Your inbox probably looks like mine right now… Every day there is another tool promising to save you time and cut your decision fatigue, with a quieter message underneath it all that if you are not using AI yet, you are behind.
I am not anti-tech. I am also not anti-AI. I test new tools every month and lean on AI hard in some corners of my life. But I recently spent hours trying to train an AI planning tool on the realities of my week, and what came out was a plan I knew would never work. Here are the four questions I now run every tool through.
1. Is this task repetitive and rules-based?
This is where the real wins are. Meal planning used to take my husband and me twenty minutes every Sunday, and now I have my Claude AI trained on the meals we actually eat, I snap a photo of the fridge, and we have a plan and a grocery list in seconds. Travel planning is the same. Mundane, repeated, no nuanced judgment required. Hand it the assistant work.
2. Am I using this to skip a skill I actually need?
You have gotten one of those emails where you could tell within two lines that no human wrote it. That is not an AI problem, that is a fundamentals problem. If you do not yet know how to plan and prioritize on your own, no app is going to hand you that skill. It will just make faster decisions on a foundation that is not there.
3. Will this add to my cognitive load or reduce it?
Count the steps honestly. I can do my detailed weekly plan in fifteen minutes, twenty on a hard week. Massaging a tool for three hours to get something worse than that is not a trade I will ever make.
4. Does this tool assume more predictability than I actually have?
This is the one that explains why so many of these tools have failed you. They read your calendar, then fill every bit of white space inside working hours, which means they book you solid and call it a plan. They cannot replan when you have been up half the night with a kid. And none of them has any concept of the mental load, so when a tool sees you free from four thirty to six, it does not know you are home and about to be in constant motion.
I talked to some male colleagues who love these tools, and it made sense once we dug in. They use the “perfect week” method. That means every Mondays are the same ten things, Tuesdays are meetings, etc. Each week is essentially planned the same every time. When your life is that repeatable, AI can fill in the details because it has a pattern to work from. These tools are trained on typical. If you are the default parent, or juggling caregiving and work, you are not typical, and some days you do not know what three hours from now holds.
Run one tool through the four questions this week
Pick the tool you have been curious about, or the one you already pay for and barely use, and answer each of the four questions in a sentence. Then answer the one that matters most, which is what specific problem you are asking it to solve. If you cannot finish that sentence, close the tab.
The women I work with who have the firmest grip on their time are not the ones with the most impressive tech stacks. Plenty of them plan on paper. Tech supports your system, it does not become it. đź©·
- Plan-a-Palooza 2026 — Last Week Before Early Bird Ends!
This is the last week to grab your early bird ticket for Plan-a-Palooza, so if you've been on the fence, now's the moment.
It's my favorite two days of the whole year, the one live event where I teach my full annual planning method from start to finish, and we build your Year at a Glance and Annual One-Pager together in real time. You don't need any special planner or experience going in; just come with your calendar and whatever you already use to track your life, and we'll build the rest together! - Crush It at Work and School Summit
Summer's winding down, and if you can feel the schedules and routines about to ramp back up, I've got something worth checking out.
I'm joining Alan P. Brown and 20 other ADHD and executive function experts for the free Crush It at Work and School Summit, four days of short interviews on reducing mental clutter, building routines that actually stick, and heading into the busier season with more energy instead of less. It's completely free to attend, and I'll be covering what to do to protect your sanity once things pick back up. Worth a look if you or someone in your house is feeling that shift coming.
Monthly Planning: The 4 Levels of Planning Series (Part 3 of 4)
We're on part three of the 4 Levels of Planning series, and this time I'm zooming in on monthly planning, the layer that shows you your real capacity before the month even fills up and starts making decisions for you.
Some months feel impossible no matter what you do, and by the time you notice, you've already said yes to more than you had room for. I'm walking through a simple 20-minute process for gauging your actual capacity ahead of time, why protecting pockets of it early saves you from scrambling later, and how this layer bridges your bigger goals to what actually happens week to week.
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How do you manage the information overload of back-to-school season?
School apps, emails, notifications, grades, lunch balances, it all comes flooding in at once, and it's easy to feel like you're forgetting something no matter how on top of it you try to stay. This week I've got a simple weekly rhythm that catches all of it without you having to think about it constantly, plus one tip a friend passed along that I wish I'd had years ago for handling everything that comes in during that first chaotic flurry of the school year.
Remember, this video is updated every Wednesday, so don’t miss it! Head to The Pink Bee app to watch now.
Friend, don’t forget, just 15 minutes of planning today can set the tone for your entire week. You’ve got the tools, you’ve got the tips, and now it’s time to take action. Let’s crush this week together!
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