Stop dabbling: Why you can't AI your way out of trying to fix everything

Welcome to the Differently Aligned podcast for neurodivergent business owners. I'm Adina Levy. I'm an Autistic AuDHDer, business coach, speech therapist, AI fiend, and I run Differently Aligned Business Coaching, and my other business, Play Learn Chat, where I wear my speech therapist and professional educator hat. I support neurodivergent business owners like you, whose businesses have grown into a fabulous, sometimes overwhelming, tangled mess that doesn't quite fit what you need.

I guide, teach, coach, and build alongside you, using AI, automations, systematising things to help you untangle your strategy, your business alignment, and your operations. I'm obsessed with helping you make your business finally work better for you. Everyone is welcome here, no matter your neurotype, your gender, your race, your size, your orientation, and all the other identities that make you you. This podcast is recorded on the Aboriginal lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal people the traditional custodians of the lands on which I live, work, and play.

I acknowledge any First Nations people listening in. I have a mini quiz for you to kick off today's episode. What is actually stopping you from using AI more in your business? There are five options.

Not enough time. You don't know what to try. You can't get it to work how you want. You're figuring it out yourself, so therefore you're kind of not figuring much out or moving forward.

Or you keep starting little AI projects and not quite finishing them. It might be a combination of the above. What's most prevalent for you? What jumps out as the reason why you are not using AI more to help you in your business, to make your business smoother, more fun, more easeful, more effective?

While each of those reasons is completely valid and something I have experienced as well very much, what I notice that underlines a lot of them is that you're trying to do too much at one time, or you're hoping to do too much at one time. You might have an idea that you wanna fix everything in your business and level it all up and fix all your systems and put AI into, you know, all the areas of your business that you can, and that's trying to do too much. Sometimes that might lead you to scramble and try and do all the things and they're half-baked, and sometimes it might lead you to freeze and not move forward at all in improving your systems, your AI use, and how you hold your business together.

I'm gonna share with you an invitation to my webinar, which is coming up in about a week and a half from when this episode is coming out. On the 31st of May or the 1st of June, depending on where in the world you're listening from. I'm running a free webinar called From Inbox Chaos to Inbox Zero. The link is in the show notes.

Now, I'm gonna be the first to admit AI is cool. It's shiny. It's interesting. The world of AI, the tools, the capabilities, the possibilities are changing every minute.

To an ADHD brain, especially a tech and systems kind of ADHD brain, it can be a real exciting thing. And even if you're a person who's not deep in tech and systems, but you can kind of see the possibility and you think, "Ooh, I'm hearing that AI can do this. Can it help me? Ooh, shiny thing, shiny thing, new app, new platform, new thing," it's a lot.

It's really exciting, and it can be a big distractor, and it can be very overwhelming. So part of my job is to help translate this for you and help you find some of the really practical ways that you can plug AI into your business. genuinely for me, it is a special interest to play with tools and apps and systems, but the other side of it is that dabbling doesn't lead us to actual results. It doesn't lead us to a business that gives us more free time.

It doesn't lead us to a business that grows sensibly. And honestly, it pains me to say that because I love to dabble If I could dabble all day long, I would, but I have to find a balance. And the balance that I'm finding is seeing these mini projects through to completion is the most powerful thing that is shifting in my business, in how I use AI, in how I systematize my AI usage. Honestly, I don't believe there's just one tool around the corner that if you turn it on, it's gonna fix everything.

Even Notion that I love and talk about a lot and use a lot and teach a lot. It's wonderful, but just like getting a Notion account isn't gonna fix everything in your business. I love to talk about your business strategy, your business alignment, how it fits with you, your life, your needs, your interests. I love to talk about business systems and AI is a layer on top of that.

It doesn't sit outside all of that. It belongs as part of your systems in your business. AI is the piece that dials up all the other stuff. But what that means is if your business is scattered and doesn't fit you, chucking some AI layers on top is just gonna dial up how scattered your business is feeling for you.

If your business is becoming quite clear and structured and you've got great systems or you're ready to put them into place, some intentional AI use is a really smart thing. I don't wanna fully take away the permission to go and play and dabble if that's interesting for you. But I need you to know that if you're feeling quite scattered and you're feeling like, "Ugh, I don't even know what is gonna help me move this forward in my business," if you're collecting AI prompts or custom GPTs or little half-done systems and projects and they're not really working together or you forget about them or you don't have a way for them to actually automatically be integrated into your daily practice or your weekly practice in your business, they might as well not really exist.

