Ep 125: AI Assisted Weekly Preview
How AI Can Transform Your Weekly Planning Process: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Claude-Powered Productivity
SUMMARY
Planning your week shouldn't feel like another task on your endless to-do list. Yet for most creative professionals, the Sunday scramble to organize the upcoming week often creates more stress than clarity. What if there was a way to streamline this entire process while actually making it more comprehensive and insightful?
In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on something I rarely show publicly: my messy, evolving, but surprisingly effective AI-assisted weekly planning process. Joined by PJ Towle from 43 Creative, we walk through exactly how I use Claude AI to transform scattered calendar items and Asana tasks into a structured, actionable weekly preview.
The Current State of Creative Planning
Most creative professionals I work with fall into one of two camps: they're either drowning in multiple planning systems that don't talk to each other, or they're flying by the seat of their pants with no real system at all. Both approaches lead to the same result – feeling reactive instead of proactive, constantly fighting fires instead of making strategic progress.
The traditional approach to weekly planning often involves:
Scattered information across multiple platforms
Time-consuming manual compilation
Inconsistent formatting and structure
Missing context about travel, weather, or personal priorities
No integration of business goals with daily tasks
Before you worry that I'm advocating for robots to take over your creative process, let me be clear: AI isn't replacing human creativity and thinking. Instead, it's handling the administrative overhead that prevents us from accessing that creativity in the first place.
The goal isn't to let AI make decisions for us, but to let it handle the compilation, formatting, and cross-referencing that normally eats up valuable mental energy. This frees us to focus on the strategic thinking and creative problem-solving that actually moves our businesses forward.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Project Knowledge is Everything: The success of AI-assisted planning depends entirely on the context you provide. Claude's project knowledge feature allows you to build a comprehensive understanding of your business, values, goals, and preferences that carry across all weekly planning sessions.
⚡️ Cross-Platform Integration Creates Clarity: By connecting Google Calendar, Asana tasks, weather forecasts, and business goals in one unified view, you eliminate the mental overhead of switching between systems and potentially missing important connections.
⚡️ Iteration Beats Perfection: The most valuable systems aren't born perfectly – they evolve through practice and honest experimentation. Don't wait until you have it all figured out to start incorporating AI tools into your workflow.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "Innovation doesn't happen in isolation and the best systems aren't born perfectly. They evolve through practice, feedback and honest experimentation."
💬 "I fancy myself as a curator. I love to curate pieces from this thing and this thing and this thing. And then I kind of put all those curated pieces together."
💬 "Whatever you use though, just make sure it works for you and make sure it feels natural to you. Don't make it if there's any kind of hurdle or a new habit that you have to learn – the less of those that you can incorporate, the easier it's going to be for you to actually repeat use and success over and over again."
EPISODE RESOURCES
⚡️ Claude.ai
⚡️ ASANA
⚡️ reMarkable 2
⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
TRANSCRIPT
Okay, real talk. How many of you have amazing systems for your creative work, but your finances are still a hot mess? That used to be me too, until I found the Core Group. They're accountants who actually get creatives and they help you build financial systems that create breathing room instead of panic attacks. Using their profit first methodology means that you pay yourself first. Crazy, right? Go check them out at coregroupus.com.
Sometimes the most valuable content comes from showing the messy imperfect reality of how we actually work instead of the polished version we think we should present. So today I'm pulling back the curtain on my AI assisted weekly planning process with one of my clients, PJ Tao. It's clunky, it's evolving, and it's already changing how we approach productivity. Let's get into it.
Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for creative professionals who want to scale their business without sacrificing their sanity. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder of Chief Creative Consultants, where I help creative teams move from chaos to clarity through systems that actually work. If you're new here, this show is all about practical strategies, real frameworks and honest conversations about what it takes to build a sustainable creative business. No fluff, no theory, just actionable insights that you can implement today.
Now here's the thing about today's episode. It's different from our usual format. Instead of a polished presentation of a perfectly refined system, I'm doing something I rarely do. I'm showing you something while it's still rough around the edges. I've been experimenting with AI to help streamline my weekly planning process for a while now. And honestly, it's been a game changer even in its current imperfect state. But rather than waiting until I have it all figured out, I wanted to bring you into the process now because I think there's real value in seeing how we can start integrating these tools into our workflow today with mess and all.
PJ Tao, founder of 43 Creative and one of my clients, joined me to walk through exactly how I'm currently using AI to prepare for my weekly preview sessions. You'll hear us navigate through the process in real time and you'll probably catch some of the places where I'm still trying to figure it out and I would love your feedback and insight on that. But that's exactly the point. Innovation doesn't happen in isolation and the best systems aren't born perfectly. They evolve through practice, feedback and honest experimentation.
So today you're getting a behind the scenes look at that evolution in action. Whether you're AI curious, AI skeptical or somewhere in between, I think you'll find value in seeing how these tools can enhance rather than replace the human creativity and thinking that makes our work so meaningful. All right, let's dive into this very real and very unpolished conversation about the future of creative productivity.
All right, PJ, welcome to the podcast again. Glad to have you back, bud.
You make it sound like I'm on here so often that you're back again.
