#306 - I Asked Claude How to Free Up 10+ Hours a Week (Here's What It Said)

A few weeks ago, I did something slightly unhinged. I opened up Claude and I asked it one question. How the hell do I free up 10 hours or more in my business a week? Not, hey, help me write a caption or help me plan my content or help me set up a new offer. Just a straight up brutal, please audit my life and tell me what I need to cut question. Because here's where I'm at right now. I've got some big goals. You've probably heard me talk about them. And part of those big goals are quite a few big projects. There is a lot that needs to get done right now, all at once. And I do not want to arrive at the end of December having completely collapsed into a heap to get there. So I asked the question. Then Claude came back with 4 really specific things that I needed to figure out how to systemize, automate, and hand over to AI that would free up not just 10 hours, but so much more. And that's exactly what I'm going to share with you today. The 4 things Claude told me to build What each one actually does, how much time each one is now saving me, and how you can build them for yourself too.

Build it, automate it, scale it. This almost feels too easy. Time to build a grown-ass business. The Doing It Online Podcast. Here's your host, Kate McKibbin.

Hey, hey there. I'm Kate McKibbin from hellofunnels.co and welcome to the Doing It Online Podcast. Today we're talking AI, my second favorite topic, and the 4 things that came out of one slightly intense conversation with Claude. So if you've had a year where your AI has gone from fun toy to, wait, this might actually change my life, you are not alone. That's been my year too. I have been playing with AI for several years now, but at the start of this year, I made a decision. Every Friday morning, 3 to 4 hours dedicated AI time, installing, upgrading, designing, playing, whatever needed to be done because I wanted AI to be a genuinely crucial part of this business, not just a thing I dabbled with. And here's the thing I think most people seriously underestimate. When you have that kind of dedicated repeated practice for anything, it compounds. Combine that with how fast these tools themselves have been improving and the features that are now available And seriously, what I can build now versus what I could build even 6 months ago is not even close. The fact that I can create some of these things that I'm going to talk about today at all still genuinely blows my mind. So when I sat down and I asked Claude to audit where my time was actually going and which of these leaky buckets could be filled with AI, I wasn't really starting from zero. I had a year of practice behind that question because some of the things they came back with would probably have made A beginner, absolutely run for the hills. But I'm no beginner and I built them and holy shit. All right, let me show you exactly what they were. Okay, so the first and the biggest one was designing sales pages and landing pages. Look, procrastinating branding has always been one of my things. So I've tried outsourcing this before, but getting other people to handle the design, for me, it was always frustrating. And I kind of loved it. I liked designing things, but I knew it was a big time sucker. I already knew that. However, outsourcing wasn't the answer because it took even more time and it was expensive. So I had taken it all back. I was doing everything in-house, pretty much always have. There's me and Claude writing the copy and then me doing everything else. But it was that piece, that actual page setup, page design piece that even though I enjoyed it most of the time, was taking up way too much of my time. And I had seen people talking about, you know, getting Claude to design pages directly just from a few prompts. And with my tech stack, that wasn't going to work because I use Showit for our main site. And to be honest, I'm so shocked that Showit have not brought out an AI design option, although they probably will the second I hit publish on this episode. And ClickFunnels for landing pages, and they've got some AI things, but Let's be real, they're not great. So having that as my tech stack already, I really didn't wanna have to pay for another tool if I didn't have to. It just didn't make sense for me. But when I realized how much time doing this was taking and how much time it could save me by being able to hand it over to AI, I got focused and I found a workaround. And this is a genuinely super easy to use and very inexpensive tool. Like literally you can start for free and then the plan I've gone up to is $30 a month. And that has finally allowed me to go from just doing the copy with Claude to being able to go get Claude to do the copy, get Claude to do the design, which was another skill in itself. But the real missing piece was then sending that design and having it published live all in the same chat, all in the same conversation. That was a missing piece. So I already had like the copy templates, I had the skills, I had that whole copywriting workflow down, but I hadn't been able to get that then second step design, third step published without me doing the heavy lifting. And now I can. Now I can go from offer idea to a fully written, approved copy, fully designed page, published page, live links working, ready to be able to, you know, email out in about an hour. You know, if I wanted to move that fast, like, let's be honest here, I'm still a bit of a perfectionist and I still love some procrastinator branding. So I took that finished and totally ready to go page in that hour. And then I still spend another couple of hours playing around with it and moving stuff around and changing colors and fonts and whatever. But you don't have to do that. That's my sickness, not yours. But the fact of the matter is that I probably would've done that messing around piece regardless, but it still was now saving me days, if not, you know, depending on what I was building. Like it was a sales page that would take me 2 to 3 dedicated days to write it, design it, build it, test it. That whole thing has now been condensed down to an hour, and then the fluffing around after that was time I would've spent anyway on top. So yeah, I've gone from days or an afternoon if it was like a more standard landing page to 60 minutes. That in and of itself, life-changing. All right, the next thing it came back with was creating a centralized dashboard for all the moving pieces of my content and promotions. So we already had a content calendar living inside ClickUp. You've probably heard me talk about it. You may have even seen it if you've been in one of our live build sessions. But what I didn't have was a place where the promotion planning actually lived properly. So currently it was in a spreadsheet, which was a genuinely ginormous spreadsheet that my team hated even touching. It had so many columns, so many things that were kind of linked together. I tried to make it smart and ended up just making it complicated. And the worst thing was it didn't talk to the content calendar. So we'd moved the content out of that spreadsheet into its own separate you know, AI-run, fairly autonomous place, but the rest of the spreadsheet was still manual and they didn't talk to each other. So things would get changed in one place and that did not come back and reflect elsewhere unless you manually