If you've ever looked at your to do list and thought everything feels urgent and I don't even know where to start, then this episode will be really helpful for you. That feeling of overwhelm that I'm sure we're all familiar with comes from having too much to do all at once, with no clear way to decide what actually matters today.
And the problem isn't that you're bad at prioritizing. It's that modern work throws meetings, emails, projects, and personal commitments at you simultaneously, and your brain isn't built to hold all of that in a calm and chilled out manner. So in this episode, Neil and I are going to talk through practical ways to use AI to help you
prioritize when you're weak is feeling out of control. We are going to cover how to get AI to help separate urgent from important, break big heavy work into manageable chunks, and learn how to safely connect AI to your email and calendar so that it can identify priorities, draft replies, and help you plan your week. By the end, you are going to have a much more effective way to decide what deserves your energy and what can wait. Welcome to how IAI with me Doctor Amantha Imba, and Neo Applin,
head of Inventium AI. Each episode we share one practical way to use AI better at work and in life. No fluff, no dech jargon, just things you can use straight away. So today we're talking about how to help AI to get you to prioritize when everything feels urgent and nia. I know you and I have weeks where they can just be quite overwhelming with the amount of
work that we've got on, particularly in the AI space. Now, I'm going to share a couple of my workflows because I am not a copilot user, which means that my AI is not automatically connected into my calendar. But I know that you've got some different methods because you're more copilot than me. So should we get into it. Yep.
But also, if you're not in copilot, you can use other applications like Claude and Gemini and whatever, so you're not left out if you're not copilot, So go for it.
Okay. So here's what I typically do at the start of the week and I realize, oh, I'm feeling overwhelmed. What am I going to do? Is I will work with my AI, and I will do a brain dump of everything that is on my mind, like every single task, whether it be big, deep work chunks or smaller shallow work chunks. Then I will ask the AI to well some of the context that will know because it knows
me quite well. But I will still prompt it to interview me to try to break apart what is urgent important, what is important not urgent and urgent and not you know, but yeah, so kind of working in those those you know, typical time management task management quadrants. Then I will get a bit of a list, so a bit of a
priority list from AI. Sometimes I will ask it to ask me questions to break down how long I think each task will take, because then that's important for time boxing, because sometimes you know, everything can feel overwhelming because you just in your mind overestimate how much time everything is
going to take. And then another thing that I'll do is I will ask it to ask me questions to identify which task is causing me the most stress, because you know how sometimes you've just got a shopping list of things that need to get done during the week, but often there's just one that's causing a lot of stress. Have you had that experience before? Yeah?
Absolutely, And sometimes you can't put your finger on it. You just know I feel stressed, but you don't know which one.
Yeah. So I find that AI is quite helpful in asking me questions to just unpack that, and often I will prioritize for Monday the task that is causing me the most stressed, because once I get that done, then my stress levels automatically decline. I sometimes then get more micro and I'll get it to break the list up into a task list or a to do list, if you like, splitting it up into deep versus shallow work tasks for every day of the week Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
At Inventium, we do Gift of the Fifth, so a lot of us don't work on Friday if we've got all our work done. So it's often a four day list. And that I find that little process, which takes all of five minutes chatting with the AI is I find a really good flow to get the AI to help me prioritize. Do you do anything similar to that? Because I do have one other flow that I want to share, But first you have you done anything like that? Neo?
I have I think that my days are a little bit different to yours. Often I've got larger chunks of time, whereas you're If you ever seen Amantha's calendar, everyone, it is a thing to behold. It's like someone sprinkled hundreds and thousands on the calendar because they are all different colors, and there are no gaps, because everything is scheduled within
an inch of its life. So Amantha needs this kind of productivity, whereas for me, often I've got blocks of half a day, or some a day delivery, or a few hours here and there, so my day is not as tightly scheduled as Amantha's. However, I can help anyone whether their diary looks more like mine or more like yours. But in order for it to be useful, it really needs to know about you. It needs to know about the task you're working on, the projects you're working on,
and things like that. So the first step is how do you help give that context to your AI. Now I know that one of the things you do is you work with Claude, and you work with projects a lot, and so with projects for those of you who aren't in Claude, it's a bit like a GPT it's a little bit like a notebook if you're in copilot land, where it's got your documents, your background, your knowledge, and so every time you up and up a new chat thread,
it already knows all those things. And so having that background is great because you can say, here's my week that I'm really worried about, or here's these projects and I'm worried about. It knows loosely. We try to achieve it knows loosely about these projects and things like that. Heck, I used to be a project manager, so this have a project in claude, or have a notebook in copilot for each of the projects you're working on. That way you don't have to say it everything about all your job.