No, maybe I can't. I think it's second time. I think it's your third. OK, I'll trust you. It's the second in the creativity made easy when I did have you on way back when I was doing any Graham stuff, didn't I? Did I have you over that?
Oh man, I've slept a few times and not enough since then to be able to tell you whether or not you did or not. I don't know. It doesn't matter.
Anyway, by now you all know why we're here. You saw it in the intro. We're going to walk through this really clunky process that I have for doing my weekly preview, just to give you a little backstory on the whole, what is a weekly preview thing? We'll start there. So, for a few years, I don't know, 2022 to probably 2024, I was a pretty avid user of the full focus planner and I still promote it. I still love it. I have family members and close friends and clients that use it. But it was just one more thing for me to carry around. I was already carrying around my laptop bag and everything else. And then I switched over to using a remarkable pad, which we'll talk about here in a little bit.
And so I wanted to have a way to be able to use it. But the full focus planner includes this thing at the beginning of every week. It has you walk through your week to plan out the week. Right. So like you're making the plan of what's going to happen before it actually happens so that you have a plan when you get into there. And obviously we talk a lot on this show about having a lot of margin. And so we plan in that margin as well. But yes. So it's a lot of things that we're going to walk through today and a lot of things that you're going to see on the screen as we share with you are centered around or their foundations are in Michael Hyatt's full focus planner.
So there's nothing, there's really nothing that we're doing today that is, you know, intellectual property. Proprietary or anything like that. I fancy myself as a curator. I love to curate pieces from this thing and this thing and this thing. And then I kind of put all those curated pieces together, which you could argue there's nothing new under the sun anyway, and that's how things are always done. But I digress.
So yeah, so we're going to show you all that today, but I thought we would start by introducing kind of the players, if you will, and the software and the different tools that we're going to be using. And I've got PJ here because we've been talking for a while in our coaching sessions on our weekly calls. We've been talking for a while about this weekly preview and how I do it. And we have some other friends that do something similar. And we're like, man, we just need to hop on a call and let's walk through this. So PJ is getting a two for today. He's getting to be a guest on a podcast and he's getting to see how I do this weekly preview. And he may have some insights on how I could do it better because he's super smart.
Thank you. Thank you. Let me introduce the players real quick. I mentioned at the beginning that I use a remarkable tablet now. So I use a remarkable tablet and remarkable. It's not like an iPad where it has email and text and apps and all these different things, right? Like this is designed to basically just act as a digital paper notebook. And there's multiple notebooks that can be used in it. There's all sorts of ones. I think Amazon Kindle has their own version of it. I think Google Chrome may have their own version of it. There's all sorts of different versions of it. I like the remarkable for the, I'm a clean simplistic when it comes to the technology. It's why I'm a Mac user.
And so I like the simplicity of this right here. Only integrations really is I can, I think it, can add stuff to my Google Drive or Dropbox and I can send notes via email from here, but I can't like check my email. That email can't be replied to. Like I love the restriction that it has on it because that's what it limits. Like this is the tool that I use for that. So I take notes on this all the time during coaching sessions. I will screen share with this because you can screen share digitally, you know, kind of John Madden playbook my way through it and draw things out. But yeah, this is an everyday carry for me. I use it every day. So and so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to produce this new weekly preview, which I used to do in the full focus planner. I'm going to produce it digitally and add it to my remarkable and I'll show you how we do all that.
So I'll start screen sharing and introduce the other players as well. So this is Claude. This is my good friend Claude, PJ and I both good friends with Claude. My son actually even drew a, drew like a robot like version of him the other day and named it Claude. I've found myself starting to refer to Claude with pronouns. Yeah. Like, Hey, I was talking with Claude the other day and he said that he said, and my wife always has to pause me like, wait, you're still talking about Claude AI, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. I don't actually know someone named Claude named Claude. Yeah. That's a good way. Like how many people know someone named Claude?
Right. So I think that's always a good way. Like if you're going to, if you want to humanize it and give it a human name, that's a good way to do that. I think so. Anyway, this is Claude Claude is an AI tool, much like, chat GPT or Gemini, I think is one. There's all sorts of different AI tools out there. Yeah, so and I'm sure there's I'm not I'm sure I'm not using the proper terminology for what Claude really is. But what I like about Claude is that instead of just dumping a bunch of stuff into chats and kind of using it like Google, which is kind of what I use chat GPT for now, then I can build these projects in here.
And inside of these projects, I can give it specific instructions and I can give it specific project knowledge so that it knows what to give me. And we'll walk through all that as well. The other tool that we'll talk about today or the other player in this equation that we'll talk about today as well is Asana. This is my Asana right now for today and the next seven days is kind of how we, me and PJ both have ours organized pretty much the same way.
So you've heard me talk about Asana at length on this podcast. I'm not going to go into it, but it's a project management software. This is where all of our DO and DUE dates live. So we know when we wake up and we look at the thing, it tells us, here's what we need to do today. We need to reach out. We need to call. We need to run through. We need to check. We need to write, record, write, write, write a lot of writing today.
