The Ride
The Tour de France starts today, and it starts strangely: a team time trial. No lone hero punching the air on a summit. Eight riders rolling out together, taking turns in the wind, and the clock stops on the fifth rider across the line. Nobody rides alone.
Which makes it the perfect first stage for this tour too. Because the biggest misconception about AI is that it’s a tool you use. It isn’t. It’s a team you ride with.
Here’s the mistake almost everyone makes in week one: they open a chat window, stare at the empty box, and try to think of use cases. Ten minutes later they’ve asked it to write a poem, been mildly impressed, and closed the tab. That’s not using AI. That’s interviewing it badly.
Turn it around. Don’t brainstorm use cases. Show it your reality and let it find them.
Your calendar knows what you do. Your inbox knows what you do repeatedly. You don’t need imagination on day one — you need to hand over the evidence.
Pick your bike
First, the practical bit. Pick one primary provider and pay the ~$20/month. That twenty dollars buys you an application that’s easy to use and genuinely feature-rich — skills, connectors, artifacts that turn your work into visuals. Once you’re in, you can do a lot.
On this tour, we ride Claude. Partly honest preference — it’s what I use every day. Mostly because Claude has Cowork built in, and Cowork teaches you the thing that actually matters: delegating work, not chatting about it. If you’re on ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, stay on your bike — every concept in the next 21 days maps across, and I’ll flag it when the mapping isn’t obvious.
The first twenty minutes
This is today’s team time trial. Short, together, against the clock:
- Sign up and open the app. Desktop if you can.
- Show it your reality. Screenshot your calendar for the week and drop it in. Or connect your email. Whichever feels less weird.
- Ask the day-one question: “Based on what you can see, what am I doing repeatedly? What could you take off my plate this week?”
- Pick ONE of its suggestions and let it do the thing. Draft the recurring email. Summarise the meeting notes. Prep the Monday update.
Then stop and notice what just happened. You didn’t think of a use case. It read your week and found one. That feeling — oh, it’s not a search engine, it’s a colleague who’s read everything and never gets tired — that’s the whole tour, in miniature.
Tomorrow
Stage 2 is hilly: prompting is briefing. If you’ve ever briefed a colleague, an agency, or a new starter, you already have the skill everyone thinks they need to learn. See you at 06:05.
The Breakaway (optional, ~15 min)
For the riders who want to go off the front today:
- Connect a second tool (calendar if you did email, email if you did calendar).
- Ask the workflows question: “Based on what you can see of how I work, which of my workflows are repeatable processes — things that could be written down once and run again?” Keep its answer. That list is raw material for week two, when those become skills.
- Start your team sheet. Open a plain document — yours, not the AI’s — and write down: who you are, what you do, what the AI got right about you today, what it got wrong. This is day one of your AI brain: the context that makes every future answer better. It lives in a file you own, portable to any model. We’ll grow it all tour.
How this stage was made: drafted by Claude from a voice interview with Matt, edited by Matt.