rulebook, and load in everything you have kept since lesson 1. Then you run the same job inside it and in a normal chat, and compare the answers.

Work lives in mail, a chat channel and a calendar, so the Friday report gets written from memory. After checking with IT, you connect work mail and Slack, prep three meetings in one go, and build a status report where every line names its source.

Built around Luis and his landscaping company, but it fits any small business. You answer a day of customer email in your own voice, turn three photos of a job into a quote, and raise an invoice through QuickBooks or Stripe on Claude. One Canva post rounds off the week.

Your bank app says Shopping $612, which tells you nothing useful. You export a month of transactions, sort them into six categories named after real choices at home, and check the twenty biggest rows by hand. At the end you know which charges repeat and which ones you could have skipped.

Most home budgets die within two weeks because the totals are typed in by hand. You describe a four-sheet Excel workbook and get it back with dropdowns, real formulas and a monthly rollover. Then you break it on purpose to see whether it holds.

Somewhere in a year of email are the notices that your subscriptions went up. The assistant digs out every recurring charge and price rise, and you sort them by yearly cost. You pick one to cancel, draft the letter from the company's own terms, and send it yourself.

Your accountant asks for the same list every year, and two items are always missing. You search your inbox and drive for every tax document, get one checklist marked found, missing or unsure, and have each form explained. Last, you write the questions your preparer actually needs.

A lab result with three flagged rows can sit on the fridge for months. You get it read back in plain words, check two rows against the paper, and build a prep sheet with a dated timeline and your questions in order. Anything only a doctor can answer stays unanswered on purpose.

Dana's week lives in four apps and a wall calendar that stopped being right on Tuesday. You turn school emails into calendar entries, spot the clashes, plan a carpool and get seven dinners out of a photo of your fridge. It ends with one Sunday note for the whole family.

Hours of video did not teach Maya spreadsheets, and they will not teach you either. You pick something you want to be able to do, build a 30-day plan backwards from it, and study with a tutor that asks questions instead of giving answers. On day 7 the plan gets rewritten around your mistakes.

Pull out a lease, a warranty or an insurance letter and find what it actually binds you to, with every deadline in your calendar. You look up the real rule with sources and draft one letter built from dates and quotes. You also learn where to stop and call a professional.

Luis has circled one decision for four months: buy a second truck or pay a subcontractor. You run a research job that reads the web and your own files together, then make the assistant argue against your favourite option. What you keep is a one-page brief with the numbers that would change your mind written on top.

Luis lost a $14,000 job because his quote was a long email and the other one was a proper document. Here you write the outline first, draft into it and cut a third. You come out with a Word file or a clean paste into Google Docs, and the outline is saved for next time.

A deck is ten claims before it is ten slides. You write those claims first, turn them into slides through PowerPoint, Canva or Gamma, and fix by hand only the three that carry the decision. Read the headlines aloud at the end, and they should tell the story on their own.

Getting a good picture out of AI comes down to the brief you write for it. You write one in five parts, make three versions by changing one line at a time, and put the best into a Canva flyer with the real words on top. The test is whether the phone number reads at arm's length.

Luis's website still lists a phone number he stopped using. From the proposal, resume and images you already made, you build a small site with ChatGPT Sites or Claude, read every page aloud, and publish it. Then you open it on your phone and try to contact yourself.

Tidying a folder lasts about two weeks. So instead the assistant finds the patterns in your messiest folder, you cut them to five categories, and you write one naming rule on a one-page rule sheet. Your loose receipts end up in one spreadsheet as well.

Maya spends twenty minutes every morning checking three places to see what changed. You write down the four things you want to know at seven, test them as a normal message for three mornings, then schedule it. After a week you cut the part you keep skipping.

Dana's insurance went from $62 to $71 in March, and she noticed in September. You set up two check-ins that run on a schedule, one watching your spending sheet and one looking ahead at bills. A health reminder rounds it off, written so it holds no private detail.

The gaps in your day, like three minutes in a car park, happen away from the laptop. You set up voice, the camera, the share button and a widget, then run a real connected job from your phone. Along the way you find out which jobs still need the laptop.

Luis has typed the same four rules for his quotes about forty times. You turn your most-repeated instruction into a Claude Skill, a small file of instructions that Claude picks up by itself when the job comes up. Then you test it by asking for the job in plain words.

Maya types twenty-two fields per person into a permit website every quarter. Now the assistant fills in a web form for you, clicking through it under rules that make it stop before anything is submitted. You approve each step, keep passwords out of the chat, and check what it typed.

A job that needs two free days never gets done, like Luis's review of his fourteen maintenance prices. You write one brief naming the file you want, the sources it may use and what it must never do, then hand it over. When the spreadsheet comes back, you check two figures before sending it.

Luis had 214 receipts in one folder. On a copy of that folder, Claude Cowork shows you its plan first, then files everything by your rules and builds a spreadsheet, flagging the 16 it could not read. You learn to count what went in against what came out.

The cheapest price on the page cost Luis $6.20 more once shipping was added. You compare options by the total delivered, check the winner on the seller's own site and decide yourself. For a booking, the agent goes as far as the confirmation screen, and you press the last button.

Maya found twelve connections she had granted since March, and one of them could read her whole mailbox. You count every connection on both tools, remove any you cannot explain in four words, and set anything that can write to ask first. A short never list and a 90-day reminder finish the job.

Twenty-five jobs learned, and most people use about four. This first capstone cuts your list to five, each tied to a day of the week and a real source. You write one rulebook for all of them, give your assistant a name, and end with a one-page design sheet.

Three jobs run for five working days, and you write one line a day about what each produced and whether you used it. On Friday you count what worked and what went wrong. Then you change exactly one thing: the part behind the worst result.

Pick one track: chase the enquiries nobody followed up and plan a month of marketing, or turn a year of your own status reports into a case for promotion. Both run on records you already have. Nothing gets sent until you have read it.

Codex and Claude Code build software from plain English, and you already did a small version of that with your Skill in lesson 29. You see what they do, decide honestly whether they are for you, and leave with a four-week plan that starts next Monday.