It’s Tuesday, 9am. I sit down to work.
The first thing I open is not my email. It’s not my calendar. It’s not the shot list for Saturday.
I open Claude and ask it what’s going on.
Where I left off. What came into the inbox overnight. What’s actually on fire versus what just feels like it. Anything in the news I should know about before I talk to a client today.
Five minutes later I know what my day is. Before that habit existed, that first hour was me opening seven tabs, feeling overwhelmed, and going to get a second coffee to avoid the feeling.
That’s the whole pitch. Not “AI made me 10x productive.” It gave me a starting point so I’d start.
Here’s everything else, organized by the job it does instead of by what it is.
Job 1: Get the thought out of my head before it evaporates
Plaud. All the damn time.
Meetings, phone calls, planning, brainstorming. It records and it transcribes and I stop trying to be a court reporter while also being a participant in my own conversation.
This one is bigger than it sounds. I used to leave a client meeting with three pages of notes and no memory of the conversation, because I spent the whole thing writing instead of listening. Or I’d leave with zero notes and a great vibe, and remember about 40% of it.
Now I’m just in the room. The recording handles the rest.
Notes app and Reminders. Not glamorous. Still load-bearing. The idea at a red light goes somewhere in four seconds or it’s gone forever.
Job 2: When talking isn’t enough
reMarkable tablet.
This is the one tool in my entire stack with no AI in it whatsoever, and I’d fight somebody to keep it.
Plaud can hear a meeting. It cannot see one. When I need to sketch out an idea, draw a diagram, map a chart, or show somebody the shape of a thing, talking about it does not work. I have to draw it.
So it gets drawn. On a screen that does exactly one thing and cannot show me a notification.
There’s something about a device with no apps on it. Nothing on that thing is competing for my attention, which for my brain is the actual feature.
And when I’m done it’s already digital. Straight into the client’s project folder, no photographing a napkin.
Job 3: Turn a giant scary thing into something I’ll actually start
Motion.
Motion breaks big tasks into smaller tasks, which is exactly what my brain needs, because a task called “launch the new site” is not a task. It’s a wall. I will look at that wall for three weeks.
But here’s my honest problem with it, and it’s the most ADHD thing in this entire post:
I used to freeze on Motion’s own setup screen.
To make it work, you have to give every task a priority and a description so it knows how to schedule you. Reasonable. Correct, even. And I would sit there completely stuck, unable to decide whether a thing was high or medium, unable to write the description, and then close the app.
I was frozen by the tool that exists to unfreeze me. That’s not a joke, that’s just Tuesday.
AI fixed that specifically. Now the categories, priorities, and durations get decided for me and I just approve or change them. I’m the editor, not the author. Turns out that’s the difference between a tool I use and a tool I own.
Job 4: Make sure it happens without me
Dubsado. My CRM. Where every inquiry lands, what runs the workflows, what tells me what’s next with which client.
And this is the tool I have to be honest about, because it’s the one I bought purely because buying it felt like solving the problem.
I purchased it. Felt great. Genuinely felt like I’d fixed my business that afternoon.
Then I opened it. It was so daunting I did nothing with it for an embarrassingly long time. It sat there, paid for, doing nothing, quietly making me feel like shit every time I thought about it.
What finally worked was hiring a pro to set it up. This was before AI was any good, and honestly I’d do it the same way today.
So here’s my actual advice, and it’s not the advice a tech blog gives you: still hire the pro to build it. Then use AI to maintain it.
Setup is a specialist job. Maintenance is a memory job. Those are different problems and I stopped trying to solve them with the same tool.
Job 5: The wall of 4,000 photos
Aftershoot.
Here’s a number most people outside this job don’t know. A single wedding can come home as three to five thousand frames. Before anybody sees a single photo, somebody has to go through every one of those and decide which ones live.
That is the exact shape of task my brain refuses to start. It isn’t hard. It’s just enormous, repetitive, and made of four thousand tiny decisions in a row. I have absolutely sat down to cull a wedding, opened the folder, looked at the count, and found something else to do.
Aftershoot goes through the whole take and does the first pass. Duplicates, blinks, out of focus, the eleven nearly identical frames of the same moment where only one is sharp.
What it does not do is decide what’s good. I still go through what it hands me. It gets me from four thousand down to a workable set, and then the actual choosing, the part that’s mine, starts from a pile I’ll actually open.
Same pattern as everything else on this list: it isn’t doing the work, it’s getting me to the starting line.
And I only use it to cull. It does not edit my photos. The look comes from presets I built myself over years of shooting, and I apply them. Aftershoot never touches how a single delivered image looks, and I’m not interested in the version where it does.
That split matters to me more than it probably should. Culling is a chore. The edit is the work. I’ll hand off the chore all day long. The other one is the reason anybody hires me. More on that at the bottom.
Job 6: The random thought spiral
ChatGPT.
This one has a specific job that nothing else in the stack does. My brain produces a constant stream of half-thoughts. Weird business idea. Random question. Something I noticed and can’t let go of. Even random shit like why Goldfish lose their color in dark environments.
Most of them are garbage. Some of them are the next thing.
I dump them in and dig. Not to get an answer, to find out whether there’s anything there. It’s a thinking partner for the two in the morning stuff.
Claude helps run the business. ChatGPT chases the tangent. I use them differently on purpose.
Job 7: Everything else
Planable. Just started using it for social posting. Ask me in six months.
Google Suite and Adobe Suite. The furniture. Not interesting, completely non-negotiable.
iPad. Drawing, and any edit heavy enough that I want to be holding the thing I’m working on.
And yea, there are a pile of other apps and subscriptions in here I didn’t list. If you’ve got a question about any of it, or a suggestion for something better, reach out. I’ll take it.
What none of this touches
Read that whole list again.
Not one thing on it makes a photograph.
Every single tool is doing the job around the picture. Remembering. Organizing. Scheduling. Transcribing. Breaking a wall into steps. Following up on day three so a couple doesn’t book somebody else who simply answered their email.
The photograph is still a camera pointed at a real thing that was really there, and that is not moving. Not for a client, not for a portfolio, not ever.
That’s a hard line and I want to be specific about where it sits, because “we use AI” has come to mean anything from spell check to inventing a product that doesn’t exist. Those are not the same and pretending they are is how people get lied to.
I wrote the whole thing out on the studio side, aimed at business owners who are trying to decide whether to pay a photographer at all now that a subscription can generate something that looks close enough:
AI Can Make You an Image. It Can’t Make You Proof.
That one’s the business argument. This one was just the confession that I needed help remembering to send an email.
