In today's episode, we’re taking a deep dive into the transformative power of automation with Chris Cameron, a workflow efficiency consultant specializing in helping neurodivergent individuals harness the benefits of AI and automated tools. Chris shares his personal journey with ADHD and how technology has played a pivotal role in managing daily challenges.
From practical learning to creating inclusive support systems, Chris discusses how specialized automation can alleviate everyday pressures. We also get into a number of topics about AI and how we can integrate some of the services to help alleviate some of the woes of executive dysfunction.
Whether you're a business owner, content creator, or someone looking for practical solutions, this conversation is packed with actionable insights that promise to simplify and enhance your life.
William Curb: All right, well, it's great to have you here with us. Can you give a introduction and talk about what it is you do?
Chris Cameron: Yeah, sure. So I'm a workflow efficiency consultant, which is basically a fancy way of saying, I help people use automated tools and computer processes to make their lives easier, whether that's in their businesses or in their personal lives. And my focus for the past about a year, I guess, has been working with people with ADHD, just because these tools have had an impact for me and the strategies about how to use them as well. And after my diagnosis a couple of years ago, I started focusing on how people with ADHD could leverage that stuff. And finally, I decided to start working with neurodivergent business owners and content creators to help them streamline things. So that's a little bit about me.
William Curb: Awesome. So I think kind of the first place, I mean, I had tons of threads my mind went to immediately, but I think the first thing that might help people is giving some more like concrete example of what like an automation tool is. Cause they might hear that and not have any idea. They're just like, well, that sounds great, but what does that mean?
Chris Cameron: That's a great point that you bring up. And in fact, I find oftentimes in kind of getting into the subject with people who are less familiar with the term automation, they seem to find it scary. But I will remind people that we use automated tools in our lives every day. And most of us don't think about it like you use the dishwasher, which is an automated way of washing your dishes. I mean, we're taking out the manual work.
And I think in the computer world, one of the great entry points for that that I always like to lead with for people that haven't done much automation or any at all is email filtering. It's kind of a more of a passive approach to automation because you're filtering, right? But it's also super powerful because you can pick a message that you've received and move it somewhere else. And really that's the first step in creating an automation. We're talking about using an action that you can refer to as a trigger. And so in this case, an email filtering, the action or trigger is gonna be receiving that email.
And then you have a set of conditions around it. So if the condition is that I'm receiving an email from William and then do something with this message, like automatically flag it or star it or favorite or whatever, so that I have that in my priority inbox or something to that effect, that's an easy way, I think, to get your head around one of the more basic things that automation can do. For me, it's something that I use every day extensively because without any kind of email filtering, my digital life would be very quickly quite a mess.
William Curb: Yeah, one of the filters I set up on my own email is to just look for the word unsubscribe in there and shovel all of those into a newsletter folder. Because then I'm like, even if I got randomly subscribed to a newsletter, it automatically does not just appear in the main inbox for me now, which is when I first did that, I'm like, oh, I don't get any email anymore.
Chris Cameron: That's a great strategy.
William Curb: I remember we're also talking like all these calendar tools are great automations that because it made it so much easier for us to schedule something because it's like, oh, you have my times and it just automatically pops up on the calendar and it does all these things without us having to think about them.
Chris Cameron: Yeah, you're using Calendly, right?
William Curb: Yeah.
Chris Cameron: And I think that's probably one of the platforms that people are more familiar with. I know they advertise quite a lot. So Cal.com is another fantastic platform for scheduling automation. And in fact, Google Calendar has added their own booking system to the calendar as well. So I believe it's only for Google, like paying Google Workspace customers. But yeah, you can basically have just an open calendar registration that shows for anyone that's not familiar with how these work.
Basically, it just shows you a page where I could look up when William is available and say, oh, yeah, I'd like to meet with him on Thursday. And look, there's an open spot and it coincides with an open spot that I have in my calendar. Great. Let's click that button and make it happen. And then we both get emails and magic happens.
William Curb: Yeah, but it also makes me think about one of the downsides to automations, too, is things do happen automatically. And so they do require maintenance to be like, because I have to make sure I'm putting the days that I'm not available in there. It is one of those things that we do have to think about, like, hey, yeah, this is more than a habit. It is just going to happen.
Chris Cameron: That's one of the things that I make sure to teach people about whatever I'm doing more of an instructional kind of thing with someone and kind of walking them through how to set up automations. I think something really important to remember is that automations are not static. They're not permanent. They're ongoing project, kind of like gardening. You just need to do some maintenance. Otherwise, they will just like kind of die on you. So yeah, I mean, just keep in mind how your automations are working.
