AI for South Africa
AI for South Africa is the podcast that makes artificial intelligence practical, accessible and useful for South Africans — from Soweto to Stellenbosch, from the classroom to the boardroom. Hosted by Maxine McKelvey-Brown of Maximillion Digital, each episode teaches one concrete skill using real South African examples across business, education, family life and everyday work. Whether you're a spaza shop owner, an HR manager, a teacher or just someone trying to understand what all the AI fuss is about — this show is for you. No jargon. No hype. Just practical AI for South Africa.
AI for South Africa
Personal productivity with AI: Remember it, schedule it, say it
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What if AI could help you run your day without you having to explain everything from scratch every morning?
In this episode of AI for South Africa, I share the three simple habits I use to manage multiple projects, follow-ups, content, admin and everyday life with AI.
There are no complicated systems or massive automations involved. It comes down to giving AI better context, letting recurring work happen automatically, and talking instead of typing when typing is slowing you down.
Takeaways:
Remember it
Create an evergreen document that tells your AI who you are, what you're working on, how you like things done and what it needs to remember. Keep updating it so you don't have to start from zero every time.
Schedule it
If you regularly ask AI to do the same thing, stop being the trigger. Schedule it. Morning briefings, weekly analytics, recurring research and monthly admin can happen without you remembering to ask.
Say it
Use voice instead of typing wherever it makes sense. Dictate emails, prompts, meeting follow-ups and ideas, then let AI help clean them up.
Your homework: Start your evergreen document. Write down who you are, what you're working on right now, and how you prefer things written.
Simple setup. Much less re-explaining.
Daily AI Briefing Download
Hello and welcome to AI for South Africa. My name is Maxine, and today I'm going to share with you what my mornings are like now. So I open up Claude and the first thing I do is I'll ask it what's on the list today and how can we make today a little bit more efficient? That's it. And then it gives me all the information that I need about my project, what's up, what's I still need to follow up on. Because I have so many different companies, it'll break down each company and be like, okay, for Maximilian, you need to do this, for Hub Link, you need to do that, for this, you need to do this, and then don't forget you need to fetch the kids today. And it's all because I've been running with this certain setup to make my personal productivity smooth and easy for me. There's nothing fancy in terms of like tools or anything like that, it's just my Claude, and there's these three habits that I have, and stacked on top of each other, it makes a huge difference to how I run my day and how I run my projects so that I don't have to necessarily rely on hiring more staff or getting outsourced people. It's just me and I have so much to do and my AI helps me. So let's get into it. So the first thing I have is called an evergreen document, and this is a big one for me because at any point I'm working on so many projects at the same time. If I don't create this document, this running document, um, I never know what was going on, and my claude would never know what was going on. It would probably think I'm three different people. So, what is an evergreen document? An evergreen document is a document, a running document that keeps everything that's going on from one project to the next. It can also hold things like how you prefer to do things, what your Mondays are like, if you have certain things that you don't like to use, or that let's say every day at 10 o'clock you like to have coffee. It's it's where you keep all your stuff that is set, so the base stuff, maybe the stuff that doesn't necessarily change all the time, but also so things like who you are, what your business does, how you like things written, things like that. But then also it has updated stuff on things that are changing every time you you work on a project. And let's say, for example, I'm going through a chat and something happens and I learn that I actually don't like to use AI in a certain way, or let's say it keeps making the same mistake in one of my Excel projects. Then what I can do is I can say to it, listen, please put into the Evergreen document that I don't like to use AI in this way, or that you keep making this mistake in my Excel, it needs to be set, and AI can read it whenever it is. So once this document exists, you can kind of connect it to every conversation where you actually where there's meaning. So if you have projects for all your clients or projects for everything that you do, connect that document to that project so that it knows off the base what it's dealing with, how to do it, what's happening in the last week, and it has context every time you work on it, it's not starting from zero. Remember, we never want to start from zero because it's just too much work. Let me give you an example. If you remember my podcast social media, is I come up with ideas, but every piece of content after that is produced by AI. And one of the things that my social media team, which is I say my social media team, it's actually AI team, it was creating LinkedIn posts line by line, like no real paragraph elements, and it was driving me insane. And no matter how many times I kept saying to it, look, stop doing this line by line stuff, you know. So what I decided then was I was gonna actually put it to my Evergreen document that when you're writing posts, don't use a line with a space or a line with a space. I want it in paragraphs, I want it legible, I want it to be readable by a human. That for me is the most important thing in terms of I want humans to be able to read my copy, not just machines. And so I put it into my Evergreen document, and then last week initiated for my LinkedIn posts to be posted or created, and it remembered it, so I didn't have to keep telling it. So little things like that. What I also do is after I'm finished a project or job that I'm working on, I'll say to it, please update the memory. Each project also has its memory, but I like to keep the evergreen document so that there's a holistic view on what's happening. Number two is scheduling, and I think I've spoken about this quite a lot lately. So this one is about not being the trigger, right? And so most of us use AI from a reactive point of view. I need something, go to it, use it, and then you know, open a chat, we ask, we wait, and we get the answer, which is great, but we don't necessarily want to do that every single time. We want things to run on their own if it's a thing that happens all the time. So what I do is I have another one in the morning that gives me my morning summary of what's happening in AI news, and you can download it from my website as