You know that feeling when you have a list of twenty things to do, and you just sort of... stare at it? Like your brain is trying to process all the items at once, but instead of picking one, it just kind of short-circuits?
Oh, I know that feeling intimately. It is the classic wall of awful, as the productivity expert Brendan Mahan calls it. It is not just a list of tasks; it is a wall built of failure bricks, disappointment bricks, and shame bricks. You have the data, but you lack the executive function to turn that data into a sequence because the emotional weight of the wall is just too heavy.
Exactly. And that is exactly what our housemate Daniel was talking about in the prompt he sent us this morning. He is a big fan of the Getting Things Done methodology, which we have talked about before, but he is hitting a snag that I think a lot of people, especially those with A-D-H-D, can relate to. He is great at the capture phase, getting everything out of his head and into a list, but the manual sorting, the prioritizing, the chunking... that is where the wheels come off. He is stuck at the clarify and organize phases.
Herman Poppleberry here, and I have been diving into the research on this very topic because, frankly, the manual part of productivity is where most systems fail. Daniel is right. David Allen’s Getting Things Done is a brilliant framework for capturing, but it was designed in an era of paper and early digital tools. It assumes you have the mental bandwidth to sit down every morning and manually decide what is important. It assumes your prefrontal cortex is always online and ready to play air traffic controller.
Right, and for someone with A-D-H-D, that decision-making process is often the hardest part of the day. It is like being asked to build a bridge while you are already struggling to keep your head above water. So, Daniel is asking: can A-I do the bridge-building for us? Can we move from a static list to an automated daily roadmap? Can we externalize the executive function entirely?
The short answer is yes, and it is actually one of the most exciting frontiers in personal technology right now in early twenty twenty-six. We are moving away from simple list managers and toward what I like to call autonomous scheduling agents. These are systems that do not just store your tasks; they reason about them.
That sounds fancy. But before we get into the specific tools, let’s talk about the methodology shift. Because just throwing an A-I at a messy list might just give you a faster way to feel overwhelmed. If the A-I just yells at you to do fifty things, you are still going to hit that wall of awful.
That is a great point, Corn. The fundamental problem with traditional lists is that they are disconnected from time. A list of fifty items is just a wish list until it meets a calendar. What Daniel is looking for is a bridge between his inbox and his schedule. In the past, we had to do that manually. We had to look at our calendar, see a two-hour gap, look at our list, and decide which task fit. That is a high-stakes calculation.
And that decision costs energy. It is what we discussed back in episode three hundred and forty-four when we talked about navigating life with adult A-D-H-D. That decision fatigue is a real productivity killer. By the time you have decided what to do, you are too tired to actually do it.
Precisely. So, the new A-I-driven methodology is something I call adaptive scheduling. Instead of you choosing the task for the time slot, you define the constraints of the task, and the A-I math-magically, if you will, fits it into the available gaps in your life. It treats your day like a constraint satisfaction problem, which is a classic computer science challenge.
So, instead of saying, I will do the laundry at two o’clock, I tell the A-I, I have this laundry task, it takes one hour, it is medium priority, and it needs to be done by Friday. And then I just... wait for it to tell me when it is time?
Exactly. And the A-I looks at your meetings, your sleep schedule, your preferred working hours, and it just... slots it in. If a new meeting pops up at two o’clock, the A-I automatically shifts the laundry to four o’clock without you having to touch a thing. It removes the need for manual rescheduling, which is often where people with A-D-H-D give up. When the plan breaks, the A-D-H-D brain often just throws the whole plan away. Adaptive scheduling prevents that total collapse.
I can see how that would be a game-changer. It takes the shame out of not getting something done at a specific time because the system just adjusts. It is like a G-P-S for your day. If you miss a turn, it just says rerouting instead of calling you a failure. But how does it handle prioritization? That is the big hurdle Daniel mentioned. If I have ten tasks that all feel important, how does the A-I know which one to put first?