Make sure that things like email filters are kept up to date. Perhaps you have old ones that are no longer relevant because you've unsubscribed to a bunch of mailing lists. Or if you're a freelancer, you could have a whole group of people that you were communicating with for a particular project, and that's no longer relevant once the project is done. So small maintenance, things like that, as well as things like if you're linking together several platforms, you'll want to be aware of just any major changes that any of them make that could kind of interrupt the flow of an automation.
William Curb: I do think it's also such a good thing with ADHD too, because it does this like offloading of our executive function. So we're not, we can only keep so much stuff in our brain. And so maybe a checklist would work or something, which is just another system for us to use. But this makes it just, OK, this will just happen. And so it is like an automatic habit.
Chris Cameron: And I like your reference to the checklist. I'm a huge fan of checklists. And it's just very helpful to, in terms of reducing decision fatigue and potentially getting distracted halfway through a task, if you have a checklist that kind of keeps you on a set path, let's say, you can follow those steps. And in fact, that's a great way to go about designing a workflow that you could then later automate. One of the things that you want to keep track of is just how you're doing things in your daily life, what kind of order or sequence they happen in.
And I think by creating a checklist, you're kind of halfway to automating a lot of stuff. And I think a great example that I could give you of something that's a bit more tangible for that is just a morning routine that I had for quite some time. It's kind of not working that well for me these days, but during the time that it was working very well for me, I basically just recorded what was going on in my morning. So waking up, turning off my alarm, going to the bathroom, brushing my teeth, and making some coffee. And all those different parts of my morning, I just noted down, OK, this is approximately how long this takes and et cetera.
And I did that for a few weeks. And then after I had a very detailed checklist of all these things that I do pretty much every morning, I started automating some of it. And that started actually with me just wondering, what can I do differently than just turning off my alarm? One of the things that I have that I wanted to build actually was journaling first thing in the morning. But the problem is I can't just do it first thing in the morning. Like, you don't just wake up and journal. I mean, I don't anyway. Maybe some people can. But I had all these other things to do first.
So I decided that I'd set up a little tag next to my bed that I could just tap my phone on. It's a little NFC tag and it just triggered a routine. That open actually that same checklist. It's like, OK, go and brush your teeth. OK, cool. So I checked that off. Go and make yourself some coffee. Cool. I checked that off. And when I'm done the first five things, it's like, OK, now go to your computer and write a journal entry. And so I had it automatically open on a text editor for me so that I could just write that entry.
William Curb: I mean, I think that's one of the biggest things there is that it cuts off that barrier to entry because we have to have this like problem with a getting past that threshold of the activation of starting something. But if it's like, oh, this opened automatically. Well, it's there. I guess I'll do it.
Chris Cameron: I think we have great intentions sometimes going into these things where it's like I really want to start journaling and you'll sit down. And, you know, whether it's with a notepad or, you know, at your computer or whatever. But it's really easy when it's a new habit that you're forming to not roll right into it, like with ease.
William Curb: Yeah.
Chris Cameron: And so any small kind of bump in the road could kind of just, you know, swerve you off the back. And so, you know, if I'm going on my computer, well, hey, look at that. I got a new notification for emails. Let me check that first. But if you can avoid doing that and you just go right to the open document, then you're one step closer to victory.
William Curb: So yeah, it's really about helping you along with your intentions.
Chris Cameron: Yeah.
William Curb: It's also making me think of like the blocks that you can put on like your browser to be like, oh, I don't want to spend more time on reddit or Facebook or Twitter or any of the other social sites. And I'll be like, yeah, can I get around this block? Of course, it is not that hard for me to figure out what I need to do. But it's a reminder of the intention and it gets me to be like, OK, I have to make a decision if I want to do the extra steps to make it so it's that I am doing the thing I had said I don't want to do.
Chris Cameron: Yeah. And it's not even necessarily that you don't want to do it. It's just that like, even if you do want to do it, there's something else that's easier to do or more like immediately gratifying. And and just that tiny bit of friction or resistance in that process is just enough to slow you down long enough that you're like, oh, OK, I'll just do something else for like five minutes before I do that. Like five minutes turns into an hour and then you don't have time to do the thing that you really wanted to do. You know, it'll wait till tomorrow. We'll start that new habit tomorrow. So I find leveraging automation for building happens is incredibly powerful. But having a well-defined strategy for it is equally important.
