In this guide
01The dreaded email 02Rambling → official 03The unread pile 04Website words 05Second opinion at 11pm 06If you make things →How to startYou don’t need an AI strategy. I mean that. You need one annoying task off your plate, today, and then you’ll understand this stuff better than most of the people writing strategies.
So that’s this guide. Six things you already have to do this week, and what it looks like to hand each one to an AI tool. No setup, no budget, no picking the “right” one (the free version of any of them is fine for all of this).
Pick the one that makes you wince. Start there.
Task 01
The email you’ve been putting off
Everyone has one. The price increase. The unpaid invoice you’ve chased twice already. The “no” you keep rewriting because every version sounds either cold or apologetic.
Here’s the move: open the tool and type the situation the way you’d tell a friend. Messy is fine. Messy is actually better, because you’ll say the true thing instead of the polished thing.
You type“I need to tell a client my monthly rate is going from $400 to $475. She’s been with me six years, I feel weird about it, and I don’t want to over-apologize.”
You get backA short, warm draft that states the new rate, gives a date, thanks her for six years, and doesn’t grovel.
It won’t be perfect. Two sentences won’t sound like you. Fix those two sentences and send it. That’s still twenty minutes of dread turned into four minutes of editing.
Task 02
Turning your rambling into something official
Some people think clearly and write painfully. If that’s you, this section is the whole guide.
Talk into your phone’s voice memo app the way you’d explain a job to a friend: what the project is, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, what you need from the client. Paste the transcript in and say “turn this into a one-page proposal.”
Three minutes of rambling comes back as a document with sections. You’ll still edit it (you should edit it), but you’re editing instead of staring at a blank page. Same trick works for job postings, quotes, project timelines, and the process doc you’ve been meaning to write for two years.
Task 03
Reading things you don’t want to read
The lease renewal. The vendor contract. The 40-email thread you got cc’d into on day one.
Paste it in and ask for a summary. Then ask the better question: “What in here should worry me?” Then keep asking follow-ups like you would with a person. “What does clause 8 actually mean?” “Is this cancellation window normal?”
To be clear about what this is: it’s preparation, not a lawyer. You’ll walk into the actual conversation knowing which three questions to ask, which is a very different meeting than nodding along. But anything with real legal or money consequences still gets a professional’s eyes.
Task 04
The words on your website
The About page you wrote in 2019. The service descriptions that sound like everyone else’s. The Google review you’ve been meaning to reply to for a month.
The mistake most people make here is asking for copy cold, and getting back something that sounds like AI wrote it (because it did). The fix is one extra step: show it your voice first.
You type“Here are two emails I wrote to customers. Match this tone.” (paste the emails) “Now rewrite my About page. Here’s the current one.”
Suddenly the draft sounds like you on a good day instead of a brochure. This one step, giving it examples of how you actually talk, is the difference between usable and embarrassing.
Task 05
A second opinion at 11pm
This one’s underrated because it isn’t about writing at all. It’s about having someone to think with when it’s late and everyone you’d normally ask is asleep.
“Read this email before I send it. Am I being too harsh?”
“Here’s my pricing for this project. What am I missing?”
“I’m about to hire my first employee. Argue against it.”
Solo owners don’t have a coworker across the desk. This is the closest available substitute, and it’s available at 11pm, and it never gets tired of your questions.
Task 06
If you make things for a living
A note for the designers, photographers, writers, and makers reading this, because I’m one of you and I know the reflex: “I’m not letting AI do my work.”
Good. Don’t. Your work is the reason clients come to you.
But your week isn’t all craft, is it? Wrapped around every project is a pile of things that are definitely not the work:
- The case studyThe one you’ve been meaning to write since the project shipped last spring.
- The proposal and scope docFor the next project, before it starts creeping.
- The estimateThe one you always underprice because you write it at midnight.
- The reply to “make it pop”The version that stays professional.
- The rest of the pileInvoice reminders, the contract template, the artist statement.
Hand that pile over. Try pasting in vague client feedback and asking “what clarifying questions should I ask before I touch the design?” It turns “make it pop” into an actual conversation about contrast and hierarchy. Your craft stays yours. The paperwork around it stops eating your studio time.
How to actually start
One task. Ten minutes. Today.
- Pick the one task above that made you wince.
- Open Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini (whichever, free version, it genuinely doesn’t matter yet).
- Spend ten minutes on it today. Not this weekend. Today.
Two honest boundaries while you’re at it: read everything before it leaves your hands, and don’t trust it with final numbers or legal wording without a human check. It gets things confidently wrong sometimes, and knowing that going in is most of the protection. Guide 4 covers exactly this (what AI gets wrong, and how to catch it), because trusting it the right amount is a skill of its own.
Quick reference
Describe the situation messily, ask for a draft, fix two sentences.
Voice memo in, one-page proposal out.
“Summarize this. What should worry me?”
Show it two of your emails first, then ask for the rewrite.
“Read this before I send it.” “Argue against this plan.”
Case studies, estimates, scope docs. The craft stays yours.
That’s it. No strategy, no subscription, no course. One task, ten minutes, today.
And if you get through a few of these and start wondering what this could look like wired into your actual business, your website, your systems, the stuff behind the counter… that’s the kind of thing I help people figure out. No pressure either way. Go send that email first.