Section Insights
The Power of Enhanced Productivity
How has the speaker's productivity changed with new systems?
The speaker describes a significant increase in productivity, allowing them to accomplish tasks in a day that previously took a week. They emphasize the importance of transitioning to new systems despite initial inefficiencies, as it ultimately leads to deeper work and skill development for everyone involved.
- Transitioning to new systems can initially be inefficient but leads to greater long-term productivity.
- Deeper work and enhanced skills are achievable with the right tools.
- Investing time in learning new systems pays off in improved performance.
Contextualizing Information for Efficiency
How does the speaker maintain context in their work?
The speaker discusses a system that updates itself regularly, contextualizing information from various sources like Slack and emails. This system helps them stay informed about important files and milestones, enhancing their ability to focus on relevant tasks.
- Regular updates to knowledge files improve contextual understanding.
- Automated systems can help manage information overload.
- Maintaining context is crucial for effective time management.
Leveraging AI for Task Management
How does the speaker utilize AI in their workflow?
The speaker uses AI, specifically Claude, to manage their tasks and priorities. They rely on Claude to handle most of their work, allowing them to focus on high-level tasks while Claude manages the details and context.
- AI can significantly reduce the cognitive load of task management.
- Using AI as a partner allows for more efficient workflow.
- Automation tools can help maintain focus on important tasks.
The Self-Improvement Loop
What is the self-improvement loop and how does it work?
The self-improvement loop is a scheduled task that helps the speaker refine their writing and skills. It analyzes drafts and feedback to improve Claude's performance and suggests new skills based on recurring tasks.
- Continuous feedback loops enhance AI learning and performance.
- Identifying patterns in work can lead to skill development.
- Scheduled tasks can facilitate ongoing self-improvement.
User Experience in AI Tools
How important is user experience in AI tools?
The speaker emphasizes the necessity of good UX in AI tools, noting that it should guide users effectively. They advocate for building accessible tools that can be easily adopted by teams, enhancing collaboration and productivity.
- User experience is critical for the adoption of AI tools.
- Guided interfaces can help users navigate complex systems.
- Collaboration tools should be designed for ease of use to maximize effectiveness.
Transcript
0:00 I cannot describe how powerful it is. I'm really able to do in a day now what used to take me a week. But more than that, I'll say it's a lot of deeper work. There's things that I do today that I just wasn't able to do before. Whether it's more in-depth research, whether it's being more databacked, anything you do today, you can do it almost at the top level. One of the things even at a company level that I tell people is look, you got to go through the pain of switching your systems and it's not going to be as efficient. And yes, of course, like the old way will be faster because it's muscle memory, but if you get to the next level, not only will you have a system that works better for you, but everybody will have more skills.
0:42 >> Today, I say I manage about 70 to 80% of my time in front of the computer with co-work alone. >> We've seen a couple morning briefs, but I want to see what you think makes yours different. In this daily brief, my coworker runs through my recent slacks, my emails, my personal notes, and it looks for context that it doesn't understand in these things. And it says like, oh, if there's a file I wasn't aware of, there's a milestone, there's a goal, it would ask me about it and say, hey, like, what is this? Is this important? Should I read this? And this is, I think, where the real magic happens.
1:10 >> This is really genius. I'm curious how this scales beyond you. So, you have your system, you're, you know, 10x PM now. Congratulations. How does this affect the team? How do they use systems like this? Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Clarvo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today I have Daniel Bloom and he's going to show us his clawed co-work system to rule them all.
1:41 It self-heals, it self-optimizes, and it's way better than the morning briefing you have going on. Let's get to it. Optimizely agent platform for marketers is built on a bigger idea. A whole directory of agents now joined by a newly revealed squad of virtual teammates. Each with a defined role and a personality of their own. This isn't about faster drafts. It's about handling the coordination, too. The research, the approvals, the handoffs, the routing, the back and forth that quietly eats your week and never makes it into anyone's highlight reel. Get the story behind it all. Hear the confessions from marketers who have handed off the busy work. Meet the squad and understand what virtual teammates can do for you at optimizely.com/how ii ai. Daniel, welcome to how I ai. I am so excited to have you on this episode because every week, every month, I think things get better and I'm always impressed with how much more organized everybody but me seems to get with their AI and their personal productivity.