This is where it gets really interesting. Modern A-I schedulers use a combination of several factors. First, there is the hard deadline. That is obvious. But then there is what we call the urgency-importance matrix, often known as the Eisenhower Matrix, but automated. The A-I looks at the lead time you have left. If a task takes five hours and it is due in six hours, the A-I knows that is now a critical priority. But it also looks at your energy levels if you have provided that data.
Wait, energy levels? How does it know if I am tired?
Some of the newer tools in twenty twenty-six, like Morgen and Focuzed dot I-O, allow you to tag tasks with the energy they require. High-focus tasks versus low-energy admin. The A-I then looks at your historical data. If you usually finish high-focus tasks between nine and eleven in the morning, it will prioritize your deep work for those slots. It is trying to match the task to your biological state.
That is fascinating. But what about the stuff without deadlines? Daniel mentioned cleaning the living room. That has no hard deadline, but it still needs to happen. If the A-I only cares about deadlines, the living room will stay messy forever.
That is where behavioral algorithms come in. Some of these tools, like Reclaim dot A-I, use a concept called decaying priority or increasing urgency. If you keep snoozing a task, the A-I might realize it is either too big and needs to be broken down, or it might start increasing its internal priority score because it knows that the longer a task sits, the more mental weight it carries. It starts defending that task more aggressively as time goes on.
So it is essentially acting as an external prefrontal cortex. It is doing the heavy lifting of evaluating and sequencing. I am curious about the specific tech that is doing this right now. I know we mentioned unified A-I workspaces in episode three hundred and sixty-seven, but are there dedicated apps that focus specifically on this autonomous roadmap idea?
There are a few heavy hitters right now. One that is really leading the pack is called Motion. It is essentially an A-I-powered calendar and task manager that treats your time like a giant puzzle. You put in your tasks, you give them a duration and a priority, and it builds your day for you. In twenty twenty-five, they released an A-I Project Manager feature that can actually build out entire project plans from a single prompt. If you tell it you are searching for an apartment, it can generate the sub-tasks for you.
I have seen some people talk about Motion. It seems very aggressive, in a good way. Like, it doesn't let you hide from your tasks. It puts them right on the calendar as blocks of time.
It is! And that is actually helpful for certain brain types. It creates a sense of visual accountability. Another one is Reclaim dot A-I. It is more focused on balancing habits and tasks. So, if you want to make sure you spend thirty minutes reading every day, Reclaim will find a spot for that, but it will prioritize your high-stakes work tasks over the reading if things get tight. They have a feature called LunchBuddy that automatically protects your lunch break, moving it around as your meetings shift. It is about defending your humanity against your calendar.
I like the idea of habit integration. Because for someone like Daniel, or anyone trying to manage a busy life, the small habits often get sacrificed first when the to-do list gets long. And then you feel even worse because you are not taking care of yourself.
True. And then there is Akiflow. Akiflow is particularly interesting for the G-T-D crowd because it excels at the capture phase. It pulls in tasks from your email, your Slack, your Trello, and even your browser tabs. It has a universal inbox. Then, it uses A-I to help you time-block them. It is less about the A-I doing everything for you and more about the A-I making the manual part take ten seconds instead of ten minutes. It is the power-user choice.
And you mentioned Morgen earlier. How does that fit in?
Morgen is great for people who want a middle ground. It uses something called Frames. You define a frame, like Deep Work from eight to eleven, and then you tell the A-I which types of tasks are allowed in that frame. The A-I then suggests the best tasks to fill that space, but you have to click approve. It is a human-in-the-loop system, which can be less overwhelming for people who feel anxious about an A-I having total control over their schedule.
Okay, so let’s dig into the mechanics of how these tools actually prioritize. You mentioned deadlines and lead time, but is there any deeper logic? For instance, does the A-I understand the context of the task? Like, does it know that I am more productive in the morning, so it should put my deep-work writing task at nine A-M and my bank-account-switching admin task at three P-M?
Some of them are getting there! This is what we call energy-aware scheduling. While most current tools still rely on you setting your working hours, the next generation is looking at your history to see when you actually mark tasks as complete. If the data shows you always finish your creative tasks before noon and your admin tasks after lunch, the A-I starts to favor that pattern. It is looking for your personal chronotype.
