At the start of this financial year, I set an intention: more facilitation, more in-person delivery, more of the work I love. What I didn’t plan for was how badly I’d need my own AI personal assistant to keep the rest of my life standing.
Well. Be careful what you wish for.
This past month has been the busiest of my career. Crisis-crossing Melbourne for in-person training sessions, delivering online corporate workshops on the side, facilitating Train the Trainer programs with factory teams. If it involved helping teams boost their productivity or get more from their systems, I probably did it this month. And it’s been brilliant.
But here’s the thing about running four to five different programs a week across completely different contexts and topics: the mental context-switching is heavy. The energy required to show up fully for every person goes fast. Really fast.
The Cost of Saying Yes to Everything
The professional win felt huge. But the personal fallout? That crept up quietly.
My house became chaotic. My balcony plants started giving me distress signals, droopy leaves everywhere. The gym shifted from a regular habit to something I did when guilt finally kicked in. I was running on fumes, doing a hundred percent in every facilitation session and zero percent in the rest of my life.
That’s when I realised something important: knowing your limits isn’t about being weak or not ambitious enough. It’s about being honest with yourself. And knowing your limits is a win, full stop.
Because once you know them, you get to make a choice. You can’t be a hundred percent in your career AND a hundred percent everywhere else. That’s not a failing. That’s math.
Practising what I Preach
If you’re paying for premium AI tools – Copilot (Premium), Claude Pro, paid subscriptions to any of the major platforms – you’re paying for an AI personal assistant. But most of us aren’t treating them like one.
We’re still using AI like it’s a search engine. We ask questions and hope for good answers. That’s functional, sure. But if you’re drowning in admin and chaos and the mental load of trying to manage everything, you’re leaving money on the table.
The real power comes when you set up your AI tools to actually work for you. When you configure them to know what you need, remember your context, and help you automate the small decisions that eat up your mental energy every single day.
Think about your assistant at work (if you have one). You don’t expect them to read your mind. You brief them. You give them templates. You tell them what you want the output to look like. You set them up to succeed.
Your AI personal assistant deserves the same treatment.
Setting Up Copilot as Your Personal Assistant
This is where it gets practical. Copilot (Premium) is already deep in your ecosystem if you use Outlook, Teams, Word, or Excel. The leverage is already there, you just need to unlock it.
Here’s how you set up Copilot to actually act like your AI personal assistant:
- Create the perfect Personal Assistant Prompt. This will look different for us all.
Run the prompt and look at the response. It isn’t going to be exactly what you need the first time, so keep revising until you have the prompt that works for you.
Here’s an example of the kind of brief I use, adjust the timeframes and sections to match your own week:
- .Click on the clock icon. Once you’re happy with your prompt, you don’t have to run it manually every time. Click the clock icon to turn it into a scheduled prompt, this is where the real time-saving happens.
- Set your schedule. Choose how often you want the prompt to run: daily, weekly, on specific days, and set your start and end dates. Tick the box if you’d like an email notifying you when your response is ready, then hit Save.
- Manage your scheduled prompts. Once saved, you’ll see your prompt sitting in your list of active scheduled prompts. From here you can check when it’s next due to run, and edit or cancel it any time your needs change.
The key is to be specific. Tell Copilot who you are, what you value, and what success looks like. Then let it handle the execution.
The Claude and Codex Approach
If you’re paying for Claude Pro, you can install the Claude app on your computer and use Claude Cowork to schedule your own personal assistant prompt, the same way you would in Copilot.
If you’re using ChatGPT, even on the free plan, you can try out Codex, though you’ll likely need to be on a paid plan to get the real benefit. Codex is also installed on your device, but in Codex this same feature is called automations.
The real benefit of Claude and Codex over Copilot is that you’re not limited to the Microsoft world. My personal assistant prompt in Claude checks all my emails and calendars, including the ones sitting outside of Microsoft entirely. If your life (like mine) runs across more than one ecosystem, this matters more than it sounds.
The Ripple Effect
Here’s what changed for me: once I acknowledged my limits, I could actually design systems to work around them. I could protect the energy I needed for facilitation by automating the admin stuff that was leaking energy everywhere else.
I started asking Claude to summarise meeting notes and pull out the action items. I asked Copilot to draft first-pass responses to routine emails. I set up prompts to help me think through workshop design problems without starting from scratch every time.
Did this give me my gym routine back? Not completely, I’m still figuring that one out. But it did give me breathing room. It reduced the mental load enough that I could be more intentional about the other parts of my life.
So What Now?
The lesson isn’t “work less” or “be less ambitious.” It’s this: once you know your limits, you get to be strategic about them.
If you’re already paying for premium AI, start treating it like the AI personal assistant you’re investing in. Brief it properly. Give it context. Build templates. Automate decisions.
And if you’re not using AI yet because it feels like one more thing to learn? The mental load you’re carrying, the dishes, the emails, the meeting notes, the draft responses, that’s the real cost. Learning to brief an AI properly is actually the shortcut.
Your limits aren’t weakness. They’re data. Use them.
I’d love to hear what you discover. And if you’d like a practical session on embedding tools like this into your team’s workflow, email me at [email protected].