2:53 And so tell me like what brought you to building this big system and what problem are you trying to solve? >> Cool. Well, Claire, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. As somebody who's been an early adopter of AI for quite a while, I think it took a already like a a good few months ago or even a year ago, we were able to solve some of the big or at least improve some of the big jobs to be done for PMS with even with simpler tools like with gems. you could improve your specs and you could improve your research. But I think as I was progressing with my AI adoption, I really felt that one of the biggest things that hangs over me and and really makes my day-to-day more difficult is all this just overhead of of being a PM of coordinating a bunch of things, remembering endless tasks that arise on Slack and meetings and action items and just trying to maneuver this whole this whole chaos that happens every single day. while at the same time wanting to do in-depth work and focus and and really think I felt that that was something that was really really difficult for me and I was getting nowhere near solving it until I was able to actually build a system with co-work that I'm actually still a little bit surprised at how powerful it is and how much it's helped transform this this problem for me.
4:14 >> So tell me about your personal AI stack as a PM. How did you pick the tools that go into it? And then I want to I want you to show us how how it all kind of works. >> Perfect. so I'll say I think most of my choices were made by my company Mio. and the tools that I'm I'm are in our stack. but thankfully I'm I'm pretty satisfied with those. So for a long time we only had like the Gemini enterprise and we were using that and just a few months ago we got the claude enterprise and co-work and that's when things really changed for me. and besides that I'm basically bound to whatever whatever tools we have and use so this is this is what I work based off of.
4:59 >> Okay. So this is good for everybody out there who is stuck with the tools that they're stuck with. You can still make it work. I at work. I think that Claude is obviously like a big part of this stack. Was co-work just the big unlock for you? Like where did you when did you start building this and what was the early tools versus what you use now? >> Yeah. So I think first of all on your first saying I think it's very correct and in general I'll say like I was bound by constraints of an average PM all the time in terms of having you know not endless tokens and needing to work within budgets and bureaucracy and I think it's very possible and very doable within all those constraints that you know real PMs face and I think it's it's very important to say and in terms of the tool so co-work was definitely the big unlock for me but I While I love co-work, it's not co-work in itself.
5:54 and I think codeex could be great for this as well or Chad GBT work. I think the real importance is for a system to a be able to rewrite its own core files and that means that it keeps on improving and b just have connections and integrations to as much of your ecosystem. when these two rules apply there is a significant significant opportunity to really really improve the way you work and while I was working with Gemini gems earlier and there's obviously some incredible things that can be done with those these two elements make a system really powerful and also really integrated into your daily life but also self-improving which is one of the biggest unlocks here >> okay well let's let's show show it to us I want to I want to see how you actually manage your life as a PM.
6:43 >> Let me start with this notion board, right? So, this is nothing incredible. It's just a standard PM notion board. It has three sections. One is top of mind, which are the large initiatives that I I just think of you know on any given time. It has my this week, which is basically the priority that I have for this week. And it has inbox, which is things that arise from Slack, email, calendar, and co-work picks up and fills them in here. Now, the cool thing about this board is not that it exists, but the fact that not only did Coowork build this completely on its own, I was working with a very simple and messy Google doc before, and I think notion got I think co-work got tired of of it and basically decided to build this for me, but also it actually manages it on my behalf. And I think that's the pretty cool thing that I want to show and I'll walk you through how it does it. I'll say that the most important thing about this is that it knows me really really well because I spent a lot of time and effort contextualizing it and maintaining this context and also centralizing all of my work in it which took some time to get used to. But the ROI is just absolutely insane there. And I really felt how well it knows me just when prepping for this for this episode when I knew that because this is my real environment I couldn't show you know names and projects and sensitive stuff. So basically I just created this skill on cloud called demo and I just told it replace all the terminology and like specifics with generic terms. But because it knows me so well basically in in one prompt I was able to replace my manager's name with your manager and my top initiative. You can see here with headline feature and that's how well it knows me. It was just able to replace all of these and it just makes it for a really really seamless and comfortable collaboration.
8:37 >> Tell me a little bit about how that context is saved. Is it just that you just put everything in notion so when it's searching it kind of knows? Is there something more purposeful around your kind of personal brain? How do you how do you inject context into the system? So I'll say when I built up the system, it was very important for me to build something scalable. So I did a lot of research on like how to build how to set up your cloud MD and the and the context files. and basically I set it up so there's a context file around every every topic that that I have and like every area of my work and my goals and my and you know my colleagues and everything that you can imagine. I spent a lot of time manually contextualizing in the beginning, whether through like feeding it links and and different decks and stuff like that. And also just a lot of, you know, whisper just dictating endless information and blabbering endlessly about everything that I can think of, which is just incredibly powerful on how much context you can give relatively easily and quickly. and then this system basically updates itself on a recurring basis. every every few weeks it runs and updates the knowledge files based on you know different things that have occurred and different changes and we will see some of that just in a minute.