So yeah, that's, that's Asana. We did remarkable. We did Claude. I the only other thing I'm missing is there's some Google integration in Claude that it'll pull from. I have my Google calendar synced up to this, so you'll see me say at the beginning of this prompt, hey, referencing my Google calendar. Sorry, I don't know how to get this thing to stop telling me all the way. It's Grammarly is all the ways that it wants you to write better. Grammarly is like. I love it and hate it at the same time. Grammarly is probably going to want to force itself into this conversation several times today, but it's not a part of this. Right.
So yeah, so I thought what we would do PJ is just, I would just start walking you through kind of hear the things that I've put in the instructions. Here's the things that I put in my project knowledge. Here's the things in my weekly preview. And then we'll start populating it so that we can see it in real time. So I'm actually going to do my weekly preview for next week. We're recording this on Thursday, September the fourth, and I'm going to do this for the following week in which I'm, you'll see, I'm actually going to be up with PJ and Indianapolis area. So, so we'll start with the instructions.
So if you click on here, you know, you can, these are the specific project instructions you can give it, right? So I just said, Hey, create my weekly plan for each week, pull my calendar items for the upcoming week from your Google calendar integration. And I'll provide a list of my tasks broken up by day and category. We'll talk about that more in a second. Analyze the data and create a structured weekly plan following theme days and deep work preferences as outlined in the project documentation. That's the stuff over here that we talked about. Include relevant inspirational quotes. I love this because I love to learn from the leaders and heroes of our past and present.
And so include inspirational quotes from Winston Churchill, who I love and have a giant picture of over here. You've probably seen him in past episodes. Teddy Roosevelt, other leaders on themes of life, leadership, creativity process throughout the plan, included weather forecast for each day. This is a nice little tip. That's a good idea. I took from my, took from my friend, took from my friend and colleague Blake Bayer, and then provide thought provoking questions that align with my business plan for some of today's leading voices and small business growth. So those are my instructions, that I have for it. So now we'll walk through these six things that I have in here.
They're not really in particularly order to how they have it laid out, but we'll just talk about it. So this right here, I won't click on it because it's long and boring, but this one right here is a, is a Google doc that I have of a, kind of a running document of a business plan that I have for my business. It has all the stuff in there. Like this is what I'm going after. This is my target. This is my marketing. This is all the stuff that I'm kind of thinking, planning in and around my business. Then I have my personal values.
I include these in here because I want to again, I think there's some things that I ask for, but I want it to understand like these are Dustin's core personal values and I kind of break them down. Mine are courage, authenticity, resilience, excellence, faith, understanding and leadership. It spells out the word careful or another word for intentional. So, yeah, daily values integration. Each daily plan should include a specific challenge or reflection tied to one of these values. So I tried to include that as much as possible.
Let's see what else we got. The weekly preview format. So this is the format in which I want it to give it back to me when I'm done. I have theme days. I talk about the output format. I'm not going to get too much into it here, but it's got the quotes on there. Key notifications, calendar items. There are some things on here. I wonder if it's in this one or not, PJ, but there was one I think might even have been you that told me one time about telling AI what you don't want as much as what you do want.
Right, right. Be a critical thinker. Think for yourself. Push back on me. Don't just give me positive reinforcement for the things that I'm saying and that I'm asking. Yeah. And then humanize the writing. That's the other one I use a lot. Yeah, I love it. I need to that one to mine. So this is only include tasks explicitly listed in provided task lists. No suggestion or additional tasks, because it'll see it and it'll be like, oh, I see what you're doing here and here's 18 other things you can do. No, that's interesting. Yeah.
No timing of tasks. I don't let it tell me when to do the tasks. I only want the calendar items should have time blocks on it. And then group the tasks by business, client or project. So we talk about clear headers, weather formats, quotes from Churchill, things like that. Inspirational for my goals.
Speaking of goals, the next thing I have on here are my goals, which I simplified several months ago to just two things of being physically and financially fit. So are getting healthy financially and physically healthier. So I have that in here that I have not a priority, but I'm trying to read 50 books too. And then about me is this is as you can tell is a is a AI generated thing.
I basically told Claude when I was setting up this project, Hey, interview me so that so that you can know as much as you can about me and I can attach this to all my projects. So this about me one is pretty much in every single project. It goes through my name, where I live, what time zone I'm in. I speak English only. Here's my professional background. Like here's the here's basically my tech stack that I use. Here's my project context, it goes to communication preferences, like it goes through all these different things. It was really great. So I copied it and pasted it and I use it in every single one of these.
So if you want to add project knowledge and I'll talk about this last one here too, if you want to add project knowledge, you just click on this plus sign. You can upload a PDF or something like that from your device or image or whatever you want, which I have right here. You can click add, add text context. And that's what these are right here. If you see where it says text in the bottom. Or you can link a Google Doc. And I love that, PJ, because as I update this Google Doc, it's being it updates in the project. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't have to worry about like, oh, I got to go change that project knowledge.
So these things right here, my personal values, my goals about me, the weekly. These are things that when I'm going to do it in a text, I'm going to add text context. It's going to be the stuff that's like, hey, this is probably not going to change. Like this is, know, but if it's going to change and it's going to fluctuate over time, then I will, I will put it on a Google doc and then I will add the Google doc. Right. And then this last one here, I don't know if it'll show you or not. Yeah. I just uploaded my brand promises, which for my business. it's just a little bit more business context that may or may not be included in the business plan. I couldn't remember if it's redundant, it's redundant, but I'd rather make sure it's there.
