My Exact AI Stack for Getting Time Back (And How I Actually Use It)

The short answer: I use AI across three specific systems every day — email triage, daily notes, and weekly review. Combined with Wispr Flow for voice input, I’ve recovered enough time and mental bandwidth to actually create again. Here’s exactly how.

Why I’m Sharing This

I’ve tried a lot of productivity systems. Most of them add more complexity than they remove.

What changed for me wasn’t finding the perfect system. It was identifying the three places where I was hemorrhaging the most time and mental energy, and using AI to plug each hole specifically.

I have an ADHD brain. That means task switching is brutal. Forgetting what I was supposed to do with an email is normal. Losing the thread of my own thinking mid-day is constant. The systems below aren’t just productivity hacks — they’re accommodations for the way my brain actually works.

If any of that sounds familiar, this might be useful for you too.

System 1: AI Email Triage (Inbox Zero Without the Anxiety)

Email used to be a low-grade source of constant dread.

Not because anything in it was urgent. But because every time I opened my inbox, I had to make a dozen small decisions. Reply now? Later? Flag it? Is this important? What do I even do with this?

Decision fatigue before I’d done a single real thing.

Now I run everything through Claude Co-Work.

Here’s how it works:

What I’ve set it to do:

Scan every incoming email against a set of priority rules I’ve defined
Pull out only the emails that actually need my attention
Delete or archive everything else automatically
For each priority email, tell me: reply, be aware, or ignore

The “be aware” category is the one that changed everything.

Most emails don’t need a reply. They need me to know about them so I’m not blindsided later. Claude Co-Work flags those separately and tells me: here’s what this is, here’s how it will affect you if you ignore it. That’s it. I read it, I understand the context, I move on.

The result: inbox zero every day. No scanning, no sorting, no guilt about the 47 things I haven’t responded to.

For an ADHD brain, this is significant. Out of sight, out of mind is real. But so is “I forgot what I was supposed to do with that email.” Having everything pre-sorted and pre-decided means I’m not carrying that cognitive load through my day.

System 2: Daily Notes by Dictation

I used to not take notes at all. Not because I didn’t want to. Because sitting down to type out thoughts felt like another task on top of all the other tasks.

Now I dictate.

The Wispr Flow workflow:

Open a blank draft in Drafts app (or any notes app)
Talk through my day — what happened, what I’m thinking, what I need to remember, what’s bothering me, what worked
Hand the raw transcript to Claude Co-Work
Claude Co-Work formats it into a clean, structured daily note with categories: wins, blockers, tasks, observations, follow-ups
Claude Co-Work then saves to my Obsidian Vault
I review it at the end of the day

That’s it. The whole thing takes about five minutes of talking and maybe two minutes of review.

What I get out of it: an actual record of my days instead of a vague sense that things happened. When you’re task-switching constantly, days blur together. The daily note gives me a way to close loops and not carry half-finished thoughts into the next morning.

System 3: Weekly AI Review

Every week I take all seven daily notes and run them through Claude Co-Work together.

The prompt I use asks it to pull out:

Take my notes from the last seven days and extract this information. Fill in the template for me.

What worked this week
What didn’t work
Pivots I need to make
Top three priority tasks for next week
Things I should drop entirely

Weekly Review Template

Weekly Review of Morning Pages

GAP = Goal, Action, Plan

Goal
Action
Plan

Reflections of the Week

WARP — Reflecting on what you have achieved during the week:

Wins
Aspirations
Results
Pivots
Successes
Failures

Questions:

What did I learn about myself this week?
What do I have to do in the upcoming week?
What am I doing wrong that needs to be fixed?
What new things should I do to take my life in the direction I want it to go?
What weight are you carrying unnecessarily?

Learning:

What are you learning?
What are my goals for the week?

What comes back is a weekly review that would have taken me an hour to write manually, produced in about ninety seconds.

The “things to drop” section is underrated. It’s easy to carry dead weight week after week because you never stop to explicitly name it. Having AI surface those calls from my own notes, in my own words, makes it hard to ignore.

The Tool That Ties It All Together: Wispr Flow

None of these systems would work as well without Wispr Flow.

Wispr Flow is an AI voice-to-text tool that works system-wide on Mac. I talk, it transcribes, instantly. No switching apps, no recording files, no cleanup.

The impact: I’d estimate a 75% increase in my output. That’s not a round number I threw out. It’s what I actually observed over about six weeks of consistent use.

Here’s why it works so well for me. Typing has friction. It slows thought. By the time my fingers have caught up with my brain, I’ve already lost the thread of what I was about to say. Voice removes that bottleneck entirely.

I use it for:

Daily note dictation
Drafting emails
Capturing ideas mid-walk or mid-drive via phone
Roughing out blog posts before I structure them
Messaging without stopping what I’m doing

If you only take one thing from this post, take Wispr Flow. The learning curve is basically zero. The return is immediate.

What This Stack Actually Costs Me

In time: about 10 minutes a day for the note dictation and review, plus the weekly summary which runs automatically.

In money: Claude Co-Work subscription + Wispr Flow subscription. Both are under $30/month combined.

What I get back: hours of decision fatigue, the mental overhead of carrying unread emails, and the weekly work of reviewing my own week.

The math is obvious when you put it that way.

In Short

AI email triage eliminates inbox decision fatigue and keeps me at inbox zero without effort.
The reply / be aware / ignore framework is what makes triage actually useful, not just organized.
Dictating daily notes removes the friction of written capture and gives me a real record of my days.
Weekly AI review from daily notes surfaces what to keep, drop, and pivot — automatically.
Wispr Flow alone may be worth 75% more output for anyone who thinks faster than they type.

FAQ

What email tool do you use for the triage?

Claude Co-Work.

Does AI triage ever miss important emails?

Occasionally. I review the priority list each morning, which takes about two minutes, so nothing critical slips through. The rules I’ve set have gotten sharper over time as I’ve refined them.

Do I need to be a tech person to set this up?

No. Claude Co-Work has a setup process that walks you through it. Wispr Flow installs like any Mac app. The daily note workflow is just talking into your phone or computer.

What if I don’t have ADHD — does this still apply?

Yes. Task switching, decision fatigue, and forgetting what you meant to do with an email are not ADHD-specific problems. They’re human problems. The systems just happen to be designed with a brain like mine in mind.

How long did it take to build these habits?

About two weeks before the daily note felt automatic. The email triage was immediate — I set it up and it just ran. The weekly review took one cycle to feel useful, and by week three I couldn’t imagine not doing it.

If you want help setting up any of these systems, reply to this post or find me on X. I’m happy to share the exact prompts I use for the weekly review.