9:57 >> I love it. Well, let's let's switch over to co-work and show us how kind of the system is architected and then how you maintain it and use it over time. >> Perfect. So, it all starts with one recurring task which is a composition of several skills called the weekly prep. So the weekly prep is the very basic task that helps me start my week. I'll say that I won't run this live just because I want to be mindful of time. But generally speaking this task helps me go through all these things that you just saw in the notion and fill them in. So we basically have the top of mind, the this week and the inbox. And what this series of skills does, it pulls in information from my entire ecosystem from my notion, my calendar, Slack, from from granola transcripts of meetings and basically recommends what I should be focusing on this week. If there's new top of- mind items that need to be added or removed, it would recommend that. It would recommend moving, removing, finishing things from this week. And the same with the inbox.
11:03 and this basically on Sunday mornings, this is our beginning of the week. it helps me start with a very very clear and focused list of what I actually want to do. And then finally, it helps me prep for my meetings. So it runs me through the meetings that I'm going to have and asks me how I want to prep for them. Whether it's like a serious preparation that requires its own task in my weekly priority, whether it's a quick reminder or just meetings that don't really need any prep. And then I confirm all of this and I'm set to go. And this is the start. But >> and does that push all of it into notion?
11:40 >> Yes. And that basically this test that I ran earlier basically created this state that we have now the the notion that we have right now. But I'll also show you how it updates it. >> Yeah, let's look at that. >> Perfect. So the unique thing about this is that I think and this is something I ran into after having created the first weekly prep. I think one of the things any any PM can resonate with is the fact that there's two worlds, right? There's this beautiful clean organized world that's in our weekly priority or our road map where everything is very clear and beautiful and fits in and then there's reality where as we said this chaos of Slack and meetings and urgent priorities and executive asks and endless things that just flow in and out and what I was feeling in the beginning is this real this real gap between what I was doing and prepping and what it was happening in real life where I was spending all this time doing all these small tasks.
12:40 And I think I've built the system to really work alongside me. And part of the fact that it knows me really well is also that it knows how I work. So for example, I'm inbox zero both on Slack on on email. So it knows that if something is was saved on Slack and is no longer, it means it's likely done. Or if something was on inbox in in Gmail and is no longer so, then it probably means I already read it. And that really really helps in how we collaborate smoothly. So basically, let me run to my next scheduled my next scheduled task. And this is called the morning brief. And this is I think where the real magic happens. So actually we're going to run this live right now. I had to laugh because I think folks AI setup is a real reflection of their internal personality. And you strike me as somebody who is organized and thoughtful. You're an inbox zero person. I am sorry to anybody that tries to text or email me. I am like a chaos reigns person. I cannot put my stuff in a table. I cannot put my stuff in a conbon board. I need just a bot and I need when it's 2 in the morning or it's 6:00 in the morning or it's 2 in the afternoon. I just need to be like, "Dearbot, what's going on?
14:00 What's going on?" And so it's always fascinating to me to watch people who I just pre-AI have like a much more structured approach to their work and then post AI I think it really reflects in how you build build your system because mine looks it probably should look like something like this but it looks nothing like this. Well, I think I I'll say first of all that you are correct in in me being quite an organized person, but I will say like again in reality a lot is a mess and a lot is like I I've found out how much is like business logic in my brain and I've had this experience with the system where I continuously like do discovery on myself and how I work and I continuously run into this places where the system is not good enough because it doesn't cover this and what it doesn't cover like it has a blind spot and it becomes much less powerful. So over time I've like covered all different angles.
14:57 and I think it's doable. I think it's doable. And up until recently I would say in a way I was also operating chaotically. You know some of the tasks were saved on Slack. Some of them were like in my inbox. Others were just like tabs that are open in Chrome. And I've just had Claude like learn to work with all of these and say, "All right, I'll take unfortunately it can't take an open tab as as a task, but everything else I just learned to look at the same way I do."
15:24 >> Well, let's look at this morning brief because we've seen a couple morning briefs, but I want to see what you think makes yours different. >> Okay. So, I think that there's several things, but I I'll walk through this very quickly and and show the different parts and I'll highlight the interesting things. So the first part is that this brief basically walks me through my meetings. I think one of the biggest pains of PMs is we have ton of meetings. we need action items, we need to act on them. Almost every meeting creates new work, but we have to run to the next meeting and often times it's backtoback until the end of the day and then you know so this helps me kind of catch up on on yesterday's meetings.
