One AI Hack That Will Kill Your Procrastination

What if the key to ending your procrastination is already in your pocket? 

Joe Downs and Peter Swain dive into the hidden power of AI as the ultimate procrastination killer. 

They explore how AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini can do more than brainstorm ideas…they can help you start the hard stuff you’ve been avoiding, whether it’s your taxes, overwhelming to-do lists, or a business idea that’s been sitting on the shelf. 

From personal stories of stuck moments to clever hacks on using AI as your own executive coach or life advisor, this episode is a powerful wake-up call to stop spinning your wheels and finally start. 

If you’ve ever looked at a task and thought, “I don’t even know where to begin,” this episode is for you.

Listen For

:33 Why do we avoid the things we need to do the most?

2:29 How did AI turn a month-long task list into a 15-minute sprint?

6:11 What’s the hidden genius behind AI-guided decisions?

14:59 What’s the real cost of not starting a task today?

23:52 How can your board of AI advisors plan your week better than you can? 

Connect with the hosts: Email 

Joe Downs 

Website | Email |LinkedIn |YouTube 

Peter Swain 

Website |Email |LinkedIn |X 

Chapters

• 0:33 Why do we avoid the things we need to do the most?
• 2:29 How did AI turn a month-long task list into a 15-minute sprint?
• 6:11 What’s the hidden genius behind AI-guided decisions?
• 14:59 What’s the real cost of not starting a task today?
• 23:52 How can your board of AI advisors plan your week better than you can?

Transcript

Peter Swain (00:00):

Find everything that I've made into a project, not a task, number one. Number two, look for clear delegation opportunities that I have already missed. Number three, analyze anything that remains next to my true north of what I'm trying to achieve in my life. Number four, look for the known unknowns where I've overloaded and I've tried to do too much in any given day. I run it every week and it comes back and says, "You should be delegating that, that, and that. You're overloaded on this day, this day, and this day

Joe Downs (00:33):

You know that thing on your to- do list that's been there for three weeks, the one you keep moving to tomorrow? Maybe it's a hard conversation you need to have. Maybe it's finally looking at your finances. Maybe it's that email you've rewritten in your head 40 times and ever actually sent. Here's what I've learned. We don't avoid hard things because we're lazy. We avoid them because we don't know how to start. And that's exactly where AI becomes dangerous, but in the best way possible because that's the thing that's been haunting you. With AI, it can be less than 15 minutes away from being done. And today we're going to talk about using AI to tackle the stuff you've been avoiding, the finances, the conversations, the tough decisions. I'm Joe Downs. With me is Peter Swain. One of us teaches people how to buy self-storage.

(01:20):

The other's an AI business strategist together with just a couple of successful idiots. All right, Peter, let's step inside the Hustle Lab and show these people how AI can put more horsepower behind their hustle than a Brit has excuses for why their football team

Peter Swain (01:34):

Lost.That's harsh, man. That's harsh. Tottenham have just had a really unlucky

Joe Downs (01:38):

Story. Who said anything about Tottenham?

Peter Swain (01:40):

No comment. All right. Go birds.

Joe Downs (01:43):

All right. All right. Did you just say go birds? Are you trolling me after a pathetic offensive output by my team?

Peter Swain (01:52):

I thought you deserved a little shiv in the ribs for bringing up soccer at the moment.

Joe Downs (01:55):

All right. Fair enough. All right. Last few episodes, we've been geeking out over the tools, the how to use them, when to use them, what they are. We didn't even go deep on them. We just kind of gave some high level overviews of them, which was fun. But today, I think it's time to get a little practical. I want to talk about the stuff people are actually avoiding because I think it's going to sound like a strange hot take, but I think AI can be the number one procrastination killer and most people don't realize it. What's your take on that?

Peter Swain (02:29):

I could not agree more. I got sick over the holidays and I came back and I wrote this list of the nine things that must happen. Not kind of nice, but these are historically delayed. I've got to get at these. And I looked at it because I was still quite sick and I'm like, "This month's worth of work." And then after a couple of days when I started feeling better again, I started picking them off one by one and going, for example, one of them is my personal tax return and the accountant wants this document from this county and this document from my TV license and this document from here and this document from here. I'm like, "If I was to just enable the Gmail connector in Gemini, couldn't it go and find those for me?