So what I wanna encourage you to do, this is the shift I want you to get your mind into Stop trying to build all the pieces at once and take that pressure off yourself. If that's something you think you should be doing, just reframe that and focus on fixing one part of your business at a time. Where you start is wherever the most friction is. What really annoys you?

What gets in the way of you building the business that you want and need? What is just so frustrating or keeps getting forgotten? What feels broken every time you approach that particular task? Go and fix that one thing and take it to completion.

Get that little project done and finished, and then build that into the bigger system of your business. What I recommend, and I've got other podcast episodes about this I'll pop into the show notes, but I really recommend you have an operations manual. And that is like the brain that holds all of the bits of your business together. Just to reiterate this shift that I want you to be thinking about, we don't want to and we can't try and fix everything at once.

You can't change all facets of your business at once. It's exhausting, and it's pretty much not possible. So what I really want you to do is focus on building one piece and plugging that into the rest of what you do and build. Then build the next piece and put that into your systems and your processes.

Document it. Put it all together. I'll tell you what I've just built in my business, in the last few months, I've been dabbling with Notion AI agents, which are bits inside Notion that can have specific instructions and do specific things, and they can run on schedules or they can be triggered through different things. So for example, I had for a while the an email agent that would trigger every time a new email landed in my inbox, it would be processed by my email agent with a specific set of instructions, and I'm gonna be teaching and sharing a kind of simplified, like a starter version of those instructions with everyone who registers for my webinar from Inbox Chaos to Inbox Zero.

So go and sign up for that. Link is in the show notes. Now, the thing is Notion AI agents cost extra. This is separate from chatting with Notion AI within the Notion app.

The agents have their own separate charges. For a couple of months they were free to dabble with, and that's why I dabbled and I learnt a lot. But what I also learnt is that to me it's actually not worth the extra cost to pay for the AI agents to run in those automated ways. What I do still want is really clear, simple ways for me to be able to trigger regularly, "Hey email agent, go and sort my emails before I go in and have a look myself."

I built time tracking into my Notion and one of the other agents that used to run every week was to sum up all the different categories of how I've been using my time that week and create a little report and send that back to me, and that was really cool. It is really cool. I still want that, but it doesn't have to be automated because I could just trigger it with the tap of a button, so to speak, and I'll still get the report. It's almost the same effort for me and it doesn't cost me extra.

So what I've been working on the last few days is figuring out what are all those pieces that were happening either daily or weekly that my Notion AI agents were taking care of, and which ones can be not automated, but let's call them semi-automated. For a few days I was triggering them on my own. So I would open up a chat just with Notion AI And tag it into a particular page and on that page it has all the instructions for processing my inbox. So it would take me maybe four keystrokes and then it would start doing its thing and it can just run in the background and I come back to it when I'm ready.

That was working okay but it was still just slightly more friction than I wanted 'cause I realized there are probably six or seven pieces of my business that either happen daily or a few extras are like one day per week and probably honestly over time there'll be more things that I want running on a like regular schedule but did they have to be triggered automatically or can I just pop into Notion daily and go, "Hey, do your thing." That's where I've landed right now so I've been building my daily auto-run page which is actually to get quite specific, a Notion AI skill so it's a page and I've designated it as kind of this is the instructions for a particular skill.

And now what I've got, this is again maybe four keystrokes for me to initiate this. I also have put it in a very prominent place on a page that I look at all the time where all my tasks and projects live to be basically my reminder give this instruction to the Notion AI chat. What happens is it then calls on these things and it runs through the steps on its own in the background. It does quite a lot of processing but I'm not paying extra because it's not a Notion AI agent.

So that's where I've landed. This is all experimental. It's all a work in progress but I thought I'll share where I'm at now. I chat with Notion AI and I go @ dailyautorunskill.

It just pops up after a couple of keystrokes and I can literally just press enter And it does the rest. Or I could say, "Do this, I don't have to. I just tag in the page. The page then has the instructions, including links out to the other pages of each particular step.