15:59 and it shows all the different things and basically you can see this takes the granola transcripts and it gives me a oneliner about each meeting and if there's an action item. So here I can see from all of these meetings looking through them there is one action item to share the walkthrough and recording of a of and a write up in the feature channel with go to market. and that's it. So it's going to offer me to expand or draft any summaries. I'm going to say no, let's continue for now. And we're going to walk walk on over to the next phase which I think is pretty cool. One of the things that I think is super powerful with co-work and and with these harnesses is that you can set them up for improving themselves. And one of the things I've done is I've over time I'm building up towards Claude being more agentic and being more able to act on itself. and I'll show you this and I think it's pretty visible in this flow. This part is pretty cool where basically one of the difficulties in life is keeping the context clear, right? So you have the system, you contextualize it, it knows things, but then how do you make sure that it keeps track. So this is one of the ways I've thought of. So basically what it does is imagine in this daily brief my coworks through my recent slacks, my emails, my granola notes and it looks for context that it doesn't understand in these things and it says like oh if there's a file I wasn't aware of, there's a milestone, there's a goal, it would ask me about it and say hey like what is this? Is this important? Should I read this? so here it flagged something.
17:30 Let's see what it is. A term I didn't know the settlement cap. All right. This is some payments thing and it says like I read the thread and understand it's a limit working through. Want me to save? Yeah. So I'll say save. Yes. Save it to the context. So basically this is how Claude helps me keep it contextualized and not lose track of things. This is really genius and I want people to just take a pause and reflect on what this is because it looks like for your context you are making sure that Claude understands internal definitions, terms, goals, etc. And so many of us work inside companies where the things that we say are not in the training data.
18:10 They well not yet at least they're not in the training data. And so actually proactively prompting Claude to say like I don't understand what you're talking about here. Can we define it together and then I'll save it to my context and I'll know what you're talking about moving forward is really really sharp and something we haven't seen on the podcast yet. I love this. >> Yeah. So, it's it's super hard to just keep track and and the unlock is that you're able to say, "Oh, I can just ask Claude to be my partner in doing this and automatically, you know, follow up and and insist on on getting this knowledge is a really really big unlock."
18:45 >> Amazing. So you run it weekly, you run it daily. Do you actually spend time in the notion or are you still like navigating all this with Claude? >> So the main idea is that notion is almost a read only for me. I I look at the notion to get my focus to remind me of my top of mind to remind me of my priorities and focus this week. you know, every so often I'll I'll mark something as done if I just finished it.
19:15 But generally my goal is to have notion as as something I only look at and Claude manages on my behalf. And in general, I I'll say this is something that has happened to me naturally, but I think it's one of the core pillars of building a strong system. Today, I say I manage about 70 to 80% of my time in front of the computer with co-work alone. Almost everything I do here is through co-work and I try to do more and more of it because anything that I don't do in co-work then the context is not as well caught as if I do it through co-work whether it's you know other applications whether it's Jira Slack queries pro anything generally so >> are you using co-work with Chrome at all like are you using browser use or are you purely just using like connectors and MCPS for all of this.
20:09 >> Yeah. So I I would say in the beginning I was using like Chrome a lot. In my personal co-work that I have I use Chrome a lot. as as time proceeds and and there's more and more MCPS and connectors then obviously those are comfortable but like the Chrome connector is a critical critical piece of you know of the puzzle for when you don't have these connectors and integr integrations and you need to use the browser >> and do you feel like this is really saving you like what's the benefit here?
20:39 Is it like saving you time? Do you feel like you just know everything? Are you getting better work done? Like why? because, you know, again, these systems take time to maintain and I think we're all sort of at this point with our AI systems where we're like, okay, they're all super cool, but like why are we why are we doing this? And so, I'm just curious like what is the benefit you're getting as a PM to to running this system?
21:01 >> Yeah. So, it's it's a great question and I think honestly oftenimes we make systems that don't give us great benefit. I just I built a personal agent that its main work is sending memes about my wife in our shared panel on Telegram, which hey, to me is huge value. I think it's helping me win arguments. But jokes aside, >> I I think >> because you need to watch our episode with Jason, the CEO of Meme Lord, who actually has a meme API, so you can plug that into your agent. That was a a very weird episode that we did.
21:37 >> So, I I haven't watched it yet, but I will say it's literally like the top to-do task in my in like the Claude session that I manage my agents. And what what's next? The meme API is is definitely the next one. >> Yeah. but I'll say I think it's a really really good question and I will say also that probably in the beginning it's not going to like the ROI is not going to look great especially when you set up something that's as robust and as significant it's going to take some time because while it doesn't know you and your personal we can call it business logic and like the way you operate it's going to be very frictionful and everything it does or says or thinks is going to be a little bit and you're going to lose trust and you're going to be very skeptical and then you're going to double check everything. But the value tremendously compounds. It's just incredible the more you kind of power through these first few weeks of a contextualizing ruthlessly and continuously sharing everything you can and b centralizing whatever work you can in co-work or in your harness. Even if it doesn't feel so natural over time, it is just in I cannot describe how powerful it is. And I'll say personally, I think first of all, I'm really able to do in a day now what used to take me a week and and I stand behind that. It's and you know, it's something that sounds like a like a hypy LinkedIn post headliner, >> but it's it's it's true, you know. It's it's insane. And I I look at I look at my the way I work through these like this week and often times I can get through a this week in a good day.