And that's one of the things that I think is easy to get caught up on is, you know, if you're interested in the idea of automation, it's not quite as cut and dry as just opening an application and saying, OK, let's automate this thing. You have to give some thought to it first. So if you're kind of predisposed to observing your actions and and doing that sort of thing like, you know, maybe journaling or what have you, you know, it becomes a little bit easier to to kind of pull out those things that you might be able to kind of construct into a more formalized workflow. That doesn't mean, though, that it has to be inflexible either. You know, there are ways to there are ways to have things then be more flexible, even if they are automated.
William Curb: I know like one of the automation platforms out there is if this, then that. At least I assume that's still around. It is. Yeah. Do you use that one? I have in the past. I've also used Zapier before. I don't have any specific automations I'm using right now, other than like the email filters and some of the other like locks on my phone for being like, hey, it's eight o'clock. You should think about not doing stuff on your phone right now. But specifically was like, I think the the title of if this, then that is a great way to think about the automations, because it's like, yeah, if something is happening, then do that. Are those platforms that you think people should look into if they're interested in this?
Chris Cameron: Yeah, I think if this or IFTT is a great starting point, it's an interesting platform because I find it does basic stuff very well. And if you're new to automation, it makes it really easy. However, if you cross a threshold and it's like, I can't tell you exactly where that barrier is. But as soon as you start to get a little more complex in the kind of stuff that you want to automate, it's actually a little not that it's not powerful enough, but it becomes more complicated to automate those things that are just slightly more complex through that platform.
And maybe it's just me and the way my brain works with with seeing things like laid out. But I just find it feels more constrained than some other platforms. So like Zapier has a similar layout in like it's kind of like a vertically stacked, you know, from this step, you go into the next step. And from there, you go into the next one. You can have a chain of multiple steps that you can bring your workflow through. And it's pretty logical, I guess.
And one of the things that they've integrated recently into Zapier is an AI assistant that actually helps you build out your workflows. So you don't even have to tell it all of the different modules that you need it to use. It'll actually recommend things. So if you're new to the platform, it's kind of like teaching you along the way to.
William Curb: Awesome.
Chris Cameron: The platform that I use the most for automation is make. So it's formerly known as Integra Matt, but for anyone that's interested, they can find it at make.com.
William Curb: It's great change there.
Chris Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a great change of name, but it's much harder to Google.
William Curb: Yes, I imagine.
Chris Cameron: So but make I find does a really, really good job of anyone that thinks more visually, I think is going to prefer that platform because you have modules that you can kind of drag and drop and you can connect with like, you know, it's like a little wire connecting them. And then you can follow the bouncing ball between the modules to see how your data is flowing. And yeah, just like what's going on in that sequence.
The other really cool thing about make is that if you have an automation that requires branching or like, you know, multiple choices or multiple actions to occur at a at a given point. And I think it would probably help if I give an example. Let's say you create a calendar event on my calendar. You know, normally I would receive an email that says, OK, you know, William set up an appointment with you on this day at this time. Great. So we both get emails, right?
That's the default from whatever platform you're using. But with make, you could set it up to say, OK, like, send us both an email or send William a form that's going to capture some of the things that he's planning on talking about. And then, you know, once the form is done, send a PDF to both of us with those ideas, something like that. So you can get more complex, but these things are happening at the same time. So you kind of have like, parallel tasks going on.
William Curb: And if I don't fill that form out, it could have like a would there be like I could be like, oh, Will never filled this form out. Let's send a reminder email.
Chris Cameron: Yeah, you can absolutely do that. You can put delays on things. You can have dependencies, I guess, where, you know, if something else depends on that form to continue, like the rest of that workflow will just not continue to run or, you know, could give you some sort of message in between like, hey, Chris, you might want to follow up on this thing or whatever it is. Maybe it'll flash a light in my office. You can set up a lot of this stuff to do pretty much anything that you can think of.
And I think that's part of the things that becomes a little tricky about talking about this stuff, is that you can really go down these rabbit holes and exploring, you know, exactly how to work with the different platforms. So I would caution anyone who wants to put a little bit of time into automating whatever part of their life, just to have a rough game plan. And, you know, figure out what are the things that you're most interested in? What are the things that constitute the heaviest load for you mentally or cognitively?
And what are the things that, like, distract you or slow you down during your day and kind of decrease your productivity? I think, for me, those would be the first class things to investigate, because if I know that I can cut down decision fatigue and help myself stay focused on whatever it is that I have to do throughout my day, I'd like to put a bit of energy into automating that and helps make it more sustainable, I guess.