(03:17):

" And I was like, "Huh, okay, let's try that. " Now, did it get all 100%? No, it didn't. But did it get 70% of the documents in 20 minutes? Yes, it did. And it gave me that momentum, that kick, that energy to then do the other two hours that needed to be done to finish it. But these nine jobs that I estimated in my head were months worth of work, half of them are done and half of them were 15 minutes or less. I've got 62 affiliate payments to pay, and I was stuck on, well, what order do I pay them? Because if I pay them all sequentially, number 62 is going to be quite pissed off. He's not going to get paid for 180 days. But if I try and pay them all at the same time, it's going to hit my cash flow and put me in, not in a terrible position, but not in a good position.

(04:16):

So I uploaded the sheet into, in that case, it was Gemini. I went, "Okay, here's these people, here's what I owe them. I need to work out a structure for this. Help me understand how we should even approach this job." My first question was essentially, "I don't even know how to do it. I have no idea how I'm going to do this. " And its first question, which if most people that are smarter than me would come to is like, "Well, what's your monthly budget that you can safely execute on? " I'm like, "Oh, that's a good question. It's this amount." He goes, "Great. Based on that, you've got this many tranches that you're going to have to cover. Does that work?" I'm like, "Yeah." It's like, "Cool. Do you want to divide it equally?" I'm like, "You know what I want to do? I want to hit this ... " It's an uneven distribution, like 40 of those people are 50, $60 type numbers and then the other 20 get progressively larger.

(05:15):

I'm like, "You know what I want to do, Gemini, I want to hit all the $40, 50, I want to hit all of them in one go, because then this list is 20 long, not 60 long." So it's like, okay, great. So we structured it as let's pay down all of these people first, and then we can schedule the larger amounts over several months in equal payment structures. Now, all of this is, you're either listening to this going, "I don't understand a word you said," or you're going to listen to this and go, "Well, no shit, that's the solution." The point being, I was stuck, I didn't know how to proceed. I uploaded it and told it I didn't know how to proceed, but this is the outcome, just like we're speaking in the last episode. This is the outcome I'm seeking and it guided me through the thought process until what I thought was going to be days worth of work was complete in 22 minutes.

Joe Downs (06:11):

So for the small business owner, entrepreneur who probably doesn't have the bookkeeper on staff whose job that is, right? So it's your job to go through all that, which is a lot of us, right? You can't afford it. You're looking at a mountain of payables and where do I begin and who should I start with? And by the way, one question I had or I would have asked, I'm sure the AI, I'm sure Claude would have asked you or probably did if you actually did this, is what are the terms? Who's payable in 30? Who's payable in 60? Who's payable in 90? Or how late are you, maybe you're late on somebody and then organize that for you. And if it's, I don't know if it is or isn't, but if it's connected to, let's say your QuickBooks where it has the ability to read your QuickBooks or even your old QuickBook files, it doesn't even have to be connected.

(06:58):

It could just have the old files or access to your monthly, quarterly, annual every year. It can probably see what your cash flows look like. Maybe you expect a lot of receivables in June, but not July, right? So it's-

Peter Swain (07:16):

Exactly. Now, I know this isn't the topic we're talking about and it's almost not worth talking about because it's so far beyond people's capacity to envisage, but then this next thing happens. And the next thing that happens is to me, the most magical thing about AI of the human brain likes being in a zone of genius. It likes being in this space of something and it doesn't really like context switching very much. So in the old days, you'd send this to somebody and they'd bring it back to you. And by the time they bring it back to you, you're no longer in the zone of genius around why you were asking for the thing or doing the thing in the first place, so it's very disjointed. Then you've got the other approach where you sit down for six hours and do it yourself, but the human brain isn't very good at focusing for six hours.

(08:11):

So you end up just ticking the box and getting it done. Now what happens, Joe, is during the process of doing it, what I realized is that 20 of the 60 people are in my existing programs and they would much rather I put on a four-hour webinar on a Saturday to teach X, Y, Z than pay them the affiliate. They would much rather have more access, more time, more deliverables than they would the 50, 100, 200, $300. So I actually ended up net not committing to 18 of $62,000 because I wrote a bunch of people an email saying, "Hey, we owe you this money for your affiliate. Thank you so much for referring people to us. I've got an offer for you. Happy to pay it, but what I was thinking of was I would put on a four-hour event on this date, on this time, and teach this thing that I know that you might be interested in.