23:21 which is just mind-blowing. But more than that, I'll say it's a lot of deeper work. there's things that I do today that I just wasn't able to do before. Whether it's more in-depth research, whether it's better being more databacked when checking things, working less off of hunches and more off of like facts and researches, whether it's competitive researchers, like anything you do today, you can do it almost at the top level. as opposed to back in the day, moving moving fast meant you need to, you know, operate on a lot of hunches. not work off of data, not be as robust in terms of your documentation. And today it really really changes.
24:07 >> I I love it. I love it. You you've sold me. I don't know if I'm going to get as organized as you, but I and I think that's absolutely right. I one of the things even at a company level that I tell people is look, you got to go through the pain of switching your systems and it's not going to be as efficient. And yes, of course, like the old way will be faster because it's muscle memory, but if you get to the next level, not only will you have a system that works better for you, but everybody will have more skills. And I think that's almost the more important part where this is a personal productivity system that works for you.
24:43 That's great. but I'd say probably the the bigger benefit is it forced you to learn how to use co-work and use these AI tools in a different way. And as a product builder, you have to know that stuff. You have to think about, well, what if my product's being used only through Claude? What what do I want that to look like? And I think it's just if you are in a product, it is just one of the most important things that that you could you could do. This episode is brought to you by Jira by Atlassian. The teamwork graph in Jira delivers 44% more accurate agent results with 48% less token usage. That's a huge difference when working with AI coding agents like Claude, Cursor, Codeex, or C-Pilot. The hardest part of shipping with AI isn't the code, it's the context.
25:30 What's the right ticket? What did the spec say? What got decided in Slack? The teamwork graph pulls all of that from across your entire stack from Jira and Confluence to GitHub and feeds it directly to your agents before they write a single line. You assign the work, the agent gets everything it needs, and a PR surfaces when it's ready. No digging, no contact switching, no broken flow. Same team, smarter agents. Try and free at jira.dev.
26:00 That's jir.dev. I'm curious how this scales beyond you. So you have your system, you're, you know, 10x PM now. Congratulations. How does this affect the team? How do they use systems like this? How do you share kind of how do all how does that work? >> A lot of what you brought up is is super relevant in that sense. and I think one of the things that have made me you know in a sense wait for for co-work for example when a few months ago there was this endless hype about cursor and about cloud code and you know I was kind of sitting on the sidelines and and waiting like should I adopt these like tools that are not meant for me and are super super technical can be scary and I'm glad I waited for for cowork because it's a lot about like you know just UX and and experience and simplicity and a lot of the tools that we've built for for the team and whether it's the gem that helps the team write specs product specs that we did almost a year ago or what we call the workstation that we have that I'll show a little bit later at the end of the day if you make something accessible and simple and the value is clear then it then it gets adopted much better. All right, before we get to the workstation flow, which is going to be how you get this across the company, across the team, you also have some self-improving loops that I think are really interesting. So, how do you improve this over time? How does it get better? What have you figured out there?
27:31 >> Yeah, so I think this is one of the coolest unlocks that have helped me continuously improve the setup while not dedicating too much time to it. And basically, it's almost not self-improvement, but it's Claude helping me improve it. So, I'll walk you through something called the self-improvement loop. It's a scheduled test task that runs weekly and it has several skills attached to it and and I'll walk through them. So, again, it it works in parts. a trick I found really helpful when when I have a bunch of information that Claude feeds me. So, I'm going to walk through this in retroactive. so, first of all, the first part is how my drafts landed. So, what I found over time is that when I write with Claude, it'll give me a draft and then I'll change it and I'll just send it. But the thing there is that Claude doesn't learn what the gap is between the draft that it wrote and what I actually sent. So, I have Claude when running this task looking for drafts that it it shared with me and I didn't respond and then looking to see if I sent them in a different way and learning from those draft and saying, "Oh, so we actually ended up writing this and doing the learning on it on its own." So in this specific in this specific week I see that there was nothing learned and insignificant but this is very helpful in continuing improving and you know polishing claude on on how I write. Now this is a cool one. The second one and this is skills that are worth building. So basically Claude on an ongoing basis looks for things that I do on a recurring basis and suggests turning them into skills. Many of my skills actually ended up being from this flow. so you could see it. I've been prototyping a bunch lately. So, it's, helping me. it's suggesting I create a claw design handoff, skill between co-working where I do the research and design where I actually build the prototype. and a bunch of other interesting skills that I've built. I have a skill like this, by the way, that's handoff between co-work which I use kind of as the exe executing arm of co-work. This is the second part. The third part is fixes to my existing setup. So basically all of my skills and recurring tasks have lines in their in their files to collect feedback and friction for my interaction with them. So over time they gather this I don't need to do this proactively.