changed it. And I was constantly clicking back and forth trying to keep the 2 systems and just my brain and the team in sync. So now it is one hub and it is 2-way connected. So if something gets planned in the content calendar, it flows into the promo dashboard automatically. If I move something around in the dashboard, it updates the calendar too. No more double handling. How cool is that? And in that one screen, I can see the things that actually matter. So I can see the key dates. I can see school holidays. I can see who's got time off on my team, our monthly focus, internal projects, client work, upcoming promotions. Live workshops we might be running for our clients and what content needs to connect to what, and it's all in one place. So I can sense check whether a plan is actually doable or whether it is totally going to break myself or somebody else in the process. And this one is interesting because it's not really a time saver in the traditional sense. Like, yes, it saved me time from the double handling of things, but what it really saved me was mistakes. And the time that would then be taken to fix those mistakes, and it saved brain space. So yes, a bit of time, but mostly this was just something that needed to exist. All right. Thing number 3 was stories, Instagram stories, because these always felt like something that kind of sat outside of our actual content workflow. So already we'd get everything else done in one sitting, in one chat. And stories just were this separate thing. So that didn't really make sense. So I brought it into our content workflow properly. It added maybe 5 minutes to the content planning creation workflow I was already doing. And now our Instagram stories get planned and written alongside everything else. Then the missing piece again was design. And I'd already solved that problem with carousels inside Claude. We've already set that up. So I just applied the same process. And now once stories are planned and approved, it fires off a little prompt asking me for some images. Yes, I could probably automate that fully connected to a folder, but again, I'm a perfectionist. I like to choose the images myself. So instead I grab a couple images, drop them in, it goes to work, and then the finished designs land with my team ready to schedule. So that probably totally saved about 2 to 3 hours a week, if not more. Then thing number 4, and this is my favorite, the one that I've wanted for the longest time and was honestly just too scared to build because I'd heard the horror stories, right? There are Reddit threads dedicated to this and this alone. So automated AI assistants going rogue, scraping credit card details, buying random things on Amazon. So I wasn't touching it unless it could be done very safely. And every time I looked into what safely actually meant, it seemed to kind of lose the benefit of having this automated thing entirely. So I was like, well, I'll just leave it for now. But this was one of the things that came up in that original audit with Cord, was it flagged that I had all of these small things constantly either falling through the cracks or pulling me away from something, like out-of-focus time. So I was like starting and restarting and getting interrupted all the time because I was busy trying to remember these little things, trying to make sure that nothing got forgotten, or jumping back in because like, oh, I've just got to do this small thing. It'd be faster if I do it myself. You know how it goes, right? So it said I either needed to hire someone and hand these things over, which was going to take a bunch of time, or I could let AI do it properly. So I decided to have a go at letting the AI do it. And what that meant was sitting down and figuring out how. So a bit of trial and error, but I actually cracked a setup that actually works. And this now lives entirely inside Slack. So it's not like I'm logging in and out of Claude, checking scheduled task. That's not how it works. It actually runs almost like a human team member in that it runs through its own task list and it messages me like a team member would. So once I had this set up, what I did was I did a massive brain dump with what I've called it my EA, my executive assistant. That first one was huge, probably about half an hour of just random word vomit. Now, whenever I think of a little thing, I just send it across. But what happened was it turned that brain dump into tasks. It then scopes out what's needed to complete that task, what it can do on its own, what it would need approval to do, and what it would then hand back to me. It also prioritizes the task based on what it knows is coming up, i.e., what's in that marketing calendar and the other priorities I've told it we're focusing on. And it works through the list in order on its own. If it has a question or if it gets up to something that it needs me to approve or it needs a team member to action, it comes to me or it comes to that team member and then it goes. So it's never acting without my sign-off. It's not off doing random stuff. I don't know what it's doing and it's properly sandboxed, but it is autonomous. It is working on its own in the background. It's not me going in going, hey, let's do this. It's already doing it. So now as it's going through its task list, it can do things like writing an email, getting me to approve it, then forwarding it to my VA to schedule it. It can chase up a team member if something that was supposed to happen hasn't. When I say, all right, we're going to start planning a new promotion, it instantly goes and starts setting up a project plan. It goes and does the background research. It sets the expected goals and sales and starts mapping out and assigning tasks for things that need to get done. Seriously, it's a game changer. So right now, I would say it's saving me a minimum of 5 hours a week, but realistically, as it goes, as it learns how to do more things, that is going to easily become 10, even 20 hours a week. And that's the most exciting piece. So that's the 4 things. And if you're sitting there thinking, okay, I want some of these too. Yeah, you definitely do, by the way. Maybe you don't need all 4, but I would put money on at least one of these. Solving a pretty big problem in your business, something that's probably been quietly draining you all year long. So here is what I've done. Okay. So AI Fridays has been something that I've been doing internally all year, as you know, and I've decided I'm going to invite you along. So over the next 4 Fridays, we are going to be building one of each of these 4 pieces together live. So you can either jump into one, you can grab a season pass, you can come to all 4. And if you can't make it live, you can grab a replay level ticket instead. All the details are in the show notes. Click through, grab your spot. They're already moving fast. We may need to actually put a cap in for the live spots because if that room gets too full, it's not gonna work. So that's the shift, guys, and it's given me back 10+ hours a week, and it could all be yours for just 4 Fridays. And honestly, I still can't quite believe we can build this stuff ourselves now. It's so much fun. All right, that's it for today, guys. I'll see you next week.

That's it for this episode. Now go build it, automate it, and scale it.

I love the show, guys.

You're awesome. For more strategies and resources, visit hellofunnels.co.