Yeah. So one thing I'm not seeing though, from your stuff is like, I don't see your due versus due. Yeah, that's interesting framework that's there. And I'm also not seeing the future you framework. So those are those are two of your resources that when I build my project, project knowledge for for 43 creative projects, I always put those two in there. Yeah. And then just even reference, you know, build things out for with Dustin's do versus do and future you context, because then it's easy to copy into Asana. Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. So if my goal is to copy into a sauna, I 100 % use that. Okay. Okay. My goal, my goal here is not to copy into a sauna. I'm taking from a sauna. Okay. Okay. I'm not putting into a sauna. So for me, my, this is going to go into my remarkable. It's basically going to be on paper, right? Like I can print these if you wanted to, if you didn't have a remarkable, you could print this out every week if you wanted to. So yeah.
Good call though. I was anything that any project that I have in here, like PJ said, if I'm putting something into Asana, like if I needed to, hey, read this project overview meeting that I had with PJ, pull out all the stuff, remember the DO and the future me and all that, I'll put that in the project knowledge 100%. But I just haven't found it. I haven't found a need for it here yet. Got it. Maybe it'll help, I don't know. But I haven't seen a need for it yet.
What I do here is then I pretty much use the same prompt every time. Right. So I say, reference my Google calendars because it has the Google calendar integration, which you can do down here in your settings. You can link it to your Google calendar. Hey, reference my Google calendars and my Asana tasks below. Now I'll pause there for a second. I copy and paste my Asana tasks. And now some of you may be going, wait, Claude has Asana integration. You're right. It does. I have yet to figure out a way for it to actually work right.
So if you have it, if you have a way for it to work right, let me know. Because when I ask it to reference it, it pulls some stuff and then it will pull things from different time periods, like things that I did months ago, or things are things that I don't need to do until like three weeks from now. I'll only get some of the stuff, I won't get all this stuff. And so there's a lot of conversations of me having back and forth with it going like, hey, you missed this, you missed this. And it's like, oh, you're right. I missed this, you know.
And this is like for me, it's a lot more, it is a little bit more tedious to do the way that I'm about to do, but it it's more accurate than what I'm finding in their son integration right now. But again, if you or anyone who's listening to this knows anything more about this, I'm all ears for the Asana integration, but I will copy and paste my tasks over and I'll show you how I do that here in a second.
Referencing the Google calendars and the assign tasks below prepare my weekly preview for, and then I put the dates in because of what I've found in AI land is they don't always understand the dates. Even this morning I was using it for something else and it goes tune in or like check back in on Tuesday. You know this and, and, was it four or five days from now on Tuesday, December the 9th. And I'm like, that's not, that's not four or five days from now. No, it's September, bro.
Is December 9th Tuesday? That's what I want to maybe. I don't even know. Probably not. So then I have to go, Hey, dummy, it's today's date is which makes Tuesday yada yada. And it's like, Oh yeah, sorry. I don't know what I was thinking there. It can be a real stoner sometimes. I've always thought about it like a toddler who's just trying to, no, I shouldn't say that I've thought about it that way. I heard somebody say AI is like a toddler always trying to please you. Yes. Yes. A hundred percent. A hundred percent.
So then I'll give it the date, take Monday, September the 8th through Friday, September 12th. Full focus preview. Again, this is dismissed. Full focus will, you know, preview the weekends as well. I rarely used the weekend ones because I associated it with work and on the weekends I was trying to disconnect from that. So again, I do my weekly preview Monday through Friday. That's my work week.
So, hey, use the weekly preview format right here. And and and steps to achieve my annual goals for the week. I don't know what in steps means. Maybe I've mistyped something. Oh, and steps and steps to achieve my annual goals for the week. Ask clarifying questions if you need to. This one's a big one. I love this one. I also have a few items on other calendars that you may not see. I should say may not not cannot. that you may not see. So be sure to ask me about those as well. Because I have, you're like me, you have a bunch of different calendars. I have my work calendar, then I have another personal calendar, then we have a family calendar. There's all these different calendars, both of my businesses, they each have their own calendar. Right. So I just want to be uber sure that it's got everything.
So I will just like with everything with AI, we will cross reference this to make sure it's accurate, which I know is a little bit of a pain right now. But it's a needed step so that we don't miss certain pieces. Now let me ask you a question right here. Why not add this prompt minus the dates to your project knowledge and just say, Hey Claude, run my weekly preview prompts. Refer, you know, refer to the weekly preview prompt for these dates. Let's give it a shot. Let's add context and we'll say weekly preview prompt. I'll slide it in right here and we'll say.
What would I say? Like I would do like prepare my weekly preview for Monday through Friday and then in brackets put insert dates or something like that. And they threw Friday. Insert dates. Like that, because then now I think you could just go. This is what I've done a few times with some client deliverable work is build the prompt there and then just say run this prompt SOP for XYZ thing. Here's the little bit of information that you need and go and then it would kick it all out. So maybe maybe we just saved you even a few more minutes. Maybe I'm into it.
