I spent 30 minutes today to save myself 30 minutes every week moving forward. That’s 2 hours a month, 24 hours a year. It doesn’t sound like much, but think longer term. Every week, I plan to automate another 30-minute task. It all compounds.
How am I doing it? Claude Cowork.
It’s changing the way I operate entirely. It’s the future of how I work, and I’m convinced it will be the future of how every employee works. More on that in a second. First, you’re probably wondering what I did.
Here’s the situation. Every week, I send a weekly Slack message to our team. It covers a few things:
Our Current Priorities: The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
Key Wins: There’s a lot to celebrate every week, especially when you move super fast.
Customer Pain Points: Our grounding point is our customers’ problems. We literally exist to solve them (and the future ones we know are coming our way). We’re a start-up trying to secure the future of how companies will work. That takes some vision.
Focused Improvements: There’s always something we can improve on. It’s important to call out our mess-ups and how we improved them. No ego, amigo.
Next Week: What’s in the queue? Let’s get excited about the challenges we’re about to crush.
Current Musing: My mind is always fixated on something. It always helps to write these things out.
I have a time block every Friday to knock this out. To start, I review all my calendar items, meeting transcription summaries, and whatever else that randomly pops into my head. The research can take 15-20 minutes, and writing adds another 15-30 minutes, depending on how much I’m writing and the current focus level.
Automating this was easy. Here are the steps I took:
Plot the Steps: This wasn’t a complicated thing. I just visualized the steps I would naturally take and wrote them down.
Document the Output Format: I already had this figured out because I’ve been manually doing this in a Google Doc.
Find the Connectors: Claude has connectors to major services like Google Calendar, so that was easy. A quick search for my meeting recording software turned up that they had a fully supported MCP server. Easy. Saved me from having to build one (which I would just do with Claude Code).
Start prompting: I’m what you would call a lazy prompter. I just went to Claude Cowork and asked it to create a weekly summary using the format I listed. I then gave it an example of the last update I gave. Then I let it work. An iterative process of tiny improvements got me to where I wanted.
Make an Agent Skill: I just asked Claude to create one and followed the instructions.
That was it. It took me 30 minutes, tops, to do this. Now, moving forward, I have everything automated. I will, of course, still review and update. Each week, I know I’ll find something to tweak, and I’ll do that. It’s about the incremental improvement.
The key for the non-techies out there is this…
Stop getting stuck asking, “Can it do this task?” Just start testing!
You have to break through the busy barrier. We all think, “It’s easier and faster for me to just do the task manually. It would take too long to figure out how to do it a new way.”
Block off a day, half-day, a few hours, whatever. Just put it on your calendar for the earliest available time. If you say you don’t have availability, here’s a special message for you. Make adjustments, not excuses. You can find the time. You’re just scared to try something new. But remember, growth doesn’t happen in the comfort zone.
Here’s your homework. Take a look at your week. What routine tasks are you doing? The tasks that you could explain in a few minutes to someone you trust and have them do it for you. I promise you that you have at least one of them. That’s the one you tackle first.
Go on, I’ll wait…
Like most good things in life, these productivity gains come at a cost. I’m not talking about the cost for Claude. That’s worth every penny. To be truly productive, you’re delegating this AI agent access to a lot of your tools and data. Your calendar, your email, your CRM.
These agents become a new aggregation point for security risk. And today, these agents are running without oversight and with limited security controls. Security teams are completely blind to what’s happening.
That’s why we built visibility and security controls for local agents at Evoke. I’m able to gain comfort knowing that I can push hard with automating my workflows without sacrificing security.
If you’re looking for that warm and fuzzy feeling that boosts employee productivity while maintaining security and privacy, let’s chat.
If you have questions about securing AI, let’s chat.
