Intuitive planner

Can Claude be my manager?

I have another confession: I’m using Claude as a personal assistant, and I love it. I am not the first person to reflect that I experience this as a support tool for my neurodiversity. The manual work of planning usually takes over the actual work of a project¹ for me. The result is that I’m never quite sure whether I’m on track, and I take on way more than I should² because I don’t have a solid sense of what I need to do OR what my capacity actually allows.

I’m not using Claude for the creative work. I love the process of composition. I like to feel the pen glide over the paper and get lost in the rhythm of the keyboard under my fingers when the words start to come faster than my body can capture them. I don’t need or want Claude for that work. Instead, I use him to plan.

I’ve had an idea for a book that I’ve been talking about for a couple years now. I have most of the material at least drafted, but it’s all in different places, and while I understand how to braid it all together, I get lost in the moment and my mind runs amok, and I can’t actually pull it all together. Here’s how I used Claude³ to support my work:

Setup

• I set Claude’s chat mode to prevent it from holding on to my data outside individual projects.⁴

• I set up a project with the name of my book.

• In the first chat, I asked it to make sure it understands the fundamentals of project management.

Instructions

• I added the papers and work I’d already written to the chat as background information for Claude and told it to organize the writing into themes I provided.⁵

• I told Claude to use those themes and sections I defined to create a schedule that gets the book written by December 1.

• I told it to assume I can devote 8-10 hours a week to the project, which is 1-1.5 hours a day. I spend that much time scrolling slack-jawed.

• Claude created a weekly schedule around the themes and built a 27-week program that includes re-reading the existing work and marking them up; creating a structure; drafting sections and transitions; editing, and proofreading. It won’t be publishable by Dec 1, but it’ll be written. My mind is blown.

Implementation

• Every morning I ask it to give me my daily task list for the project for that day only.

• Throughout the day I update it with tasks I have completed, roadblocks I encounter, etc. At the end of the day I tell it my status and ask it to recalculate the schedule and tell me what I need to change.

• The next day I tell it to review the schedule and changes from the day before and provide a list of the tasks I need to complete for that day only.

Key things to note: Claude does not do any creative work. Instead, it’s organizing and categorizing in a way I can understand because it’s thinking the way that I do. My goal is ambitious, but I can do it if I can stay on track. With Claude doing the administrative work to manage me, I can focus on just the tasks immediately before me knowing that if my Perfect Plan (tm) implodes, Claude can just recalculate.

1. This is in my personal life, obvz. Clearly I get it done at work. I think I’ve been spending all my “administrative self-management” spoons at work and school, and it’s kept me a mess in other areas.

2. Like, oh I don’t know, full-time job, single parenting, and grad school while my house falls down around me?

3. I have a paid account. I don’t know whether all these features are available on the free account.

4. Projects allow you to have several connected chats. You provide the “instructions” (chat parameters) that form Claude’s background knowledge for the conversations at the project level.

5. This is why it’s very important to set Claude not to keep information across chats or incorporate it into its knowledge base.