It's just about that project you're working on. So there we go. Background is really important. The next is for me at least, sometimes I have this massive boulder and I don't really know how I'm going to chunk this boulder down. So this is where you're questioning. Idea is brilliant. So you say, I've got this thing maybe stressing me. How do I make this something that I can actually do?
And AI is great at being able to break it down into smaller chunks that you can actually understand what you're trying to achieve, who you need to pull in, and things like that. So another massive tip which is get AI to help you to make sense of these things so you can then schedule it in calendar and all of those kind of things.
One thing that I've had success with is, and again this is good if your AI is not talking to your calendar, is pasting in a screenshot of your calendar for the week and asking your AI to help you prioritize or potentially to give you insight into how you're organizing my diary. So I've occasionally done this, and I actually did this before we started recording because I was curious as to what would come out, and my AI
knows me, but it's not connected into my calendar. So it was actually pretty good at recognizing what was non negotiable, like some of my external meetings, sales meetings, and also anything to do with Frankie a daughter, and it was it was good at identifying where all my deep work was time boxed, but it was interesting and it said that I had too much context switching with my deep work.
I had too many deep work tasks scheduled, and some of them I'd only given half an hour or two, so it had, you know, I think pretty cleverly suggested that I extend those deep work blocks out and try to be a bit more single minded with what I was achieving each day. So that is a fun little exercise to do with your AI if you're wanting to get maybe some coaching around how you're currently organizing your diary.
But tell me, neo, how can people who have set up connections either within the Microsoft environment using cope pilot an outlook to play together, or they've connected in chat, GPT or claude, or they're in the Google ecosystem where everything can see everything else, what is the best way that we can use our AI to help us prioritize for the week.
You use AI as your productivity assistant, so you're using it like you would if you had a project admin to be able to help you with those projects. So are we connecting two things? If you can email and calendar, and these are really important things to connect in because often we have tasks that relate to many, many, many
emails that we've been given. So connect the two of them. Now, how do you connect them Each of the different tools have their own different ways to connect in Now, Microsoft, within the Copilot and ecosystem, if you're in Microsoft Office three, six, five, or then you can get Copilot to do the connection into your mail and calendar just natively by clicking on the wet work tab. So that's great. You can do those kind of things. Google, same kind of thing. Within
the Google workspace. You can be plugged in with those things with CHURCHBT and Claude. There are things called connectors, and so you need to go to often there's a plus button or in the settings there's connectors, and then you can add connectors for say Gmail or for your Google Calendar and things like that. So these are the things to be able to plug in. We'll just talking a moment about your calendar, so you can bring these calendars your emails in and then you can have a
conversation about your day, your diary. So instead of it having a look at a picture like Amantha is given it and maybe color coded slices whatnot, if you just give the same kind of feedback Thatamantha had, but it's giving it on effective facts rather than reading a picture and things like that. The other thing is bring in your email. So I've got a meeting on Thursday? How do I prepare for this? Is there other things I need to do for this? I've got a deep work
session in here? How do I best prioritize the deep work session? And be able to read the agenda or the tasks or the notes in your deep agenda and be able to say check emails and things like that, so it'll help you along the way. So really important to be able to get your email and your calendar with AI and then work as work with it as
that assistant. As I said, there's also another superpower that particularly chatpt and Claude have, which is if you're in a system like say Monday dot Com or a SANA or things like that, and you're using these web applications for managing your tasks, you can bring those in as well,
because sometimes it's not just about calendar management. Sometimes it's about my to do list or how I need to contribute to other people's tasks and things like that, So you can bring those into your AI and then get your AI to tell you about your tasks or what's do when they're due? And do I have a task that maybe I don't have scheduled in my calendar, so
it's a way to cross reference against those two. So again, productivity assistant to be able to review all the things on your plate, help you chunk them down and be able to plan them accordingly.
Awesome. So hopefully, if you have been listening, and maybe you started off feeling really overwhelmed at the start of this episode, you've now got some practical ways that you can use AI to help lessen your stress and get yourself organized for the week. And remember, if you've got a question for Neo or I, there is an email address in the show notes. We love hearing from you, and thank you for all the emails and feedback that you have been sending us so far. We will see
you next Monday. If you found this useful, please help us spread the AI love and share it with someone who you think would benefit from knowing what you now know. And if you're ready to really start mastering AI, check out inventium dot ai. We help individuals, teams, and organizations turn Jenai into a real work superpower, saving ten plus hours a week and staying future ready without the jargon or overwhelmed. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next time on how i AI. How I AI
was hosted by me Amantha Imber and Neo Applan. A big thank you to Martin Imber who does our sound editing, and Jim Rubio for production support, and thank you to John Kilby who composed the theme music