What I Automated First, and Why It Changed Everything

My alarm goes off at 4:20 a.m., and by the time the sun is up I have already worked out, started breakfast, and read a single brief that tells me exactly what my day looks like. This is the life I built, and it runs the way it does because I built it to.

I am a mom, a wife, and the CEO of my house. I run multiple companies with my husband Mark, we have three kids in youth sports and coach some of their teams, and I manage our real estate rental portfolio on top of that. I cook most of what we eat, we travel often (mostly for fun), and our social life is full. I am also the room mom. There is no version of this life where I get all of that done by myself.

When I started using AI, I did not begin with the business. I began with my life, and that one decision changed everything about how I work, how I run my home, and how much of myself I actually have left at the end of the day.

If you have a task list, personal or professional, AI is for you. You do not need to be technical, you do not need a big team, and you do not need to wait for a perfect system. You just need to know where to start. 75% of global knowledge workers now use AI tools regularly, and the gap between those who have built real systems and those who have not is growing fast.

This is the story of what I automated first, why I picked those things, and how I stacked from there.

I Started With Mom Life

The first place I looked was the calendar, because that was where most of the chaos was living. The kids have practices, games, and snack rotations, and the school sends a steady stream of field trip emails, teacher newsletters, signup sheets, and forms that need to be filled out by Friday. As the room mom, I also field requests from other parents, plan parties, and coordinate volunteers, and as a coach I am building practice plans and game day reminders on top of that.

None of that requires my creative brain, and none of it requires me to be physically present in the moment. It just needs to get done, so that is where I started.

I had Claude pull every school newsletter out of my inbox and summarize the upcoming dates and deadlines in one clean list. I had it dig through a coach's email for the soccer schedule and turn it into a snack signup document for all the parents, allergy notes included. I had it scan my inbox for room parent threads and surface only the ones that actually needed a reply from me. I had it load entire sports seasons into my calendar in a single pass, complete with locations and arrival times.

The result was hours back, less mental load, and far fewer dropped balls.

Then I Layered In the Rental Portfolio

The rental properties came next. There are HOA notices, management company transitions, contractor invoices, tenant emails, utility confirmations, and lease renewal conversations that all need to be tracked, and most of them are not urgent enough to interrupt my day but important enough that I cannot afford to miss them.

I do not write any of that from scratch anymore. AI sorts what came in, flags what actually needs my eyes, and drafts the responses in my voice. Ella, my Chief of Staff, handles the doing, and I step in only when something needs a real decision.

It is the same approach I took with mom life, and it follows the same rule. Take the parts that do not need me and move them somewhere else.

Then I Moved It Into Slack

Once the small wins started adding up, I needed one place to see all of them together.

I picked Slack because I already lived there. My team uses it, Mark uses it, and The Foundry (our paid community) runs on it, so adding personal and family channels meant I did not have to learn a new tool to manage my life.

I set up a weekly brief that arrives every Monday morning before the rest of the house is awake. It tells me what is on my calendar, which kid has what after school, the soccer games and practice times and who is on snack duty, the work meetings that need prep, the emails that actually need my eyes, the property items that need action, and the travel plans on the horizon. It also gives me a heads up on what is coming the following week so nothing sneaks up on me.

Then I Stacked Up Into the Business

Once the foundation at home was solid, I moved into the companies.

We pull from Fireflies transcripts of every client call, and those transcripts feed almost everything else we do. They power our pre-meeting briefings, our follow-up emails, the quote overlays we use for social, our internal team summaries, and the action item lists that keep everyone aligned. The same call that used to live in someone's notebook now runs our content, our CRM, and our team alignment.

We use AI to draft LinkedIn outreach, clean up meeting notes, write first drafts of social posts in my voice and in Mark's voice, and flag clients who are starting to slip. We even use it to surface AI opportunities across our entire book of business by scanning Mark's transcripts for the moments he mentioned a problem we could solve.

Right now we are building something bigger. It is a full content engine that runs across all of our brands: IGTMS, The Gordon Guide, Integrated AI Solutions, Down Market School, and The Foundry. The engine pulls from our meeting transcripts, our SharePoint, and our internal documents, and it drafts blog posts, writes social copy, and manages our backlink system across every domain we own. It also tracks how we show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews so we can adjust in real time.

None of that replaces our team. It multiplies our team.

The Rule I Use to Decide What to Automate

Every time I look at a task, I ask myself three questions. Does this need my creative brain? Does this need my physical presence? Could someone else do this if I trained them?

If the answer to the first two is no and the answer to the third is yes, that task goes on the list.

I always start with the easiest ones, like email summaries, calendar reminders, and meeting note cleanup. Then I move up to harder things, like research, drafting, tagging, and categorizing. Eventually I add the work that needs more judgment but still follows clear rules, like lead scoring, content outlines, meeting prep documents, and client briefings pulled directly from transcripts.

What I Use

People ask me this all the time, so here is the short version.

• Claude is my main thinking partner, and I use it for drafting, research, strategy, and almost every weekly brief I run. It is the platform I trust most for nuanced work.
• ChatGPT is great for quick tasks and image work when I need a fast turnaround.
• Slack is the home base where every automation reports back to me.
• Fireflies records and transcribes our meetings, and those transcripts feed everything else.
• Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, and Google Drive hold the source data, and the more organized your source data is, the better your AI output will be.
• SharePoint holds our internal frameworks and client documents, and our AI tools read from it constantly.
• Clay and Apollo power our outbound lead generation and enrichment.
• Riverside handles podcast and content recording, transcription, and clipping all in one place.

You do not need all of these to get started. Pick one good AI tool and one good connector, and add from there as you find new use cases.

The Skill That Matters Most

Here is the thing nobody wants to hear. AI is only as good as the way you talk to it.

Prompting is a real skill, and it takes practice. The people who get the most out of AI are not the most technical, they are the most clear. They know what they want, they know how to ask for it, they give context, they give examples, and they edit and try again when the output misses.

If your output feels generic, your prompt was generic. If your output sounds like a robot, your prompt did not include your voice. If your output keeps missing the point, your prompt did not give enough context.

Spend real time learning to prompt, save the prompts that work for you, and build a library you can reuse. This one habit will change your results more than any new tool you can buy.

Do Not Set and Forget

This is the part most people miss. AI works best with human oversight, always.

I review my weekly brief before I trust it, I check the drafts before they go out, I read the social posts before they post, and I look at the CRM tags before I assume they are right. I never let AI run alone on anything that touches a client, a kid, or a partner.

When something goes wrong, and something will go wrong, I fix the prompt, add a rule, or update the source document so that the same mistake does not happen twice. The system gets smarter because I stay in the loop, not in spite of me being in it.

If you set it and forget it, you will get bad results and you will blame the tool. The tool is not the problem. The system needs you in it.

AI Should Multiply You, Not Replace You

I want to be very clear about this. The point of AI in my life is not to remove me from it. It is to make space for me.

Space to be present with my kids, to coach the teams I coach, to cook a real dinner, to work out before the sun comes up, to actually talk to Mark at dinner, and to travel with my family without my phone in my hand the whole time.

The research backs this up. Harvard Business School found that AI cuts conception time and writing time by roughly two-thirds and three-quarters respectively, and the Federal Reserve has documented measurable productivity gains across the economy. The gains are real. But the point is not the productivity numbers. The point is what you do with the time.

AI handles the busywork, and I handle the life.

If your AI use is making you feel less human, less connected, or less yourself, something is wrong with the setup, and you need to adjust it.

You do not need permission, you do not need to wait, and you do not need a perfect plan. You just need to start.