That is fascinating. It is like having a personal assistant who has been watching you work for years and knows exactly when you are going to hit that mid-afternoon slump. It is the digital equivalent of a body double, which is another A-D-H-D strategy where just having someone else present helps you stay on task.
Exactly. And for Daniel, who mentioned the bank account meeting and the credit card activation, those are perfect examples of tasks that are high friction but low duration. An A-I can see that he has a fifteen-minute gap between two meetings and say, Hey Daniel, now is the perfect time to call the bank. It takes the decision out of his hands. It reduces the activation energy required to start.
I want to push back a little bit on the idea of total automation, though. Is there a risk that we lose a sense of agency if the A-I is just telling us what to do every minute of the day? I mean, part of the G-T-D philosophy is about being the master of your own ship. If the A-I is steering, do we lose that? Do we become just... biological processors for the A-I's list?
That is a very incisive question, Corn. And it is something the developers of these tools are grappling with. There is a phenomenon called the automation paradox. The more reliable the system, the less the human pays attention. If the A-I schedules your day and you stop thinking about why things are prioritized the way they are, you might find yourself doing things that don't actually align with your long-term goals. You might become very efficient at doing things that don't matter.
Right. The A-I might be great at optimizing for efficiency, but it might not be great at optimizing for meaning. It can tell you how to get fifty things done, but it can't tell you if those fifty things are the right things to be doing with your life. It can't tell you if you should be searching for a new apartment or if you should be focusing on your current job.
Which is why the best way to use these tools is as a collaborative partner, not a dictator. You still need that weekly review that David Allen talks about in Getting Things Done. You still need to look at the big picture. The A-I handles the micro-tactical level, the hour-by-hour shuffling, so that you have the mental space to do the macro-strategic thinking. It frees up your prefrontal cortex for the stuff only humans can do.
That makes sense. It is like the A-I is the executive assistant and you are still the C-E-O. You set the vision, and the assistant handles the calendar. If the assistant puts a meeting on your calendar that you don't want to go to, you can still say no. You are still the boss.
Exactly. And for someone with A-D-H-D, the executive assistant role is often what is missing. The C-E-O part of the brain is usually firing on all cylinders, full of ideas and creativity, but the assistant is on a permanent coffee break. The A-I just fills that empty chair.
I love that analogy. So, let’s talk about the specific challenge Daniel mentioned: chunking. He has these big projects, like his work tasks or his apartment search, and he feels overwhelmed by the scale. How does A-I help with breaking things down? Because a long list of big tasks is just as scary as a long list of small ones. Maybe even scarier.
This is where generative A-I, like Chat-G-P-T or Claude, comes into play. Most of the scheduling tools I mentioned, like Motion or Reclaim, are good at moving existing chunks around. But they aren't necessarily great at creating those chunks. They are schedulers, not decomposers.
So you have to use them in tandem? You use one A-I to break it down and another to schedule it?
For now, yes. Though we are starting to see integration. For example, there is a tool called Goblin Tools that is a favorite in the neurodivergent community. It has a feature called Magic To-Do. You put in a task like Search for an apartment, and you can adjust a spiciness level—which is basically how much help you need. The A-I then breaks that task into five, ten, or even twenty micro-steps.
Micro-steps? Like what?
For an apartment search, it might suggest: one, define budget and location; two, set up alerts on real estate sites; three, prepare a list of questions for landlords; four, check your credit score. It turns a mountain into a staircase. And then, you can export those steps directly into your A-I scheduler.
And then those steps get fed into the A-I scheduler, and the scheduler finds the time for them. That sounds like a complete pipeline. You capture the big idea, you decompose it with generative A-I, and you schedule it with an autonomous agent.
Precisely. This is the unified A-I workspace we were talking about in episode three hundred and sixty-seven. It is about connecting these different specialized intelligences. One A-I is your strategist, one is your project manager, and one is your personal assistant.
I think this is a huge insight for Daniel. He doesn't just need one tool; he needs a workflow that connects the capture to the decomposition to the scheduling. He needs to stop trying to do the decomposition and scheduling manually because those are the exact areas where his executive function is struggling.
