#48 - Don't Wait for the Perfect Use Case. Pick One and Commit.
I was talking with a member recently who told me they'd built a couple of skills for a few key use cases in their firm. They said it's saving them upwards of 80 hours a month.
So I asked if they'd be willing to share what they built. They hesitated. They said it felt so elementary.
Here's what I keep thinking about: even if it is elementary, it's still saving them a ton of time. What made the difference wasn't how clever it was. They picked a use case and actually committed to developing it and implementing it.
Why we get stuck
I think a lot of us get stuck right there. We see the big AI announcements and assume we need something equally big.
In the last several weeks, OpenAI, Meta, and X have all released personal agents (Dots, Muse, and Grok Bot). They're designed to take action for you across the tools you already use. That's exciting, and I do think agents and autonomy are coming.
But I don't think the move is to wait for a perfect tool or a perfect use case. I think the move is to just pick one thing.
What picking one looks like for me
That's what I've been doing. I'm exploring agents using Claude Code, and I'm starting small. The first one is basically an executive assistant. It looks at my email, Slack, and the task list I keep in Notion.
Every morning it builds my 1-3-5 plan in a Notion page and sends me the link in Slack. (For those unfamiliar, a 1-3-5 plan is just one big thing, three medium things, and five small things.) I've also got a single chat surface to interact with the list. It can manage it all for me: check things off, add, delete, reprioritize, and so on.
The part I've come to rely on is a place to drop things that come in during the day. My brain loves novelty and loves a fire, so when something urgent shows up, I want to chase it. Now I tell the agent, it creates a to-do, and we decide together whether I handle it now or later.
It's a small thing, but it's already changing how my days go.
For your firm, it may not be an agent at all. It might be one skill that refines a single process. Same idea.
Your challenge for the next couple of months
October 15 is coming up, and many of you will get a bit of breathing room before year-end. So here's my challenge:
Find one use case. Look for a task that:
eats time
someone repeats
you keep meaning to improve
Don't worry if it feels elementary. Commit to it, build it, and use it.