William Curb: Yeah, one of the books I like is called The One Thing, and it has like a focusing question of like, what's the one thing I can do such by doing it that everything else is easier?
If I can get help here, it'll have a cascading effect on the rest of my day. And so one of the places I'd like to go to, after hearing about the like the AI tools to help design the workflows, is also that we do have a lot of like AI tools too that are essentially automations as well.
Chris Cameron: Yeah, and so many of the AI platforms that, you know, we've seen pop up in the past couple of years now, let's stick to just one, just to the first simplicity's sake. But I mean, yeah, just to just in talking about, you know, how conversational AI and chat based AI works for large language models. But yeah, chat GPT, you know, is the one that everyone knows. It's crazy helpful. I don't know about you, but I'm using it all the time in so many different ways. And I like, I keep finding new uses for it that just kind of speed up my day.
William Curb: There's all sorts of weird applications for it that, I mean, I use them frequently for the episodes to help me figure out, you know, I have like a script that I put in, like, so I'll take the transcript of what we're talking about here, and I'll have it, I'll put in and have a prompt that I've already written up. And then so I'll have your bio in it, and it'll have the transcript with the prompt, and then it will give me three possible introductions to the episode, seven possible tips for the episode, possible titles, and then also like:
Hey, if I was, if I'm, I've been starting to put tags on the episodes, like what are some good tags, with like the caveat, don't use the word ADHD in those tags, because that's useless for this. To caveat, I rarely use its exact output and probably never, because it comes off incredibly saccharine. And it's like, Oh, boy, let's talk about this. I'm like, No, that's not the tone I want at all. And I could work more on the prompt to be work on like, Hey, do this in this kind of tone. But I prefer to rewrite the things now as they are. It's just good to have be like, when I write the introduction to this episode, I'm not going to have a great recall of what we talked about immediately.
Chris Cameron: I'm right with you on doing the rewrites. I, I do have to say though, I spend quite a lot of time refining some prompts so that I get the output as close as possible to my tone of voice, because then again, you know, we're talking about tools that kind of help get you unstuck and reduce decision fatigue and that sort of thing. And I think if the output from chat GPT is already very close to the way I would have phrased something, it just saves me that much extra brainpower that I can use on, you know, adding whole new sections of, you know, content or whatever to, let's say a blog post that I'm writing or whatever it is that I'm working on.
William Curb: Yeah. I also like using it sometimes, I like it like emails from people and with people with ABDHD, they will have a lot of story to go along with what they're telling me. And so I have a very long email from them and I'm like, what are they asking? You know, and I could just pop that into like, what question is this person asking? And I'm like, simplify it for me. I'm like, oh, okay, I can see that now from what? Okay, got it.
Chris Cameron: That's a good point because I actually, I've been using something like that when I write emails too, because I tend to be that that ADHD or the, you know, has a whole bunch of additional context around things. And one of the things that I notice I do is I'll give people a long explanation. And then finally, I'll get to the point now, I've started using this one prompt that uses something called, it's a, I guess it's an approach to email writing. I don't know, I can't remember exactly where I discovered this, but I think it's like a business strategy. And it's just called bottom line upfront. If you look for, if you Google that, I'm sure you'll get a good explanation of like how you're supposed to do it.
But basically, I found that I refined the prompt a bit. And basically, it just turns my, my ideas around. And yeah, puts the big ask right up front, that people that don't have time to read through six paragraph email, can just say, Oh, okay, Chris wants this. Here's what he wants it. By the way, here's all the other stuff that you might be interested in. Right. And then I'll have from that down a bit too, just to be on the safe side, because they probably don't need all that extra info.
William Curb: One of the funny ways I've also found that I can do this is if I'm having trouble coming up with prompts, I can just ask chat GPT what would be a good prompt to get this kind of output? And it will be like, it'll give me something and I can build off of that. So it's like, it is funny how I can use chat GPT to help improve myself on it. Yeah, I remember seeing one suggestion too is like, yeah, if after you do a prompt, you can also have like, thing in there to be like, can you give me three questions that would help improve this prompt?
And it's like, Oh, that's a great way to think about improving what you're doing there. Because it's the idea of the prompt engineering that is out there is like, kind of intimidating at first, because it is like, I don't know what that means.