(09:16):

Would you prefer that or the

Joe Downs (09:18):

Payment?" So AI gave you the pathway to barter.

Peter Swain (09:24):

AI gave me the freedom of thought to be able to do what humans do really well, which is go, "Hang on a second, there's a really smart thing inside this thing because the drudgery of the work has gone, because the X hours has gone." What I find consistently when I'm in a Manus or a clock, wherever it is, is I start thinking of new ideas that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. You and I were talking about this last night around continual, I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, but continual personal development, continual professional development credits. I'm willing to bet every piece of money I will ever earn that you would not have had that idea if you were in a traditional think tank process or a consultant or da, da, da, da, da. It's because of the compression of the job getting done in a really easy manner.

(10:23):

Your brain starts being free to start going, "Well, what about this? What about this? What about this? " And it's like popping popcorn inside your head.

Joe Downs (10:31):

Well, 100%. And I told you the iteration of that to tell you, so you didn't think I was nuts because we were supposed to be talking about the storage education business model I'm launching, which hopefully if all goes well, we will record and document and share with everybody. But in that process, in that iterative process with Claude, and we are way off topic here, but it's fun. But in that iterative process with Claude, I started, you're right, everything compressed and my brain was free to be a visionary

(11:10):

And I just started asking, "Well, would this be a good idea?" And in fact, I'll even give everybody the sequence. Sequence was the fact that we're going to deliver this education through multimodal media, right? So audio, video, mind map, infographics, podcast, Google Notebook LM, which is an episode we got to do soon, but Google Notebook LM style features, everything it can do and produce is what I wanted to use. And then I asked Claude, "Hey, is this what's unique about what I'm about to do? Is this the differentiator?" And it said, "No, because all AI is going to do that soon." So you think you're going to sell against ChatGPT? You're kidding yourself, but if you get really specific and really specialized, there's a huge, total addressable market for this style of delivery for very specific information like continuing education credits for the thousand different categories there are of continuing education credits.

(12:26):

I mean, it's an absolutely huge market.

Peter Swain (12:29):

Yeah. And then what can now happen-

Joe Downs (12:31):

And if I shouldn't have said all that, cut this out of the episode

Peter Swain (12:34):

Down. But now what you can do is now go to Manis and say, "Show me all of the continual professional development credit providers grouped by industry so we can start seeing where the gaps are, so we can work out where we can go first."

Joe Downs (12:47):

We need to stop giving away the business plan.

Peter Swain (12:50):

Yeah. But well, yes and no. So first of all, I want to bring it slightly back on topic because what I'm proposing, what we're proposing is that you can swap procrastination for pleasure because the thing that you're procrastinating because you don't want to do it or you don't know how to do it or it's too hard or it's too sticky or it's too messy, we promise you it isn't. And actually what you're going to start finding is that when the popcorn starts going off in your brain, these monotonous drudgery tasks or these hard to start tasks actually become quite simple and you'll start finding wins in it that you never knew possible. But the second thing, and this is more now philosophical, is this is the thing, Joe, we can give away the business plan because anyone that starts mastering AI can start getting through these.

(13:40):

The difference between the winner and the loser for 2026 is speed of execution. And it's always been, we've all known it. I go back probably 20 years, I registered this website address, Joe, it was called Grab Me Some Grub. And what it was, you went onto a website and you could choose from a restaurant and hit add to my car and then a motorcycle guy would deliver it to your door. Sounds a lot like DoorDash.

Joe Downs (14:10):

I hope you sold that to DoorDash for several

Peter Swain (14:14):

Tens

Joe Downs (14:14):

Of millions.

Peter Swain (14:15):

Yeah. And that's the point. I bought a domain name because it was a cool idea and put it on a shelf and I never did anything with it. Execution has always outstripped ideas. There's a crude phrase around everyone has an idea. But with AI, you can now skip through that piece and now actually start executing on the idea and leveling it up and spinning it up in such profound ways. So if we can help people get past this, I don't want to do this because, or I don't even know how to start this, so I'm going to put it off and I'm going to do it tomorrow. At some point, you know, I know, we all know that you're going to have to get to it. And the longer you leave it, it ain't going to get easier. It's probably going to get harder and it's probably going to get more urgent.