well to create it for yourself. I'll share the link in the document. So, what it does is every morning it goes and fetches all the news around AI and puts it into a nice little HTML page for me to read while I'm having my coffee in the morning. I don't have to trigger it to say, hey, go fetch me that information. It automatically fetches me that information. Another one that I run is I have all my analytics of all my social media pages and websites that run weekly as well, so that I can see what's happening and if I'm doing something great or if I'm not doing something so great, and how I can change that. Also, scheduling a task if something happens over and over, just it's a great way to keep on top of stuff, you know. Like I have monthly stuff that runs, and if I didn't have that monthly stuff that runs, I'd probably forget about it. So it's kind of like a new notebook, you know. Remember to do this, remember to do that. So, yeah, looking at scheduling, most of the apps now have scheduling available, so it doesn't matter if you don't use Claude or Codex, but yeah, scheduling these tasks is like the next big step for me. The next one that is a huge one for me, and the more I talk to people, they're like, I can't believe we haven't done this before, and it's really easy to start, and there's a lot of options available, but this is voice dictation into AI. So instead of typing every single email or prompt or like if I'm in the car or wherever it is, I am talking, I'm not typing. Number one, if you know me, my spelling and my grammar is absolutely terrible. So for me, it's a bit of an irritation every time I type because I have to go back and fix it and fix it, and it takes me so long. So now I just talk to whatever I'm doing. There's programs you can download. My favorite one is Whisper. I also wrote a review about it on my blog, which I'll share the link in the description if you want to go and read about it. But instead of typing the meeting notes and like the emails and the follow-ups and all of that, it's I just talk to it. I talk to Whisper, it's on my devices and it gets the job done and it writes it better than I ever could. Its spelling is way better than what I could, and it just works really, really well, and it saves so much time. The stat that stood out for me on this one though, when I was researching it, is most people don't lose time in a meeting, they lose time in the gap after the meeting where they have to sit down and write everything down. So talking instead of typing also closes that gap because it's a different part of your brain that's triggered, and also when I find you're typing, you keep going back and correcting yourself, which kind of takes the essence away of what you're trying to do. So, yeah, those three things: a document that remembers everything that you're doing, a schedule that stops you from forgetting to trigger stuff, and then your voice to stop you from typing and wasting time. Those three things is what helps my personal productivity immensely. Let's make this real. So here's how each one actually looks the Evergreen document in practice. I have a document called Clawed.md. An MD is just a markdown file that all these LLMs use to read stuff. It sounds technical, but it's just a text file, really. And then in that document, I have sections like who I am, my current projects, how I like things written, people I've worked with, if there's certain words that I use, like my current phrase. I suppose I had it forever though, but my top used phrase is let me know if you have any questions. And if you work with me, you'll probably know that. But yeah, I have that in there in a folder on my desktop when I start a project, or if I want to do anything, then I go, here's my evergreen document, use this as context, and I read it, and it takes like 15 minutes to set up, and it saves me so much time re-explaining everything. And every time I make a huge difference, or actually, I do it after every project, but you can do it when you set to, or maybe it's once a week or whatever. I say to the project or whatever I'm working on, please update my evergreen document, and it updates my evergreen document. The next one is scheduling in practice. So, like for my briefing session, I set it up to automatically pull before I get to my laptop because my laptop's always like on. So, like 7am, it pulls all the relevant things that I like, and I give it the links that I like, and I say to it, give me a summary. Again, you can do this in the chat, so you can have a normal chat and then say to it, create me a schedule to do this every Monday or every day or whatever the case is, and it can kind of do it for you. If you want to, you can also create another MD file or a skill file that has all the information in again, and then you can just say to whichever system you're using, please use this file because markdown files and skills are usable across all apps, and then you can say please schedule this task every week or every day, and it does it for you. It's really you just it's not that difficult. You can just have a chat and it does these things for you. The voice dictation in practice, so you can just use the microphone prompt thing at the bottom of your chat box if you prefer. You can also open your phone's voice to text, it has one built in it already. But if you really want to use a system that's set up and easy to use, and there is a very good free version on it, you can use Whisper. Then instead of just asking AI to clean up all your stuff, you just actually talk into it, and Whisper actually has AI built into it and it makes everything grammar, spelling, layout, everything how you like it, and it actually learns from you in terms of how you like to talk and how you do things much faster. So look at those apps and see if you if you're willing to use them. So, homework for this week is only one thing. I want you to start your Evergreen dock. It doesn't have to be perfect, just open a blank document, write three things down who you are, what you're working on right now, and how you prefer things written. Okay, that's it. And then save it and then put it in a folder and attach it to your project and see if that works. If you're on a free version, you can also just drop the text file into the chat and say, This is my evergreen, this is where we're going from. It's just a shift in how you work, is what we're going for. We're starting to get some muscle memory in terms of using your evergreen document, never starting from scratch, and updating things as you go. So that's for today. The three things share the things as you go along, if you tie them, if you get stuck, drop them in the socials. The next episode, we're gonna be talking about skills and understanding skills. But until then, I hope you enjoyed the show, and please share this with anybody you think would be interested or who would like to learn how to do this. And I am Maxine, and this is AI for South Africa.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so we're kind of treating South Africa. Let's go.