Chris Cameron: I think prompt engineering was very, very important in early days when, you know, chat GPT 3.5 and, and the like, we're, we're just, you know, and it was all a new thing. And the systems, the LLMs were not as developed as they are now. And that's one of the things that I've noticed like chat GPT 4.0, it's a step above like 4 turbo. And, and just asking it things in natural language, you really don't need to refine the way you're asking things as much as you did in the early days of using these tools. Like now I can just ask for a thing that I want. And it's more much more receptive and gives you like things that are more closely aligned with what your intention might have been.
That being said, there are a couple of tricks that you can use to kind of help things along. So giving examples of the kind of output that you want is a really, really powerful way to direct it. Like if you're asking for suggestions for, you know, how can I start an intro to my email? Let's say you write a newsletter or, you know, how do I introduce myself a fun, you know, a blog or whatever, you can ask for suggestions and it'll just give you lots of random stuff. Or you can say, I'd like a suggestion for this and I'd like it to look something like this and then give it two or three examples. And then it'll give you something that's a lot more closely aligned with those examples that, that you gave. And that could be in terms of formatting the output formatting.
So, or, you know, the length of the output or the style of language, you know, all of those things are kind of taken into account. I really like using examples. I find it, it's a lot quicker than going back and just asking it the same thing 10 times over to get, you know, something closer to what you're thinking of, which is a valid strategy too, if you don't know what you want, right? Like there have been plenty of times that I've asked for stuff and I'm like, I don't know anything about this subject. So I'm just going to keep asking and see what kind of outputs I get and then I'll choose the thing that's like giving me the right idea or clue or suggestion of where I can go with it.
William Curb: Yeah. I've used it like a couple times to be like, hey, could you help me name this video game character that I'm making? It's like, Mike, okay, can you make it pun based?
And it's like, oh, great. I'm also thinking that we could also go into some of the specific AI tools that are great for ADHD, like goblin tools is one that has been around for a while now.
Chris Cameron: So goblin tools, I know is quite well regarded by the ADHD community. I don't know if they use ADHD specifically or they're saying neurodivergent, but either way, you know, I think one of the things that I liked when I first saw it was its ability to break down a task or to subdivide a task into smaller chunks.
William Curb: Yeah, because that is one of the things that I've talked about on the show. It's like, hey, it's great if you have or having trouble with task initiation, break it down into its component parts and figure out where you can start there. But that can be really hard to do. And so having something be like, yeah, this is what takes place in doing this thing.
Chris Cameron: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think one of the recurring themes in what we're talking about here with AI and with automation prior to that is that a lot of the time gets you past what I like to refer to as blank page syndrome. If you're starting from nothing, sometimes you don't have any momentum, right? You don't have anything to go on and you're like, I don't even know how to start this. And I remember back in high school, you'd be assigned a paper and I would get great grades in English class, but it would take me forever to get started on a paper, any kind of assignment. Because of that, I always had that mental block of how do I start this thing?
Once I'd start, you know, no problem. And I find that a lot of these tools are doing that. They're getting you past that initial hurdle. And I think in this case, we're talking about how do you go about breaking down a task. I think a lot of the time you know, but you just can't think of it because the task is so imposing feeling at the time. You hit this kind of mental block. And I think your brain is just trying to protect you in some way. It's like, no, don't look directly at that task. It's going to hurt you. But if you can get over that, then you can just barrel right through it. So yeah, I definitely like that feature. Do you use goblin tools?
William Curb: I have in the past, but it's not been something that I've been actively using recently because I can do kind of the same things with chat GPT. And I can just pop that open and be like, hey, break this task down. And it'll do the same thing now.
Chris Cameron: I haven't used it in quite some time either, to be honest. There's one that actually that I'm thinking of right now, it's how to like, it'll rephrase something for you to make it if your thoughts are meandering too much. It'll make it more pointed. And if it's coming off as being too blunt, then it'll help embellish it for you a bit.
William Curb: Yeah, that's I do that sometimes where I'm like, well, I put off this email answer and I'm like, Oh, God, that's what did I send them?
Chris Cameron: Yeah, I mean, those are helpful starting points. Speaking of goblin tools versus chat GPT, I think, you know, depending on maybe your fluency with chat GPT, how often you use it, I think it seems like both of us are in chat GPT, probably a good chunk of time. So yeah, I mean, I think if you're like us, then you probably don't need to switch tools necessarily. If you don't use chat GPT or another LLM chat application similar to it, then perhaps you'd benefit from using goblin tools just for its more specific kind of fixed set of prompts. Really, that's what it is. I mean, they're just prompts in a in a wrapper that makes it easy to just hit the one button.