Each of those steps has already been created by me when I made my Notion AI agents. Each one was a particular skill or a task that it took care of. So the daily things, it goes through my time tracking of the last day and just checks is anything missing from the classification so I can see which business of mine and which project was it under, and it just does a little bit of extra tagging and tidying up there. Then it calls upon the project reactivator skill, basically, I have lots of projects, and I like to tell myself, "Okay, these are the ones that are active now.

I'm thinking about these now. Those are the ones I'm coming back to later." And the coming back to later they'll have a date that says reactivate on a certain date. So that's my way of trusting that these thoughts and ideas for future projects are not gonna disappear forever.

I know they're gonna come back to me. So project reactivator skill just looks for, is there a project that needs to come back today? Then it brings it back and changes its status to active. It runs a Notion updates checker because I just want a little note very quickly that pops up to me and says, "Hey, Notion has a little update."

Probably once or twice a week there's a quick Notion update, so it looks on the Notion updates blog page and it just sends me a little note if there's an update. I don't have to go searching, and if there's no update, cool. Done. In future, I might add other updates where I might want particular news alerts or things like that.

It's very easy to set these things up in a really customized way. The other piece then that gets auto-triggered is my Run Inbox skill, where it goes through my three email inboxes, my two business ones and my personal one, which is a more recent addition, and it has certain rules for each inbox, what it can do automatically which might be drafting a reply of that email. Certain emails it can auto-archive, and other emails it knows that it might need to create a task for me instead of that being an email, and Notion can take care of that.

It can literally go, "All right, I've made you the task." This is what I'm teaching a lot about in the free webinar coming up soon. So once I've set my daily auto-run skill off on its merry mission, it literally goes and thinks and processes and it checks this, does that, works through each step, and then it comes back to me with a little summary I can then choose, "Okay, let's process emails," I've been building these particular skills, and they first appeared in some ways as AI agents, and I then just put them onto a page with the same instructions, and they become a skill.

I've been building this for months, years, some of them, in terms of the actual system. Now there's the AI layer that helps me with that system. Rather than me having to remember every day, "Oh- Have I got the time tracker fixing up its little entries so I can actually get a nice graph? No.

Have I got my email ticking along and processing? No, I forgot to do that. Have I checked whether I've got any projects that need reactivating this week? No, don't have to do that.

I don't have to remember it. These are repetitive things and they can still happen in the background with only three or four keystrokes on my part. I've now taken these pieces that I've worked so hard to build and put them all together onto one page that becomes the master instruction for do this stuff, run through all of this, and it can then take care of so many steps. I definitely wanna highlight that this has taken me months and years to build.

So please don't think that you need to or you should get your AI and systems into this level of layered support so quickly. I love supporting neurodivergent business owners to build these pieces into your business. in the Neurodivergent Business Collective, we are moving through month by month specific areas of your business or of your systems that we're gonna be improving each month. We work bit by bit.

We build the layers we're gonna work on a particular area of your business or a particular function and build the systems and the AI layers in Notion. If you want the guidance, you want the support, you want the community to build together, please do check out the Neurodivergent Business Collective. The doors are gonna open on the 1st of June, Sydney time. I would love to connect with you and help you along your journey to make your business more systematized, more smooth, more AI supported.

And you don't need to do it alone. You don't need to figure it out alone. You don't need to do it all at the same time or feel you're supposed to do it all and therefore run away and do nothing. Let's build it together.

Register for the free webinar from Inbox Chaos to Inbox Zero, and I'll give you the starting blocks so that you can get AI support with your emails. So the last takeaway I want you to have from this whole episode is to come back to your original thought about what's actually stopping you from using AI in your business and wonder what is underneath all that? Is it an expectation that you're trying to fix everything at once? Is it an expectation that you should be able to figure it out on your own?

Is it a fear of even trying a new thing and seeing how it's gonna fit 'cause you don't know what it's gonna break? That's okay. They're all really rational and realistic. But I want you to try one new step, not 20, not 50, just one, and start to address that area of challenge or that fear or that worry or that block.

Just move one little step forward this week and please let me know how you went. I hope that we can keep connected. Come and find me on Instagram. I am @differently.

aligned, and all the links you need are in the show notes. Thank you for being here, and thank you for looking after yourself and your brain and looking for your path to a more aligned business. Have a fabulous day.