So yeah, run my weekly preview for Monday, September 8 to Friday, September 12 2025. Those are the right dates, right? Yeah, that's okay. Cool. So then what I do from there, nerd moment, but if you shift, if you do a soft returns of a hard return shift, enter, you just hit enter right here, it's going to submit it. And it's going to be like, all right, you said you're going to provide me with some tasks. Where are those dummy? Now, now who's the dummy? So I shift enter there to, to go down a couple of lines there just for my mental clarity. then what I do next, PJ, is I go over here to my Asana.
And well, first I will say, Hey, let's, let's do Monday. So I'll say here's Monday. Sorry. I will all caps do Monday. And then first thing I will do is CCC tasks, which is my business chief creative consultant. And then I'll do a colon and I'll do it like this, because if I just were to copy this stuff here, It doesn't know what project it's associated with. So I'm giving it that information as well. Got it. So let's see if I look at here's Monday. So I'm going to say Monday. Those are 1898 ones. Here's some chief creative ones. So I'll go chief creatives from here to here. So I will hold down shift and I will command C copy those things, go back over here, hit paste.
Drop it down with another soft return and just check and make sure that's looks like it's everything for Monday. That's chief creative. But then I also have 1898 stuff. So then I'll say 1898 tasks. I'll switch back over here. I'll go to 1898 tasks, click on those things, copy them, go over here, paste them just like that. Pretty much all the way, all the way down. Let's see. What do I have? That's pretty much everything for Monday. So then I'll go, All caps Tuesday.
Anything you see so far that's cool. So then I'll go Tuesday. Tuesday is typically more of a culture based day for me. That's my other business. It's going to be a little light next week because I have a lot of meetings and I'm traveling. So my task list looks a little light for next week. A little lighter than normal. You might look at it be like, that's a lot of stuff, but it's actually not. Yeah. So let me get down to Tuesday. So I do have a looks like I have one cheap creative. I'll come back to that one, but here's some, culture based stuff. I don't mind adding that personal one in there. Doesn't bother me. That's Tuesday stops right there. So then I'll go back over here. I'll put that in here. Now, as I'm doing this, I'm self editing as well. Yeah. So for example, I know because I know my calendar, I know off the top of my head that next week, this coaching meeting with Caleb Wright is actually gonna be on Friday and it's gonna be on the calendar. So if it's a meeting, I typically, I like to have my meetings in Asana, but I don't necessarily add them into my weekly preview because it's already gonna be on my calendar portion. So it's our, and you'll see that when we do this here. So if it's a meeting like that, I'll take that off. I'll take this one off again because it's gonna be on my calendar.
That one isn't necessarily, do remind myself to take a solo walk for 15 minutes twice a week. It's just for mental clarity and to get away from my desk and do all that stuff. I will be driving that day. So I'm probably not gonna do that. So then I'll go down here and go, okay, yeah, now we're good. Now we're looking at Wednesday. Again, I've got some culture-based stuff. So I'll go down to where the culture-based stuff ends. I'll copy and paste that.
We'll go down here to Wednesday. That's how I remember how to spell it. Yeah. Wednesday. I forgot up here to include this one on chief creative for Tuesday. So Tuesday was actually TCB task. And then if I go down to here and say CCC task is when I will be editing this episode, apparently.
So yeah, there's all that good to go. Good to go get down and make sure I covered there. All my bases for Wednesday real quick. You didn't do your culture base yet. Didn't do culture base for Wednesday. I'm sorry. I meant CCC. You did culture base. You didn't do. Yeah. Yeah. So my bad. So here's chief creative there there. And is it just two of them? Yep. Just two of them. So I'm going to over here and say CCC tasks.
You need to put that back up at the top as well for Wednesday and go TCB tasks. This is the not this is like the like the least exciting portion of this episode. If you need to watch it on double time, I trust you're doing it right. September 11th is Thursday. These are they've got one forty three thing in here, which is PJ. I know that guy. Yep. So then I'll say Thursday. Forty. It doesn't like it when I do the colon. So I'll just say 43 creative. really hurts. That really hurts my four. I know I'm with you. It hurts me too. I hate not doing it, but every time it's like 40 and then it hard returns three creative. that what it does? It takes the colon as a hard return again. It can be a real stoner sometimes. So there's that task. And then I'll say down here, I've probably got CCC tasks that I need to add as well.
That's a TCB one, so I'll come back to that. Here, here. I'll dump those there, and then I'll say TCB task. There was one there. Right there. Quality manual for one of our clients. I'll pop that in right there. So then I'll just double check and make sure I have everything. I don't have anything for Friday because again, as you saw, I try to keep my Fridays.
I don't know if we covered that or not, but in my preview stuff up here, I said, I don't like to schedule, I've been not scheduling tasks on Fridays. I use, I've been using it as my like catch all day, but I also use, typically have a ton of client meetings on Fridays as well, whether it's coaching, it's usually coaching meetings. And so one of the things my VA helped me realize is like, hey, you don't get stuff done on Fridays. And I'm like, hey, shut up. Just because you're right doesn't mean you have to say it out loud. Right, right. So I'm like, you're right. So we decided we don't put any tasks on Fridays anymore. So yeah, everything in here looks right to me. And then from here, I will go ahead and submit it, see what it does. So now you're going to have to tell me if this runs as well with us using that prompt that we put in the knowledge. Yeah, I will. I'll let you know.