Right. And here is a little pro-tip for Daniel and our listeners: when you are capturing tasks, try to be as specific as possible about the duration. Even if it is just a guess. A-I tools thrive on data. If you tell an A-I you have a task called Work, it can't do much with that. But if you tell it you have a task called Review Client Project Alpha, and it will take ninety minutes, the A-I can actually work its magic. It can find a ninety-minute gap.
That is a great point. Specificity is the fuel for A-I optimization. If you give it vague inputs, you are going to get a vague roadmap. It is like trying to use a G-P-S but only telling it you want to go to the city. It needs an address.
Exactly. And another thing to consider is the idea of buffer time. One of the reasons manual lists fail is that we don't account for the time it takes to move between tasks, or the time it takes to just... breathe. We schedule ourselves back-to-back and then wonder why we are exhausted by noon.
Or the time it takes for a leak in the apartment to suddenly become a priority, which Daniel mentioned is a current situation for him. Life is messy. A static list can't handle a leaking pipe.
Right! Life happens. The beauty of these A-I tools is that they can build in what we call defensive scheduling. You can tell the A-I to always leave a fifteen-minute buffer between tasks, or to leave two hours of open time on Friday afternoons for emergencies. If nothing goes wrong, you get two hours of bonus time. If a pipe leaks, you have a place to put that crisis without ruining your whole week.
That sounds like it would significantly lower the anxiety of the day. Knowing that even if something goes wrong, the system has already accounted for a certain amount of chaos. It is like having an insurance policy for your time.
It really does. It shifts the burden of management from your brain to the software. You stop being the person who has to fix the schedule and start being the person who just follows the schedule. It is a massive reduction in cognitive load.
Let’s talk about the second-order effects here. If we all start using A-I to manage our time, what does that do to our collective sense of urgency? Do we become more productive, or do we just fill the saved time with more tasks? Are we just running faster on the treadmill?
That is the million-dollar question. There is a concept in economics called Jevons Paradox. It says that as a resource becomes more efficient to use, we actually end up using more of it, not less. So, if A-I makes us more efficient at completing tasks, we might just find ourselves adding more tasks to the list because we feel like we have the capacity. We might end up more stressed, not less.
That sounds like a recipe for burnout. Even if the A-I is managing the list, the human still has to do the work. The A-I can't do the laundry for me. It can't write the report for me. It just tells me when to do it.
Exactly. And this is why it is so important to use these tools to create space, not just to fill it. For Daniel, the goal shouldn't be to do more things; it should be to do the things he cares about with less stress. He should use the A-I to protect his free time, not just to optimize his work time. He should schedule his rest with the same priority as his meetings.
I think that is a really important distinction. The A-I is a tool for peace of mind, not just a tool for high-speed output. It is about quality of life, not just quantity of tasks. If Daniel can move his bank account and find an apartment without feeling like he is constantly failing, that is a huge win, even if he doesn't do anything else that week.
Right. And for someone with A-D-H-D, peace of mind is often the most valuable commodity. Being able to look at your phone in the morning and see a clear, realistic plan for the day—one that you know will adjust if you get distracted or if a meeting runs long—that is a massive reduction in the background noise of anxiety.
So, if Daniel wanted to start this today, what is the first step? He has his G-T-D capture system. He has his long list. What is the lowest-friction way to start using A-I to organize it? How does he climb that wall of awful?
I would suggest he picks one of the autonomous schedulers—Motion or Reclaim are probably the best starting points for his specific needs. He should connect his primary calendar, whether that is Google or Outlook, and then start importing his most important tasks from his G-T-D inbox. But he should start small.
Should he move everything at once? All five hundred items in his backlog?
No, that is a classic mistake. That is how you build a new wall of awful inside the A-I. I would say start with your top five tasks for the day. Give them a duration, give them a priority, and let the A-I find the spots. Once you see how it feels to have the A-I manage those five things, you can start moving more over. It is about building trust in the system.
And what about the chunking? Should he use something like Chat-G-P-T or Goblin Tools to break down those bigger projects first?
