8 tasks you should never do manually again

**REPLAY** Do you ever get the sense that no matter how much you do, you’re still running out of time? Like there’s something you should be doing, but you can’t quite figure out what it is? In this episode of How I Work, we sit down with New York Times bestselling author Chris Guillebeau to talk about a feeling so many of us carry but rarely name: time anxiety. From guilt over unread emails to the pressure to leave a legacy, Chris shares the practical strategies that helped him stop chasing time - and start living with more calm and clarity.

Some prompts have been with you for a year or more. They open with a grand persona for the AI, add a few rules in capital letters, and finish with a request to think it all through. They worked well once, and lately the results feel slightly off. The AI models have changed, and a few of the habits we picked up in 2024 and 2025 now work against us. In this How I AI episode, Neo and I walk through five ways good prompting has changed as of October 2026. You will come away with a simple way to tighten up the prompts you rely on most. What you’ll learn: What a persona really changes in an AI response When a goal and a finished example beat step-by-step instructions Why asking AI to think through its answer can backfire How to add emphasis without boxing the AI in What a good checklist looks like before AI hands work back Practical AI tools for productivity and focus Real-world AI workflows used by high performers How to use AI at work without burning out Smart shortcuts for managing time and mental load Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams. Find out more about Inventium AI’s training programs at inventium.ai

**REPLAY** What would you do with four extra hours a day? Probably say you don't have them. But according to Laura Vanderkam, one of the world's leading thinkers on time, they're already there. You're just not seeing them. Laura has tracked her own time for 11 years. She's run large-scale time-tracking studies with hundreds of participants. And what she keeps finding is the same thing: the stories we tell ourselves about our time are almost always wrong. The tasks we dread feel longer than they are. The free time we insist we don't have keeps showing up in the data. In this How I Work episode, I sit down with Laura to dig into what 11 years of time diaries actually reveal, why tracking your time for just one week can make you feel dramatically better about your life, and how to reclaim those post-dinner hours that most of us write off as dead time. Laura is a bestselling author of many books on time and productivity, and her latest, Big Time, is one of the most practical and perspective-shifting reads I've come across in a long time. If you've ever ended a weekend convinced you had no time to yourself, this conversation will change how you see the week ahead.

Who keeps moving my buttons? You know the one. You finally learn where everything lives, and overnight the menu has been rearranged, the feature has a new name, and the thing you spent months perfecting is on a list of things being retired. In this How I AI episode, Neo and I make sense of the latest shake-up: what is replacing GPTs and Gems, when the lights go out on each platform, and how to back up your hard work so none of it vanishes without warning. You'll leave knowing what to save, what to convert, and when. What you'll learn: Why GPTs and Gems are being retired What skills are and why they're taking over The deadlines to put in your calendar now The first thing to do before pressing any migration button Practical AI tools for productivity and focus Real-world AI workflows used by high performers How to use AI at work without burning out Smart shortcuts for managing time and mental load Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams.

Twenty minutes doesn't sound like much. Multiply it by ten sales calls a week and it adds up to more than three hours spent on a task that someone, or something, else could be doing. Now think about how many tasks like that are hiding in your own week, repeated so often that you no longer notice them. In this Work Edit, I sit down with Stephen, an organisational transformation advisor with more than 20 years of experience. Stephen uses Claude every day for client research, interview synthesis, first-draft deliverables and thought leadership, but he knows his approach has been sporadic. He wants a deliberate setup without signing up for 12 different tools. I share how I'd restructure his projects, how I catch the writing habits that make readers suspect AI wrote the whole thing, and the tools I rely on every day. Then we zoom out to a simple one-week exercise that reveals which tasks AI should be taking off your plate for good. If you use AI daily but suspect there's far more value on the table, this conversation will show you where to look. Stephen and I discuss: Why very specific projects, GPTs and skills tend to outperform one big, broad project How to train an AI on your voice using your best work, and why a separate anti-AI writing skill adheres better than one long instruction set Why I always write the first draft myself, and how I use AI as an editor afterwards The AI tells that make readers switch off, and why even writers with their own genuine style can get caught by them The tools in my daily stack, including Granola, Whisperflow and Superhuman, and how I handle disclosure when AI is taking notes in a meeting The one-week task log that shows you what to automate, and how a 20-minute pre-call task turned into a skill my EA now runs How recurring tasks, like a weekly actions recap or a daily AI news researcher, can run without you prompting them