I fully expect to have to give it some things. So here it says it's creating weekly preview, pull on the calendar data, and then it's going to provide some clarifying questions. So you can see what it's doing. I have put the weather forecast in for up here. You're right. Normally I would, I'm honestly, man, I'm afraid of like what it might do to this be like, wait, which is it? I'm so confused. I'm so confused, but you're right. I definitely should have done that. That's a good catch. See already it's going. See you're traveling to Andy September 9th through the 14th several important meeting schedule throughout the week. So here's some questions that it's giving me. So travel details. So when I answer questions on Claude, I love how it gives me numbers. So I will literally just number it and answer it that way. So it says travel details. I see you Mark, Dustin and Andy from September 9th to 14th. Are you staying in Indy for the entire week? Will you be commuting back and forth? This affects how I structure your task planning. Great question Claude.
We'll be driving up on Tuesday afternoon, staying the night in Nashville, Tennessee before continuing the drive on. I'll fix all these spelling things. I know it's driving you nuts on Wednesday. I hate typing in front of people. I'm not judging you and I appreciate it. Everybody else is. All right.
So additional calendars, do you have any other important meetings or commitments on a separate calendar? I should be aware of this particular week. I'm going to say no, you should be able to see most things, but we can double check at the end. Three, priority focus, given your travel schedule and the mix of discovery calls, coaching sessions and business meetings, are there any particular tasks or projects you want to prioritize this week?
I'm going to say, no, let's focus on these things because that's why I'm going. So I'm going to say, no, let's focus on those. And then for TCB tasks and several TCB tasks, particularly around the various projects, should these take priority over other tasks given the client deliverables? No, I will be with them on Thursday morning. Let's see how this goes.
So far as it's operating the same way that it did when you would put the whole prompt in. It's riveting content right now. We'll just be here watching, watching AI process. Yeah, this is great. This is a hundred percent what I do. So it'll spit out this to me. And so this is what I copy into my first page of, of my remarkable, which I'll show you how I get all this onto my tablet here in a second. But yeah, it's doing calendar, it's doing tasks. I'll show you how I change those into check marks when I put them into my remarkable.
Got my travel plans in here. That's pretty cool. Yep. I am wondering now if the weather is for it. I may even ask it like, is the weather for where I'm at? you read? Did you recognize that I'm going to be in Indianapolis? Yeah, I might even start typing that problem at that prompt in here. So is the weather forecast appropriate for the locations I will be in this week. Man, trying to spell appropriate on a podcast. So yeah, here goes. It says I created this thing for you. Travel schedule, theme days, weather, and it's everything looks super right to me right here. And I'll show you what I'm doing. I'm going to do this one thing here on this about the weather and then let it tighten that up. And then I'll show you how I get it into remarkable. Great.
See what it does. Oh yeah. I see that there. Well, you know, just do what I was told. Yeah, probably. You're absolutely right. I made an error. Yup. Look at it. Here it goes. So it's updating my way. That's a good call. I like that a lot.
Now know if you're going to get rained on or yeah, for sure. Yeah. No, don't know how to pack, but yeah, you can see it's updating the weather here. I'll be in Carrollton on Monday. It's doing the weather up here. It's getting the little things, a couple of things out of whack, but I just let it do its thing while it's doing his thing. It's got Wednesday now before, but it's, it's fixing it.
Yeah, you can got Churchill quotes in here. Yeah, I love that idea. Yeah, the quotes are fun. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. Eleanor Roosevelt. Let's just sit on that for a second. Yeah, no kidding. Indy on Friday. Gonna be beautiful. 79 degrees, mostly sunny, 10 % chance of rain. I love it. So now I've got all that.
Before I take this into Remarkable, I'm going to show you one more thing that I do with Claude. And I need to get a better written prompt for this, but I usually just kind of wing it week to week. But I also add in here, create a document with my calendar schedule for the week. And this is a one way that I double check my calendar to make sure it's right for the week to provide to my family so they know what and where I'm up to.
This is again a quick way. My wife likes to me to provide this to her or not so that she can go and keep tabs on me. But it's like, Hey, now I know when I can interrupt and when it's not a good time to interrupt because I do work out of the house. Right. Yeah. So right now I'm downstairs in our basement studio space, the family's upstairs. She has this and then boom, I've also started copying the same thing and emailing it over to my VA so that she has a good notice as well. I love the little, little emoji sometimes in the first one here. It's super fun.
So here's another question. If you get that prompt worked out, can you add that to your weekly preview? Yeah. Prompt in the deliverables. And then it would kick out two or three artifacts for you at once. Yep. Probably good. Probably good. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to double check with my calendar to make sure that everything actually lines up with what we're saying now. There's some red stuff on here. I'm getting real vulnerable here. There's some red stuff on here that would be more like family oriented stuff. But essentially I'm going to go through here and go, all right, do we have podcast discovery call weekly check-in? I got a dentist appointment going on here at the same time that I have a meeting with Coop. So I've got to let him know that's not happening. And then I have a, I have back to back dentist appointments on Monday afternoon. I've got glutton for punishment.