(14:59):

It's probably going to get more stressful. So pick up AI. If you don't, this is like not the part of trick piece, but just like if you don't have any idea how to do this, choose any of them, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, don't care. Put the task in and say, "I have no idea how to even start. Please help." You don't even need to know how to tell it what to do. If you can just tell it that you don't know what to do and let it start the process. And when your brain kicks into gear and you're like, "Oh no, I do really understand this, " which I'm sure you actually do, then say, "No, no, hold my bit." And then you swap the order of who's the manager and who's the guitar player in the band.

Joe Downs (15:39):

Perfect segue because I want to bring this down to kind of the step before all this and really the most basic level, which is we're talking about procrastination and you led off with an example of ... First of all, I said finances, hard decisions, tough conversations, great. We started off with an example of finances, perfect, love it. What if you were in the step before that? What if we're ... I've got a list of 10 to 15 things here. They all have to get done. I don't even know what the right order is, the priority of them, and how to get started, what's the low hanging fruit? I'm going to ask this same question in two ways. It's going to require two different answers, or I'm going to get two different answers, but the second one's selfish. So for the listener who's just still handwriting lists, which by the way is me, but I'm also putting them in notion.

(16:40):

I used to use various tasks softwares, but now everything's a notion for me. If I just have a handwritten list, I know I can take a picture of it and I know it can, if I've got these on my phone or even on my computer, whatever, you can paste it on your computer.

(16:58):

Can it, will it, and which tool do you think I should use to take my list of 10 items, 10 things I have to do, some personal, some for my business. What's my prompt? And then part B is, how do I do that in Notion? Claude's connected to Notion. I guess I should just as Claude, I don't know. I probably should-

Peter Swain (17:22):

We're going to have to do Notion AI. We'll do that a bit later on because that deserves an episode. But let's go for the first one. My first question to the person that's thinking this through is honestly how overwhelmed I. If you could do a look, like a self-diagnostic check-in for a second, how stressed are you by this? Because when I got back from my holiday and I'd been sick and I saw this list, I was hugely stressed. My Aura ring is like, you're at 90% stress when I'm normally at 20. If that's the case, then the tool is more ChatGPT voice mode, put on headphones and go for a walk.

(18:05):

I know it sounds silly and I'm not trying to be a therapist, but get out, move, breathe, because the actual first problem we've got to solve is your overwhelm problem, not the actual task problem. So in that case, I would go out, put headphones on, go for a walk and say, "Okay, ChatGPT, I'm ridiculously overwhelmed. I have to do these nine things. I need your help. So here's what you're going to do. You're going to help me prioritize what needs to be done. We're going to find the interim five-second action that can be done for each thing. There's things in here, chat, that I just need to email people saying, sorry, I can't do it for two weeks. There's things I can push back. I know I can. We're also going to help. You need to help me find delegation opportunities and you also need to align these to my true why to see if I can even should be doing them in the first place.

(18:55):

Help me sort through this cluster F so that I can have some sanity of what's going on. " So if you're in complete overwhelm, I'd be in voice mode, out there going for a walk. If you're like, "No, I've got it. I'm just up against it. " So we're like a five out of 10, not 10 out of 10. Then I'd be in something like Claude saying, "Before we begin working on this, ask me three questions on each thing to understand each thing better, and then let's work on putting them in a priority list and et cetera." Because I'd prefer the power of Claude, I'd prefer it to understand the things more before I'm having a conversation. So that would be my shift of if you're overwhelmed, A, I feel for you and we all get it and we all get to those spaces, get out, go for a walk, get some oxygen, see a tree and talk to AI.

(19:52):

If you're not overwhelmed, sit in something like Claude and break these things down into more detail. So instead of just being this ... Because the thing we're all scared of, there's nothing to fear but fear itself. It's not the thing that you're actually scared of. It's just the line item that just looking at you and haunting you.

Joe Downs (20:12):

And how to get started.

Peter Swain (20:13):

Yeah. One of mine is I'm two weeks late, finishing not late, but two weeks by my timeline of a course that I've committed to delivering to my community. When I get started, it's going to take me three hours, but to me, it's this whole big phantom right now of I've got to film a course. I don't have to film a course. The first thing I have to do is going to Claude and say, "This is what I committed to delivering. Let's break it into modules." That's the first thing I've got to do. Then the next thing I've got to do is say, give me the three talking points per module, and then the next thing I've got to do is film each of the modules, which is going to take me minutes. This isn't something I'm not training people on something I don't know how to do.

