I’m experiencing an automation challenge.
I want to automate way more activities and tasks. The challenge is two-fold. First, I’m still shifting my perspective and behavior regarding the habit of delegation. Second, I’m still shifting my perspective and behavior embracing learning as work. I’ll briefly address each aspect of this challenge.
First, I’ll ask Claude AI for examples and/or ideas of a way for me to give AI more things to do:
COLLABORATION
Example
Paste a meeting agenda and participant list. Claude drafts talking points, surfaces open questions, and anticipates likely friction points.
Idea
After a working session, paste notes from multiple stakeholders. Claude maps where views genuinely differ vs. where people are just using different words.
COMMUNICATION
Example
Paste an email draft and ask Claude to adjust from blunt to diplomatic, technical to plain English, or brief to thorough.
Idea
Paste a message and describe your recipient. Claude role-plays their likely reading, surfacing assumptions they won’t share, questions they’ll have but not ask, and phrases that may land differently than intended.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Example
Describe a plan change and affected teams. Claude produces a structured plan with awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement phases.
Idea
Claude role-plays a skeptical middle-manager, frontline worker, or exec and pushes back on your change narrative. Iterate your messaging until it holds up against each persona before going live.
PROBLEM SOLVING
Example
Describe a recurring issue and Claude walks through a structured 5-Why or Fishbone analysis, surfacing probable root causes ranked by likelihood.
Idea
Present a proposed fix and ask Claude to steelman the three most plausible failure modes—not generic risks, but failure paths specific to your constraints, timeline, and stakeholder mix.
INFORMATION LITERACY
Example
Paste an article or claim. Claude flags logical gaps, missing context, unsupported statistics, and questions worth investigating further.
Idea
Paste a report or research summary you find compelling. Ask Claude to identify what perspectives, data sources, or counterarguments are conspicuously absent.
LOGICAL REASONING
Example
Paste a position paper or debate transcript. Claude maps premises, conclusions, and logical dependencies into a structured argument tree.
Idea
Take any decision you’re about to make. Ask Claude to list every assumption the decision silently depends on, ranked by how catastrophic it would be if wrong.
MONITORING CHANGE
Example
Paste weekly project updates. Claude extracts what’s on track, what’s slipping, and what decisions are blocked, formatted for a quick leadership read-out.
Idea
Define the change you’re monitoring and ask Claude to propose 4–6 behavioral signals that precede outcomes, then use those as a standing template you paste updates into weekly.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Example
Describe a project goal and Claude generates a hierarchical work breakdown structure with deliverables, sub-tasks, dependencies, and rough sequencing.
Idea
Paste your current plan and ask Claude to trace how slippage in one task ripples through constraints on others.
Second, I’ll ask Claude for ways it can help me make learning as work routine.
1. Research-as-a-Service (RaaS) Charge clients to do deep research you’d want to do anyway. Everyone needs someone to go deep on a topic and synthesize it into a usable brief or memo. You learn; they get a deliverable.
2. Build-in-Public with Paid Tiers Document your learning publicly, then put the deeper synthesis, frameworks, or “working notes” behind a paywall. The free layer builds an audience; the paid layer monetizes your actual thinking process.
3. Commissioned Long-Form Writing / Essays Publications, think tanks, and research orgs pay for reported essays and explainers. Pitching means you choose the topic, you learn deeply to write it, and you get paid at the end.
4. Cohort Course Creation (Teach as You Learn) Structure a 4–6 week cohort around something you’re currently learning—not as an “expert,” but as a rigorous guide. The discipline of teaching forces faster, deeper mastery.
5. Consulting Retainers for “Adjacent Intelligence” Businesses often don’t need a full-time strategist. They need someone to watch the frontier for them and brief them monthly. A retainer for “here’s what I’m learning that’s relevant to your world” is genuinely viable once trust is established.
6. Paid Pilot Projects as Learning Vehicles Rather than pitching “hire me to do X,” pitch “I want to run a 30-day experiment on Y for your business, here’s the scope.” You’re getting paid to figure something out, not to already know it.
7. Grant-Funded Independent Research Fellowships and small grants exist specifically to fund curious generalists. Entities will fund you to spend months learning a topic if your framing is sharp.
8. Portfolio-as-Product (IP Ownership from the Start) Everything you learn gets turned into something you own. You sell or license the output, not your time. This is the slowest ramp of the eight — but since slow income is a real concern, it’s worth naming clearly: this one requires parallel income from the others while you build, but it compounds in a way the others don’t.