So let's go up here and go yet podcast recording discovery call weekly checking with Lou is there. Yep. It's there. That's there two o'clock to three 30, but I think I'm actually one o'clock to three 30. So I'll have to change that. I'll say dentist appointment on Monday. I will do all this in one prompt as well. And his appointment on Monday is actually from 1 PM to 3 30 PM. And y'all can see my terrible spelling cause I'm not a great person. All right. So that has nothing to do with your character. Dustin. Discovery coffee that I'm having TCB weekly pulse and then the phone call on Tuesday. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Wednesday? Extended meetup with Darren. Yup. That all looks right. I know my, I know my calendar there. Thursday coaching call Mitch. Okay. So it's not getting some TCB stuff. This is what I was talking about earlier about it, not catching some things. So here are some TCB meetings during the week as well. Now I know some people that will provide screenshots of their calendar and put it on there. I have yet to figure out how to make that work because maybe the maybe the answer is to blow it up big on my big monitor. But I feel like it usually cuts off information that I want to know. Like it'll cut off the end of somebody's name or it'll cut off the location or things like that. But I mean, maybe I'll just try it here and say, here's the screenshot.
Of when some, culture based things are. Cause usually if it's culture based, I have TCB written on it. So then I'll go back over here to it I say, screenshot as well. I'll say, see the attached screen shot with TCB items or with TCB in the appointment title.
So then I'll add right here. I'll upload a file to my desktop and look at my, the screenshots that I have up in here. There it is right there. Boom. I'll do that. And it might say, Hey, I also picked up on some other things. That's I was kind of nervous about. Maybe I should have like unchecked those, those calendars, their calendars. Yeah. So it could only see mine. But again, we told you upfront folks, this is a raw episode. That's part of it. It's learning episode. a learning episode. I'm learning. You need to watch me learn. That's what all this is. Yeah.
Okay, so while that does its thing on adding those additional items, have you tried uploading a CSV of your exported Asana tasks? I think I did one time and it still didn't give me what I wanted, but it may be worth revisiting. Because I think when you do the CSV, doesn't it include the project as a Yeah, I know what the issue was. I was having trouble figuring out how to export only a period of time as opposed to everything as opposed to everything. So like right now when I do an export of my Asana, it exports everything, which is a long. Yeah. So I was having a hard time, which I guess you could probably go there and then go, OK, and now we're just going to edit out that thing. But I feel like by the time I do all that, I can copy and paste just as quick. Major updates, Dennis appointment, Wednesday lunch, Thursday, three back to back coaching sessions that should be Friday not Thursday.
That's what I was nervous about. Thursday is now accurately shown. Overlapping meetings. Thursday reality check. It's like, hey, the are actually on Friday, September 12th, not Thursday.
No, probably my guess is that it's probably only updating this calendar, which means I'm going to have to tell it now. Go back in and add all these correct times into my week. Oh, it looks like it might be doing that, actually. No, no, it's not. No, it is. Yeah, this is my weekly preview that's working on right now. Yeah, because there's the second artifact. Yeah, weekly preview and then now he's now fixing the family schedule. Nice. For everything for the correction, now updated both documents accurately show. Perfect. Let me just double check that Thursday morning. It still didn't catch my Thursday morning. Right here. Because you singled out TCB maybe. Oh, you're right. You're right. You're right.
So one more, please add this to my Thursday morning from 9 to 11 a.m. at Verus Engineering.
All right, well, let it do that thing. Yeah. So a little clunky here on the calendar side of things. But while it's booting up, I'll show or while it's doing that, I'll show you over here. So here's that's my text worksheet. Let me see that. To cut that out, I was gonna say and cut and edit out. Whereas what I was looking at. So remarkable has a desktop app. So I open up my remarkable desktop app.
And already PJ is like, I see how you do it. So Weekly Planner is a folder that I have. And inside of the folder, I do a new notebook for every week. You can see all my weeks in here. So then I'll go up here. I'll create a notebook and I will name it the dates. I'll say September 8th through 12th, 2025. Boom. Now I have a blank slate of a notebook of September 8th, 20th through the 12th.
So now I will go back over here. Yes, it's done doing my thing. Now I'll click on weekly preview and I'll start copying. Now I could just copy this whole thing and break it up. But again, I'll show you, like to do it on different pages. So I'm selecting that I'm copying it. I'm going over here and I'm pasting it there. Now I want to do a new page. Cause I like my weekly pre like my kind of big overarching theme for the week to be on one. Let me go big here to be on one. And then I will add pages from there. So I'm to go up here. I'm to add a page. going to go close the calendar now. I'm going to go back over here to I'm going to grab everything from Monday all the way down until until the break. I copy that. I'm to go over here and I'm going to paste that in. So there's all my stuff from there. And I will do this for every day of the week. And then I'll show you my final format and then we're done and open for any additional questions.
