How I Use AI To Do Things I Don't Do, But Should

For twenty-plus years I've been buying internet domain names. And in all that time I never kept a proper list of what domains I own and what each one is worth.

Not because it's hard to do. A spreadsheet would handle it. I just never had the hours to pour into the manual work it required, so the list lived in my email or sometimes in my head -- which is a terrible place to keep a list.

It turns out all I had to do was ask for it.

Now I get a detailed domain report sent directly to my email inbox. It maintains itself. And it includes details (like estimated value) I would have never had the time to pursue on my own.

It got me thinking about what AI is actually for. This is a different kind of win than the one we usually talk about. I didn't get faster at work I was already doing. But rather, the number of things I got done in a day went up. Things I should have been doing, but were quite important enough to make the time. Now they get done without me doing them.

Everyone carries a list of things they’ve long intended to get done. It’s now possible to delegate (a lot of) those things to AI.

So today I want to break down:

—@dharmesh

In my TEDx talk about How to Compete with AI last year, I argued that AI's first job is to take the rote work off your plate.

That was about reclaiming hours you were already spending. Today I want to take a left turn and talk about unlocking extra productivity. Not through taking work off your plate, but instead adding an entirely new plate that your AI is responsible for clearing.

Think about it: If you were to make a cup of coffee and sit down with an empty piece of paper, what tasks that you’ve been meaning to make progress on would show up first?

And of those tasks, which of them would more likely than not have been on an identical list had you attempted this same exercise 90 days prior?

The domain list I mentioned in the intro is a perfect example. A database of what domains I own and how much they’re worth is exactly the kind of thing I would maintain if it were my sole focus. But I never did. There was always something more urgent.

Here’s a handful of “nice to have” ideas that may help inspire you:

These are things you might keep up with if you didn’t have more pressing responsibilities tugging at you. But each of these things can be delegated to AI agents that treat these simple tasks as their full-time job.

And all you have to do is ask your AI in plain English!

Frictionless delegation requires you to connect as much context as you can to your AI agents. Once you connect your living and static context to an AI agent, you have the real beginnings of a second brain. The more context you connect, the more capable your agents will be.

Making this easy is my goal with YouSpot -- my new AI-native CRM that builds and maintains your second brain for you. It’s a one-time setup that impacts every future interaction with AI. You don’t need YouSpot for most of the examples I have listed below -- both ChatGPT and Claude can be connected to your Gmail (among other things) -- but it is what I used myself, in case you’d like to copy my exact steps. Also, YouSpot is built for one-person companies -- but some of the examples below are personal.

Here are some recent examples of expanding capacity with AI.

Build and calculate the value of my domain portfolio

I used this prompt: Check my last domain related emails to/from GoDaddy. Extract the domain names discussed and add them to my database. Retrieve the estimated domain value using the built-in tool and store that with each one. Send me an email with which ones you added and their estimated value.

Note: This is a task that would not be possible without connecting my inbox. If you remember one thing from this newsletter, make it be how important supplying context to your AI is.

Ask my agent to find trending startups

My second brain knows the kinds of startups I’m interested in (and the kinds I’m not). When Y Combinator (the #1 startup accelerator in the world) sent an email announcing companies in their recent cohort, I just forwarded it to my agent for it to review and research independently.

And here’s the really cool part: I can just respond to the email report my agent sends me and say "XYZ is not really a fit because they're a bit too vertically focused. Not that they won't make money, but not of interest to me." -- and this feedback will instantly improve the report I get the next time I run this task.

Delegate monitoring tasks

Here’s a simple example: Find tweets that mention @dharmesh and have 5 or more likes. But I could have said "...that have a positive comment about HubSpot". You can be as specific as you want, AI will have no trouble creating the right filters from your natural language.

Do you notice how short and concise these prompts are?

An agent with access to my second brain (created by YouSpot in this case) doesn’t need dense prompts to remind it of things it can already observe in its connected context. It already has a reasonably clear idea of my personal judgment and biases thanks to all the connected context.

For the purposes of delegating everyday tasks and using AI as a virtual assistant, you really don’t need to connect that many of your everyday apps (Gmail, LinkedIn, etc) before you start seeing it pay off.

There aren’t many reasons why your AI agents should have a bedtime. The secret to expanding your capacity by delegating to AI starts with handing off more work.

If you read Automate More Work with Scheduled AI Tasks back in July, you already know the mechanism: when you find a prompt that really helps you, schedule it. That’s a good starting point for scheduling your first task.

When you’re ready to give your AI more responsibility, connect more living context manually, or try using a tool like YouSpot to build and maintain your second brain for you.

You don’t need AI to automate your entire job for it to be helpful.

The recent experiments that brought me the most satisfaction were the little ones that I’d never have the time to do on my own. I didn’t reduce my workload, I increased my net productivity.

There’s a powerful amount of leverage to be had by simply connecting more context, then delegating the tiny tasks you’d never have time to do yourself.

If you haven’t yet delegated a recurring task with AI, hit reply on this email and tell me why. No judgment (of course) -- just curious if there are any specific challenges in your way 🙂

—Dharmesh (@dharmesh)