I hate to micromanage & I’ve been micromanaging AI.
A few months ago, I’d use Claude for a familiar workflow : capturing notes from a meeting, drafting a follow-up email, updating the CRM, writing the investment memo. Micromanagement at 10x speed. The agent would finish a step, then wait. I’d scan the output, type the next instruction, wait again. Prompt, response, prompt, response. I was the bottleneck in my own system.
A year ago, this was necessary. The models couldn’t hold a complex task in their heads. Now they can.
But this leverage requires planning. Now I sketch the workflow before I touch the machine. I anticipate the decision branches : what if the company isn’t in the CRM? What if the website is down or the call transcript isn’t available? I flag the gaps before the agent encounters them.
This morning’s notebook page :
I took a photo & shared it with Claude & walked away. Workflows as images work beautifully.
The agents run in the background. The memo sat in my inbox, formatted, sourced, ready to send.
Not prompts. Blueprints.