William Curb: Yeah. Yeah. And there's a bunch of ways that you can like do things like, you know, asking for help with planning your week, or one of the features I love is just having it ask me questions about things like, Hey, can you help me refine my thoughts on this by asking me questions and then being like, can you ask me those questions one at a time, rather than 11 at a time?
Chris Cameron: Right. At the start of our chat, when I first mentioned AI platforms, I think I quickly mentioned like local LLMs. So I use one called Olama. There are a few different ones out now. But one of the things that I find really cool about that platform is that you don't really have to censor yourself. I mean, I'm not really censoring myself. But I guess just in intros of what information I feel comfortable sharing with chat GPT, you know, you don't want to necessarily give it specific details of like your address and what you're up to for, I don't know, your holidays or like maybe various medical issues or, you know, things that you might feel like uncomfortable sharing with open AI, right? Because I mean, you do have the ability to turn off data sharing with open AI.
If you're paying for chat GPT, I'm not sure if that's the case on free accounts. But definitely if you're paying for it, there's a switch that you can turn off that says, don't train LLMs on my data or something like that. But that means that they are receiving your data and potentially using it, right? If you don't click that. So Olama and other local LLMs, you don't have to worry about that because it's all running on your own machine. Yeah. So there are certain things like what we're just talking about. You can present to Olama and have it help you work through different problems or bring you different information without having any kind of risk of that information being compromised.
William Curb: Yeah, because it's worth thinking and talking about the ethical dilemmas with AI because we don't have a lot of information on how they're training their data, be it from the art side or how they got so much text to do stuff off of because it's certainly they're not being especially open about it.
Chris Cameron: Right. Ironically.
William Curb: Yeah. Yeah. So it's worth at least being aware. Yeah, there are some ethical implications about using these tools and being, I don't try to, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I'm like, when I do stuff, I try and reward it because it's important to me that what I'm giving people is my work, not someone else's work.
Chris Cameron: That's a fair point. And I think, I think if you're writing your own material too, I think many creative people are now using tools like chat GPT as kind of a super powered spell checker. Right. Like it's kind of a do everything spell checker that says, you know, how can I like replace some of the more common words to describe whatever place or action, you know, replace it with something a little more interesting sounding and whatever it is that you want to do to embellish your work or to kind of fix it in some way.
And I guess like it seems less if you're giving it more of an input versus receiving an output, then you might not really consider the implications of that, you know, beyond like, okay, I used it as a spell checker, right. What you are doing is if you're not ensuring that that data is not shared with open AI, you could be potentially feeding them a whole bunch of new unedited, like raw content in your voice. And so giving them a whole new source of material, right.
So, yeah, I think, I think from that standpoint, if you wanted to do that sort of thing, it might be more interesting to keep it local too. A really good example would be if you're writing a book, and you might not want to share those ideas with a platform like that, kind of keep it for yourself until after you publish it.
William Curb: Yeah, it's definitely worth considering. If people wanted to reach out to you, find out more about automation stuff, is there someplace they can go?
Chris Cameron: Yeah, they can visit my website, it's learnwith.cc. If anyone's interested, it's a community for content creators and business owners, entrepreneurs with ADHD. And the intention is just to connect with like-minded people and share tips and tricks and your struggles and kind of help get each other past those blockers. So if you're interested in signing up, there's open registration for the beta right now.
William Curb: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on here. I'm sure people will get a ton out of this because there is a lot in this episode. I will try and do justice with the show notes, but I'm sure there will be. I'm sure I'm gonna get emails about like, hey, you mentioned this thing and you didn't have it in the show notes.
Chris Cameron: I'll do my best to get everything that we spoke about together on the site too, clear links to those things where I've written about them too for anyone that's interested.
William Curb: I'll have to add in into my prompt to label all the tools that we talked about. All right, well, thank you so much.
Chris Cameron: Thank you so much for having me on, William. It was a pleasure.
This Episode's Top Tips
Start small with automation, using simple tools and gradually integrating more complex systems as comfort with technology grows. It can be easy to be overwhelmed if we try to start out with too much.
Easy places to start with automation include using email filters to automatically help reduce inbox clutter and tools like Google Calendar or Calendly to automate scheduling and preventing double bookings.
Regularly update and maintain automation tools to ensure they continue to serve your needs effectively, much like gardening.
Use AI tools to break down large tasks into manageable steps, helping overcome task initiation barriers.