Pop that there. New page. Go down here and grab Wednesday. I know this is taking like 45 minutes, this typically showing me which is going to take longer. Yeah, this typically will only take me about 15 to 20 minutes. So there's Thursday. I'll go there, go here, there, and it will give me a Friday, but I don't necessarily. I mean, I guess I've got stuff for meetings there, so I can probably should take it. So there's a Friday right here. paste it right there. Now it gave me some additional stuff here with my weekly. It says weekend preparation and goal alignment. But I will take all of this stuff here. Goals, small business growth insights, things like that. I will copy all of those things and I will actually add them to my first page. So I'll go back to the first page. Come on. There it is. I go back to the first page, enter a few times.
And I'll paste those things right there. So my first page, when I open up on my actual remarkable tablet and I opened this up on my tablet, this will be my first page and I'll see everything here. My key rocks. Here's some goal stuff to remember. Here's some reading goals stuff to remember. I can get more specific if I wanted to look pack current book for travel reading. Great call. Small business growth insights for each day. I could put those on the days if I wanted to. I might even, But then I go down here. And so what I'll do is I'll do a quick formatting thing because PJ and I both are, what do you want to say challenged in this way? Um, visually stimulated visual. Yeah. Like we have to have certain hierarchies there. So you can see there's different options for me here. So I do, these types of things. If it's a header, I change it to a header. leave the title up there. Now these are actual tasks. So I'll highlight these, sorry, my peers lagging a little bit. I'll highlight these and I'll change them over to check boxes. So now that just does that straight in remarkable. Yep. I see. see. Yep. So I'll make that check box as well. I'll make this here. I'm not going to, I'm not going to do every single day, but you guys get the picture of what I'm doing here. So there's that just like that. So now
Each of my days will look like this. When I open up my remarkable, it'll look, it'll show me this weekly preview. Got all that right there. I go over here. Now I've got Monday. Here's my weather. Here's my quote from Winston Churchill. My personal value focus of the day is courage. Take one bold action today that moves your business forward, even if it feels uncomfortable. Here's my calendar for the day. It's gross. Very few tasks because it's calendar heavy. My whole week will be calendar heavy. So it'll be task light. which we talked about on my most recent blog post, calendar, calendar task optimization. So I think that's everything. A lot of things I learned here. And hopefully it wasn't too clunky for you. And hopefully there's some little bits and pieces there that you can take and make your process. But really at the end of the day, what we say always PJ is like this process is for like whatever works for you. Right? use Claude, remarkable Asana. You could use a legal pad and iPhone and chat.
I don't care what you use. Whatever you use though, like just make sure it works for you and make sure it feels natural to you. Don't make it if there's any kind of hurdle or a new habit that you have to learn the less of those that you can incorporate, the easier it's going to be for you to actually repeat use and success over and over again. Any final words of encouragement to our listeners? No, I think the big takeaway
At least on my front is the quotes. The quotes are great. No, actually it was it was a couple of the other things in the project knowledge. So I'm a I'm an I've iPhone, iPad, GoodNotes user. So I would probably do this exact same process, but then have it format for a Google Doc that then I can open into GoodNotes and then be able to check off through that rather than using the remarkable piece. But I think that the other stuff with it, though, is in that all in that project knowledge piece where I loved the about me section. That that's a great one that I'm going to add today for sure. Yeah, and then and then working out some of those. It makes you really feel seen. Yeah, right. I, I, Claude knows me. So is me. So so get off my back about Claude. You don't know me like Claude does.
Funny story, a friend of ours, their eighth grade daughter asked me to fill out some questions about video editing and marketing, like using video and marketing. And so I was like, she sent me the questions and I just straight dropped them into Claude and said, you know, everything about my business and what I do answer these questions. And I started reading them out loud to my wife and she was like, oh my gosh, that sounds exactly like you had to do some, do some proofing, do some tweaking and some editing. yeah, so I'm like, it knows me. It's great.
But I love the I love the additional pieces to that in the project knowledge. I think that those were the big takeaways for me of what'll what'll push me forward with the yeah. Yeah, project knowledge is just like any other person that you're talking to. They have to have the context of what you're talking about. You can't just walk up to somebody and go, give me this. And they go, wait, what's the context here? You know, it's the same thing like, right, you need to be able to get whether you're using chat or Claude or Jim and I or whatever you're using, like you need to be able to give it the appropriate context. And so I just, I rather have it. I like Claude because I don't have to give it that context over and over again. can kind of, it's all built in there. So chat does do that now too. You can do project builds the same very similarly to what you can do in Claude. I do find that chat is just better for research and Claude Claude creates the content, writes the content in more of an authentic voice that way. Yeah.
For sure, for sure. All right, well, we'll wrap up the episode here. Next week, we're gonna be back with another episode of Creativity Made Easy. We're gonna talk about, there's a process for that. You know how people always used to say when Apple first came out, there's an app for that? We're gonna talk about next week how there's a process for that. You got a problem? There's a process for that. And we're gonna talk all about that next week on Creativity Made Easy. You can find out more about Chief Creative Consultants at DustinPead.com. That's P-E-A-D. You can find out more about 43creative.com. Any of your marketing or branding needs, go check PJ out at 43, spell it out, 43creative.com. PJ, thanks for being here, bud. Thanks, man. Thanks for the lessons. All right, we'll see you guys next week. Have a great week.