29:48 Whenever I ask for a fix or something they gather and track this information and every week it surfaces the top frictions from my interaction with Claude and suggests to improve them. so these are also super helpful as you can see. And then finally, this is a a really cool one. This is actually the the improve scale. So basically, we're all dealing with an endless flood. I think this resonates with anybody. Endless flood of tips, hyping up from X and LinkedIn and and and newsletters and blogs about setups and how to improve your AI usage and you must have this and you must build that. And I found this incredibly overwhelming. on one hand I don't want to drown in it at the same time I want to be able to actually implement what's relevant so I've built a skill called improve which is basically like a very critical auditor for these and I share them usually through my phone through a slack channel with claude and I ask them like is this real is this powerful how how does this adapt to what we have now is this needed and then it helps me review it and together we basically decide whether we want to build it or not so here I ran it against Claire, your how I AI episode on designing loops.
31:03 and it basically gave me like a a criticism of the episode. It said it's like a good vid a video and it says like listen loops at the end of the day are essentially like scheduled test. So you're running loops in many ways but I don't have goal loops that are the way you suggested. So this is something I can adapt. there's some things I can adopt and basically this is helps me you know keep track of all the things that I run into and all these like tips and tricks and at the same time not drown in them and also not you know give into the hype too much. So these are all the different things I do to you know claude helps me continuously improve it over time with as little you know dedicated effort as possible.
31:43 >> Love the we could have done the entire episode on the last three minutes. so good. You know, I the first one where it's like take everything that you wrote for me that I hated and did it did it separately or dropped or rewrote and then just learn from that. That's genius. We saw Alex Lieberman had like a write like me self-learning loop, but this one is really interesting because it takes the indirect signals of rewriting and built it. I also in the loops episode have a skill writing loop. So, I think that's a good one. look at our work over the last couple week or last week and and write loops. And then what was it? Let me look at the third one real quick.
32:22 >> So the third one is just taking interactions with Claude over the week. It's similar to building new skills but just fixing existing. >> Yeah. And then and then the third one which is so genius and I wish more people did this is build in feedback or telemetry into your skills and then review that over time and improvement. I've seen a couple folks like I think intercom does this a little bit with some of their skills that they share across the org, but I haven't seen anybody for themselves say anytime that you gather feedback from me, positive, negative, on a skill or you hear feedback from me that's indirect, put it somewhere that we can review on a weekly basis. Super super super smart. And then of course ingest all this great content, especially from How AI and improve your systems. I love it. What I also love that you've told us you do is you take this mega system that you've built across notion across claude this improving loops and you figured out a way to scale this to the org in is it called workstation workstation okay let's let's see that >> for sure so basically I'll say that one of the one of the main things that were important for us and we were debating whether to do this with cloud code which was much more powerful or with co-work and we decided on doing it with co-work we have this what we call the workstation which is essentially this I would say operating system it started out for PMs andio but it actually expanded to all Amelio workers and basically what it does is you know it it it creates an ecosystem u an operating system for you but I think the cool thing here is this on boarding and it's important to say I built this with some very very talented and smart colleagues of mine.
34:15 we really insisted in the beginning on on a good UX and after having you know a few PMs try to do it with cloud code through the terminal and taking 3 days you know to install everything and run all the dependencies we understood that we need to do something that's simple. So basically one of the key elements of this workstation is that it basically does everything for you. So it's a UX built into the flow into the chat.
34:41 so basically what it does is walks you through everything you need to do. So besides just, you know, clicking on a few confirms and maybe addressing a few questions, it basically gets you up to speed on everything. It gets all your tools connected, confirms your roles, maps your colleagues, your management, where you sit, looks at your calendar and what that looks like and your Slack, helps you create your own voice so that you basically from day zero, you're writing in a way that sounds like you and just doesn't sound like a stranger. captures your goals and basically helps you get moving really, really fast. I I couldn't do the full flow here because I I have it set up already. So but you could see it's very very simple. It takes you hand in hand and guides you to this like very very robust system that helps you you know work in co-work fully and become native.