(20:54):

I know how to do it by the back of my hand. I've just got to record myself doing it. So as you said, it's the starting piece. And if I do that first piece in ChatGPT or Claude of, let's define the modules, define the lessons and define the talking points. So I've got a document that's like, "Oh, this is what I have to do, " then I know what's going to happen. I'll just sit and record it. But you're absolutely right that AI can move you through your procrastination in a really elegant, safe, fun way, quicker than any human, any coach, any therapist, any partner than I've ever seen full stop barn on.

Joe Downs (21:39):

So that was really awesome. And it reminded me, and this is what I just heard of, I can't remember the ... I'm drawing a blank on the name of the book, but there's a book where it talks about if you want to get up and work out in the morning, you can't think about working out in the morning. The only task you have is to get up and put your sneakers on. And if you can do that one at a time, then the next step leads to the next step. And before you know it, you're at the gym and you're working out, but you don't get out of bed and boom, you're in the gym, but that's where your mind is.

Peter Swain (22:16):

A friend of mine estimated, it's exactly the same topic, estimates that he saves half an hour a day and succeeds 25% more because what he does is he lays out his gym clothes before he goes to bed. So when he wakes up in the morning, they're always in the same place, in the same pile of like, "Here's the socks, here's the pants, here's the shirt, here's the sneakers." So that putting them on is just the most easy, obvious thing to do.

Joe Downs (22:45):

Yeah, you don't have to think. It's breathing.

Peter Swain (22:46):

Yeah. It's just, well, there's the clothes, put them on. Oh, well, I've got my gym clothes on. I should probably go to the gym.

Joe Downs (22:51):

So what I heard, that's why I thought of that example is what I heard there, and it was a perfect example is it's just the hardest part about doing something is getting started. It's the first step and AI makes that first step so much easier. Now, let me take the second part when you said, if you're not frustrated or you're in a good mood and you're just trying to plan your day, let's say, and you go into Claude, as you know, this podcast is really for me, how's this sound? Because I'm not doing this, but I'd love for you to tweak what I want to do for myself, I think here is. Claude connects to Notion, I've already connected. Should I be asking Claude to look at my task for today and this week, reference my Rosetta Stone with what it knows about everything I'm trying to do and accomplish.

(23:52):

And then, and this is where I need to bring my board of advisors from ChatGPT into a Google Doc that Claude can reference and give it the instruction to reference my board of advisors. However, because really what I want to get to is I want the board of advisors based on everything it knows about me and my business, my Rosetta Stone, to tell me what are the most important priorities for that day and that week. But hold on one second. I don't know if I want the full board of advisors. I think I want to create, this is where I want your advice, I want to create more like a life coach, business coach board, like just those two.

(24:41):

Almost like if you're a traction company, EOS, following Gino Wickman advice, or maybe it's Dan Sullivan's strategic coach, whatever it is, bringing in that element of advising and coaching and life coaching and business entrepreneur coaching to help you because we're human, Peter, and there's a million things on my list and they're all extremely important to me and they're in that moment. And by the way, they're all important and urgent and they have to be done and I'm going to let people down, I'm going to let myself down and I can't possibly do them all today, but they're on my list every day and I know they shouldn't be.

Peter Swain (25:21):

Okay. So wait, there's two parts to this. One, my AI is instructed to never give me anything other than whole life advice. And I recommend this to everybody. So what do I mean by whole life advice? I mean strategies, insights, tasks that satisfy my health goals, my relationship goals, my spiritual goals, my financial goals, and my business goals. Because one of the things I've seen people use AI for is very siloed. So they'll ask for business advice, but they haven't told it their personal situation. They haven't told it what they're doing with their kids, how old their kids are, how old their wife is, et cetera, et cetera. So they're getting this advice that actually help is right for their business, but at the expense of the rest of their life. So the first thing is make sure that the input is a whole life input.

(26:17):

The second thing I would suggest to you is the reason I'm suggesting that is because the thing that's sending the task to Notion in the first place should have come from Claude in the first place. So instead what you're doing right now-

Joe Downs (26:31):

I'm writing it down and then at

Peter Swain (26:33):

Night- And then you're putting it in Notion.

