You don't need to learn AI. You need things off your plate.
Everyone says you'll get left behind without AI, and then hands you a wall of jargon. Here's the simpler place to start: your to-do list, sorted into three piles, and one tool for one job. It works the same for a one-person business as for the biggest companies.
If you run a business on your own, you know the list. Booking emails to answer. Invoices to chase. The newsletter that's late again. Captions for the photos you took three weeks ago. The website menu that's been broken since spring. And somewhere under all of it, the actual work you started the business to do.
Everyone says that if you're not using AI, you'll get left behind and you'll never keep up.
But you tried ChatGPT once, and it told you there were two r's in strawberry. I've certainly seen my share of dumb mistakes. How can I possibly trust it to run my life?! We'll get to that part later.
And if you did try to go further, within ten minutes you were being asked whether you want Claude or ChatGPT, what an API is, whether you need an "agent", and why someone in the group chat swears by a thing called DeepSeek. A headline told you it's all getting hacked anyway. You closed the laptop and went back to the list.
If that's you, nothing is wrong with you. The problem is where people tell you to start.
Start with the pile, not the tool
Most AI advice starts with the tool: which app to download, which settings to change, which prompts to copy. That's backwards. You don't need to understand the tool any more than you need to understand an engine to take a taxi.
Start with your list instead. All of it, in one place. Messy is fine. A rambling voice note is fine. Then sort it into three piles:
- The AI does it. Things that are tedious, repeatable and low-risk. Turning a voice note into a tidy to-do list. Sorting your inbox into "needs me" and "can wait". Pulling every unpaid invoice into one table.
- The AI drafts, you approve. Things that need your judgement but not your typing. Replies to booking enquiries. This week's newsletter. Instagram captions in your voice. You read it, change a word or two, and send it.
- Only you. The client call. The creative decision. The thing your customers are actually paying for. This is the pile that's supposed to get bigger.
That's the whole method. The tool is just how the first two piles get done.
The biggest companies are learning the same lesson
This isn't only a small-business problem. I've spent most of my career inside large organisations, and they're going through exactly the same thing, just with bigger budgets.
The first wave was enthusiasm: every company needed an AI plan, a pilot, a chatbot. Now that enthusiasm is meeting reality. Real work is messy, the systems underneath it are tangled, and something that looks brilliant in a demo doesn't automatically take anything off anyone's desk.
The organisations getting real value have stopped asking "how do we use AI?" and started asking the same question you should: what's on our plate, and what can we safely hand over? Not AI for the sake of AI. Things off the plate. (There's a longer story to tell about the big-company side of this, and I'll tell it here soon.)
One task, one tool
I'll confess something: I love tinkering with all of this. I've dug into more product announcements and research papers than I can count. But at the end of the day, I keep coming back to the things that actually work for me.
And what works is simple. It's far easier to find one task you do a lot and pick one tool to hand it to, than to try to "do AI" all at once.
It's better to get really familiar with one tool than to try them all.
For a while now I've been using these tools in my own work and helping friends with all sorts of tasks. It's time to share what I've learned along the way, more efficiently. Fortunately, I don't just love to tinker. I also love to teach.
The live clinic
You learn faster watching someone like you get unstuck than you do from any course. So once a month, on Zoom, for 90 minutes:
- One person takes the hot seat. They share their screen and their real, overloaded list.
- We fix it live. I say where to click and what to type, and we set things up so the AI takes the first jobs off their plate.
- Everyone else watches and takes the same fixes home. Camera off is fine. Questions are welcome.
- Within two days, everyone gets the recording and a short plain-English recap of what we did and why.
The first session is free. It's on Thursday 5 November: 10:00 in Rome, Madrid and Zurich, 09:00 in London. Can't make it? Save your seat anyway and the recording comes to your inbox.
You don't need to buy anything or install anything to come and watch. If you decide to keep coming after that, the prices are all on the clinic page, in plain numbers, with no surprises.
Something to try before then
Take ten minutes this week and do the first step on your own. Write down, or say into your phone, everything that's on your plate. Don't tidy it. Then go through it once and put a 1, 2 or 3 next to each item: AI does it, AI drafts, only me.
Most people are surprised how short the third pile is.
Then circle the one task in piles 1 or 2 that you do most often. That's where we start.
Bring the list on the 5th. Whoever's in the hot seat, you'll see your own pile in theirs.
Anouk