35:34 >> I love this. I have seen so many people try to train this into their team like sit and say okay step one step two step three step four etc. just making a skill to say, "Okay, do you have all your connectors set up?" Great. Have we pulled your voice? Great. Have you told me about you? Great. Like, tell me, you know, let me set all this up and then from day zero, someone on your team, look, they're going to customize it.
36:04 Maybe some people won't though. And so, if everybody's starting from this, it takes what, 15 minutes? Something like that. >> Yeah. >> I love it. And then do you just do this as like a shared skill? This is a plugin so everybody has it in our library and anybody can access it and you know now it's already like it's become quite a big thing like my colleagues have taken it to to the next level and it's really really impressive.
36:28 >> but yeah I I couldn't agree with you more. I think for me this this landed when about a year ago I built our spec writing gem call it call it spectacular and I I was using it for my own and I built it to be really you know back back in the day a year ago you know getting you know holding up the template was something really hard to achieve and making it not hallucinated in a long spec was like something that's hard and after I built something that was really powerful and good for for the way I was working and I was exciting to I was excited to distribute it. I had like live demos with several PMs that I watched them operated from zero and I saw how different like I thought it was already this complete fully like baked tool and I saw them using it and struggling because it was completely adjusted to how I work and that's when it started when into this gem I built this UX that guides you hand in hand that tells you like all right I'm your I'm your spec writing assistant here's how you can work with me here's what I recommend you to do here's how you can start and basically guiding them hand in hand making it simple and accessible.
37:34 so yeah good UX and simplicity is critical even for you know internal teams and PMs and technical people. I I love this so much. This is I mean this is something if you haven't taken it away as somebody watching this podcast go every company should go do this and build like your sort of like bootstrap my personal AI skill or plugin inside quad or inside codeex. Everybody starts from the same page and you can just get your most like AI pill on the team to build it for you and share and then everybody can have shared ownership over it over time. Daniel, this has been awesome. Just to recap for folks, you have notion is sort of like a readonly database source of truth for all your context and priorities for a week. You run two anchoring automations in co-work which is your weekly setup which sets up this whole notion thing preps you for meetings priorities and then your daily briefing that kind of cycles through the next day takes care of stuff and then you've been able to scale this in the org through kind of a a workstation plugin that anybody can use and kind of set up this thing for for themselves and now you're living your best life. And again, you know, bosses don't listen to this, but the man says that he can do in one day what he used to do in a week.
39:00 So, you're getting real just like real productivity gains from this. and you have learned maybe to be more organized and Claude plus notion have made you more more organized as a PM. So, everybody's everybody's benefiting here. this has been awesome. I want to do like a couple of quick lightning round questions and then we will get you back to all of your highly productive work. You know, I want to go back to you saying that you operate almost 70 80% through Claude and through co-work. What do you think is missing? what what what is that remaining 20 30% and do you think it's going to be 100% at some point or kind of what's that gap and what's missing in in terms of you being able to use AI or use claude for everything?
39:52 >> So it's a really really good question. I think the missing piece and I'm my my personal sense is that it's very close is a the ability to operate in a in the cloud essentially in a way that's unrelated to when my computer is open and running. I think that's critical and I think that was also created with the with a cloud tag which we don't yet have in our company but I've heard good things also that it's expensive. I don't know. But I think the ability to run Claude away from your computer or have it run on its own, something like OpenClaw or like a Hermes, is really really critical to do more of these things and to achieve more. I've found some ways to work around this. Like I have a ch a Slack channel that claude poll polls and when I'm away from the computer, I can send him some things and then he could read them later. But it's it's still something that has to happen online. and this is I think the the real missing piece. Once I have something that's able to operate in the cloud when I'm away from my computer when it's off and you know coordinate like act on things that that will be huge. And also closely related is just the ability to actually like you know do do things. So I've been building up the system in order to enable to to basically prepare for it. I've been having Claude not only capture my tasks and when they're done, but basically it looks at my tasks, it assigns like what it looks what it would imagine is a closed scenario. So, let's say something somebody asked a question and I saved it on Slack. So, it would say, okay, if there's a reply and it's unsaved, it means it's done. And then it looks at how I resolve these things. And that's building up towards the the time where I hope that for the simplest task that may take up time and be annoying, you know, when people somebody asks you for something or somebody asks about a file that you need or or know or to or to schedule a meeting, then it would just know to do that on its own and it wouldn't need me and and that's what I'm building up towards and that will be really powerful.