Joe Downs (26:35):

I'm putting in Notion.

Peter Swain (26:36):

Yeah. So why not put it through a-

Joe Downs (26:38):

Go ahead. Tell me how 1980s I am.

Peter Swain (26:42):

No, well, at least you're using Notion. So I'll at least put you in 1990, but why not have the AI help with the formation of the task and make sure it's actually on your true north? Because I'll give you one of my issues. I'm very bad at delegation. It's so not in my DNA. I don't want to say that because I don't want to say it to myself. I find delegation to be an energy drain, not an energy game. So what happens is I hold the task to myself, hold the task to myself, hold the task myself, then I get frustrated with my team, and then I give them 28 things at the same time when I could have given them to them weeks ago. And it's a pattern I go through. So one of the things my AI has been told, and I'm offering this to people as a bit of vulnerability for me, but as hopefully an insight for them, is my AI has been told I'm terrible at delegation and here are the people available on my team and here are the advisors available to me that are my equals or my mentors.

(27:38):

Here's all the support people in Pete's world.

Joe Downs (27:41):

Peter, I want to make this the parlor trick. I had a different one, but this is so important for procrastination and so good. I want to make this the parlor trick. So can you ... I love where you're going, but can you start at the beginning? What am I creating? You said it has a whole life coach or rule or guide. The trick is what? What do I create that governs all my decisions? And then walk me through the rest.

Peter Swain (28:07):

For you, because of your tech stack here, you're going to create a clawed project.

Joe Downs (28:11):

Okay.

Peter Swain (28:11):

You're going to put your board of advisors as a knowledge file in that project.

Joe Downs (28:15):

All right.

Peter Swain (28:15):

You're going to give it the instructions in the project to say, "Your job is to help me form whole life advice." I may tell you a project, I may tell you a task, I might talk about a nice to have. Your job is to align it with the rest of my life, to give me visceral critique if it doesn't line with my North Star with where I'm trying to get to in my world, and to look at the impact on the other parts of my life, family, finance, et cetera, if I give you this thing. And then you're then going to go into this project and say, "I want to launch, I've just done the storage hundred, I want to launch that as a storage 365." That might be something you might want to

Joe Downs (28:59):

Do.

Peter Swain (29:00):

And then the instructions and the board of advisors are going to go, "Well, why, Joe? Does this actually help you get to your goal? Because you told us that your son's graduating this year, so that's going to take a week to two weeks out of your life. This is happening in your life. This is happening with your brother, your father, your sister, your mother. You're ramping up this project with capital over here. Is there actually benefit to doing a 365 or not? Or is the hundred actually achieving the goal?" And so quite a bit of the time I have found, I go, "No, that's actually a terrible idea." When I look at it in the whole life perspective, it's not actually a very good idea, but let's say it is a good idea.

(29:50):

So it comes around and you're like, "Yeah, no, I do want to do this. " Great. Now bring this into a task list because another thing that people often do when they're procrastinating is they don't have What are the tasks they have a project? It's actually not an achievable unit of work. They have something like, as I have here, film the agent deployment course. That's not a task, that's a project. There's 60 tasks inside that project. If you look at Dave Adam from Getting Things Done, well, I love that book. That's his core principle of if you break things down into tasks, then you can get the task and do the task and nothing should be more than a five minute task. So let's say we're like, "Yeah, we do want to do Storage365. Great. What we're then going to ask is for this project to outline each of the tasks in small, bite size, achievable chunks.

(30:42):

So now Claude, using the board of advisors using all of those people using your True North is defining a list that's actually achievable that fits in with your world. Then you tell Claude to send that to Notion.

Joe Downs (30:56):

And then Notion organizes my day, my week. So this is going to

Peter Swain (30:59):

Happen. Well, you have your task list in Notion. So it fills the task list in for you instead of you filling in the task. So because you're trying to clean up the task list that you messy human screwed up in the first place. It would be slightly more optimal to not even have a crappy task list in the first place. So using AI as part of that process, I do something very similar. I use to doist, not Notion. And I have a weekly prompt that I run to say, fine, because I do it the way I didn't say. I do it the way you do. I'm so the nicest-

Joe Downs (31:36):

Well, we're human, right? Exactly. You got a pen and paper.

