Somewhere in that tiny conference room, someone’s actually learning from what just happened.
1. Productivity: The 4-Hour Deep Work Limit
You can’t do 8 hours of deep work a day.
Nobody can. The research is pretty clear: most people max out at about 4 hours of true deep, focused work.
The rest? That’s your shallow work window. Emails, admin, calls, errands.
So stop guilt-tripping yourself for “only” doing half a day of real work. That half day is the whole day. The trick is putting those 4 hours where your energy is highest. Morning person? Deep work before lunch. Night owl? Block your evenings.
Front-load what matters. Fill the gaps with everything else.
2. Ops: 15-Minute Project Post-Mortems
After every project, spend 15 minutes answering three questions:
- What worked?
- What didn’t?
- What would I do differently?
Write it down. Then move on.
This matters even more now because of AI. Your ability to get great output from AI depends on knowing what “good” looks like in your domain. Every post-mortem sharpens that mental model, and your prompts get better as a result.
The person who learns fastest from each project compounds their AI leverage over time. 15 minutes of reflection now saves hours of mediocre AI output later.
3. Tech: Template + Claude Code + Walk Away
Stop copy-pasting discovery call notes into ChatGPT one prompt at a time.
Set up a proper proposal agent:
- Create your proposal template as a markdown file — sections, pricing format, terms.
- Write a style guide for your voice and tone. (Just rant for 15 minutes, transcribe it, and ask Claude to turn it into a style guide.)
- Build a Claude Code skill that references both files automatically.
The workflow: paste your notes, run the skill, walk away for a coffee. Come back to an 80% done draft. You handle the final 20% with personal touches and pricing decisions.
3-hour proposals become 15 minutes of review. I cover building these kinds of AI workflows in The Complete Claude, Claude Code & AI for Work Productivity.
4. Courses
I have a range of online courses that teach business people what they need to know about productivity and AI:
1. Next Level Productivity
A practical, straightforward course that teaches you how to achieve elite-level personal productivity in today’s constantly interrupted world.
2. The AI Agents, Automations and Agentic Workflows Guide
This non-technical course shows business people and non-coders how they can build and use AI agents in ChatGPT and Zapier.
3. The Complete Claude, Claude Code & AI for Work Productivity
A comprehensive course taking you from beginner AI concepts like prompt and context engineering, to cutting-edge AI productivity using terminal-based AI tools like Claude Code for non-coding office work. Usable with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other current LLMs.
4. The AI Playbook
This is my longer premium course on how businesses can deploy AI tools and technology across their processes and teams.
5. ChatGPT for Managers
See how AI can solve complex management challenges in less than 30 seconds. Full prompt library and examples included.
That’s it for this week!
— Aaron