41:53 >> That's that's the dream. But we're not at the dream yet. And so I'm curious, you know, we our audience is a lot of PMs and I'm just curious now that you have this extra capacity and time, what are the the product tasks that you're doubling down on that you're doing even more, you're spending even more time on, where do you think the effort should go? >> I'm not going to say anything surprising, but just purely in-depth work, that's one. so talking to customers, talking to users and a lot of research. I think those two are really really important and given and also just the standard things that NEPM aims to get more time for. But I think that in today's world something that really really is important and interesting and that is new is a improving the system. So I think the beauty about this is that if a system is built correctly and on the right pillars, it can grow and improve over time. And I've improved my system basically week over week. and this is done through, you know, dedicating time to research and learn about AI, catching up to speed on how things are progressing and implementing them. I have a skill that's called improve which I send posts and tweets and articles to with like recommendations and tips about AI setup and together we review it and see if it fits for me or if it's just like LinkedIn hype and how it can collaborate with what my system is today and we continuously improve the system together with you know tips from from a bunch of resources. This is a skill that I think is critical today in order to be able to keep up and and become better. yeah, >> I I I love it. And then finally, my favorite question I ask everybody, you're organized, so maybe maybe you're nicer than me. When Claude is not doing what you want, when AI is not giving you the response that you want, what do you do? Do you yell? Are you nice? Are you polite?
43:54 So, I think after having watched quite a few of your episodes, I think my response is pretty similar to everybody. if I'm using whisper, I may yell. I don't get road rage, but I get clawed rage. So, I think like I can I don't I don't know if I've cursed, but I I've definitely like raised my voice. And I'm also frustrated at the fact that that doesn't go through whisper well enough. like I'm like, you know, exclaiming passionately and then I just see the transcript and it's like, why isn't this working? So, whisper folks, if you're out there, this is a feature request.
44:28 Make make my exclamations be more felt. >> I love it. Yeah, I have this, Speaking of Claude Rage, I have this hypothesis. I have this aura on. I have this hypothesis that you can tell what model I'm working with with like how agitated and stressed I am. So maybe maybe that will be a future how I AI benchmark. I'm I'm baking annoy bench which is like how furious >> that would be amazing an agent or an AI makes me. This has been so much fun.
44:59 Thank you for showing us your full system. I think it's totally accessible. I think a lot of people are going to put this in their own improved skill and I love how you're figuring out ways to share this with the rest of your team. Where can we find you and how can we be helpful to you? Awesome. So, this has been super fun, Claire. Thank you so much. people can find me on LinkedIn, Daniel Bloom. and also on my website, I'm Daniel Bloom.com. I can share some of these resources.
45:27 this this a big part of this system is available for download. So, check out the website and yeah. >> Awesome. Well, thank you for joining How AI. >> Thank you, Claire. >> Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiipod.com.
46:04 See you next time.
Summary
- The co-work system automates task management, allowing for seamless integration of various tools like Slack and Notion.
- Daily and weekly briefs help prioritize tasks and prepare for meetings, significantly reducing cognitive overhead.
- The system is designed to self-improve, learning from user interactions and feedback to enhance its functionality over time.
- Daniel highlights the importance of context in AI systems, advocating for proactive updates to ensure AI understands internal company terminology and processes.
- He emphasizes the value of a user-friendly interface to encourage team adoption of these AI tools.
- Continuous improvement through research and adaptation of new AI features is crucial for maintaining productivity.
- Daniel's approach illustrates how AI can not only streamline personal productivity but also enhance team collaboration and skill development across an organization.
Questions Answered
How has the speaker's productivity changed with new systems?
The speaker describes a significant increase in productivity, allowing them to accomplish tasks in a day that previously took a week. They emphasize the importance of transitioning to new systems despite initial inefficiencies, as it ultimately leads to deeper work and skill development for everyone involved.
How does the speaker maintain context in their work?
The speaker discusses a system that updates itself regularly, contextualizing information from various sources like Slack and emails. This system helps them stay informed about important files and milestones, enhancing their ability to focus on relevant tasks.
How does the speaker utilize AI in their workflow?
The speaker uses AI, specifically Claude, to manage their tasks and priorities. They rely on Claude to handle most of their work, allowing them to focus on high-level tasks while Claude manages the details and context.
What is the self-improvement loop and how does it work?
The self-improvement loop is a scheduled task that helps the speaker refine their writing and skills. It analyzes drafts and feedback to improve Claude's performance and suggests new skills based on recurring tasks.
How important is user experience in AI tools?
The speaker emphasizes the necessity of good UX in AI tools, noting that it should guide users effectively. They advocate for building accessible tools that can be easily adopted by teams, enhancing collaboration and productivity.