Peter Swain (31:39):

And I'm so used to my process of capturing tasks that it's just ingrained as a habit. So I have a weekly thing where I say, find everything that I've made into a project, not a task, number one. Number two, look for clear delegation opportunities that I have already missed. Number three, analyze anything that remains next to my true north of what I'm trying to achieve in my life. Number four, look for the known unknowns where I've overloaded and I've tried to do too much in any given day and give me a full break. And I run it every week and it comes back and says, "You should be delegating that, that, and that. You're overloaded on this day, this day, and this day. This actually, why did you say yes to this? " And it will go through and I clean and prune that list every Sunday.

Joe Downs (32:29):

I'm going to have to get the transcript from the show. You said that so fast.That is incredible. And I hope-

Peter Swain (32:37):

Well, I think it's a huge rabbit hole because I think, but what I think we both hope is somebody says, "I've got to do my tax return," and they open up ChatGPT and say, "I've got to do this. I don't even know where to start. Help me out. " Just that's all this. All of this episode breaks down to, "I need to do X. I don't know where to start. Help me out.

Joe Downs (32:59):

" Yeah. Well, that's exactly where I want people to start, especially for a lot of the listeners listening for the first time or still brand new, still feeling their way. That's where I want them to start. But for anyone else who has been using it, and I know we have listeners that are using Claude and they're using Gemini and they're using Mannis, I wanted to give them, and selfishly me, I wanted to know for myself how to do it better. But yeah, it's like the next level, right? But certainly, and I do, by the way, on the weekend, if I'm like, I don't ... A question for my wife, my kids, or question I have myself, my go- to, believe it or not, for just general ChatGPT. It's just right there. You have it on your phone. It's easy. It's simple. And a lot of times it can ... 90% of the time it handles the tasks that I'm asking for.

(33:58):

And a lot of times that is, what is the first step? I may not ask it like that, but I might say, "Here's the situation. What do I do? " And I probably said this in the first episode or the second, it literally is a therapist half the time. It's like having ... I still have my dad with me, but someday I won't. And it's like having ... So if you don't have your parents and you used to have them as the go- to, it's been ... They're not replaceable, but you get the point. It's nice to have that, "Hey, I can now go to this knowledge base that used to be called mom or dad and get the basic stuff that you need." Even if it's just simple stuff that you already know, you just didn't know where to access it in your brain, right?

(34:48):

And you have the mental block and you just want that big brother, mom, dad, reliable voice to say, "This is what you do. This is where you start. This is how you do it. " And if nothing else, that's what it does for you, even its most basic form, ChatGPT. And that's what I wanted. So this landed perfectly because that's really what I wanted people to understand from this episode was just, it can help you with your procrastination really just removes the fog, the mental block and just gets you going. And then you said it perfectly earlier, and then you switch seats. You use the AI to get you going. And then once you see clearly the path you're on, it got you out of the mental fog, then you switch seats and take control. That's what's beautiful about it. All right. Well, I love this episode, Peter, but we got to land this thing.

(35:49):

Folks, please like, subscribe so we can spread the word and subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Here's some homework. Think of one thing you've been avoiding and just go ask AI to break it down for you into a 15 minute task or first three steps or whatever. Try it today. Just one thing. Just like putting on your shoes to go to the gym, putting on your sneakers to go to the gym. Just open up the chat box and ask it. Look at your to- do list, personal business. Doesn't matter. Just ask it one thing. Or I dare you to do this, take a picture of your to- do list, load it in chat, and see what it says about everything on the list. That'll be a lot of fun. And if you can't because you have five, 10 tasks you're avoiding, that's the perfect solution.

(36:39):

Just take a picture, show ChatGPT what you're up to and ask what order you should do it in. And then you ready? Pro tip. Ask it for the first three steps of all of those tasks. And then from there, you'll have, what does it say? 10 tasks, three steps. You'll have 30 first steps. One of them has to be easy, and that's the one you should go with. All right. Share this with someone who has some great ideas. You know that person they're always talking about, "We should start a business. We should launch a business doing this. We should do that. " Share this episode with them. They'll thank you later. And don't forget to send in any questions, show ideas, things you want us to solve or any issues you have with the Tottenham Football Club to idiots@successfulidiots.com. We would love to feature them on the show.

(37:27):

Peter, solid show as always. Thank you, sir.

Peter Swain (37:29):

My absolute pleasure. Looking forward to next week.