Definitely. If he has a task like Move Business Account, he should put that into an A-I and ask for a step-by-step breakdown. He can even tell the A-I, I have A-D-H-D, please make these steps very small and actionable. Then, he can take those steps and put them into the scheduler. It turns a giant, scary project into a series of twenty-minute, manageable actions.
It is like the A-I is pre-chewing the food for him. I know that sounds a bit gross, but it makes it so much easier to digest. It removes the resistance to starting.
Haha, it is a bit gross, but the analogy holds! It is about reducing the activation energy required to start. For many people, the reason they don't start a task isn't that they are lazy; it is that the task is too poorly defined. The brain doesn't know where to put the first shovel in the ground. A-I is excellent at definition.
I am curious about the future of this. We are talking about apps right now, but do you see this becoming just a part of the operating system? Like, will my phone just know what I need to do and when? Will it be baked into the hardware?
We are already seeing the beginnings of that in early twenty twenty-six. Apple and Google are both integrating more agentic A-I into their core experiences. I think within the next two or three years, the idea of a separate task app might seem antiquated. Your operating system will have a unified view of your emails, your messages, your calendar, and your goals, and it will act as a persistent, proactive agent. It will know you need to call the bank because it saw the email from the bank and it knows you have a gap in your schedule.
That is both exciting and a little bit terrifying. The privacy implications are huge. If the A-I knows everything about my life, who else knows?
Oh, absolutely. For an A-I to truly manage your life, it needs to know... well, everything about your life. It needs to see your bank statements, your emails, your health data. That is a lot of trust to place in a corporation. We are seeing a rise in local A-I models that run entirely on your device to solve this, but we are not quite there yet for full-scale life management.
We should probably do a whole episode on the privacy of personal A-I agents at some point. But for now, for someone like Daniel, the immediate benefit of overcoming A-D-H-D paralysis probably outweighs the long-term privacy concerns. He just needs to get his apartment search done.
I think so. Especially since many of these current tools are quite transparent about how they use data. And the productivity gain is measurable. Research from late twenty twenty-five showed that A-D-H-D professionals using autonomous schedulers reported a forty percent increase in task completion and a significant decrease in self-reported stress levels.
So, let’s recap the practical takeaways for Daniel. One: transition from a static list to an adaptive scheduler like Motion, Reclaim, or Morgen. Two: use generative A-I like Chat-G-P-T or Goblin Tools to decompose large, overwhelming projects into small, timed chunks. Three: be specific with durations and priorities when you input them. And four: use the A-I to protect your time, not just to fill it. Build in those buffers.
That is a perfect summary. And I would add one more: don't abandon the core principles of G-T-D. Capturing is still vital. The A-I can only help you with what you have recorded. So keep that capture habit strong, but let the A-I handle the clarify and organize phases. Let it be the assistant you never had.
It is funny, we have been doing this for four hundred and fifty episodes now, and the core problems of human productivity haven't really changed. We still struggle with the same walls of awful. We just have better tools to tackle them. We have gone from paper planners to digital lists to autonomous agents.
It is true. The human brain hasn't had a hardware update in about fifty thousand years, but our software environment is changing every week. We are just trying to find ways to bridge that gap. We are using twenty-first-century silicon to help out our stone-age gray matter.
Well, I think this has been a really productive discussion. No pun intended. Daniel, I hope this helps you get that bank account moved and that living room cleaned without the usual A-D-H-D paralysis. Remember, you don't have to climb the wall all at once. You can just put a door in it with a little help from A-I.
And for everyone else listening, if you have found a specific A-I tool or workflow that has changed the game for your productivity, we would love to hear about it. Our community is always sharing great tips on how to use these new technologies in the real world. Send us a message at our website.
Absolutely. And hey, if you are enjoying the show, we would really appreciate a quick review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps other people find us, and it keeps the show growing. We are at episode four hundred and fifty, and we are not slowing down! We have a lot more weird prompts to get through.
Yeah, a rating or a review makes a huge difference in the algorithms. It is like giving our podcast its own little A-I boost. It helps the discovery engine find the people who need to hear this.
Well said, Herman. You can find all our past episodes, including the ones we mentioned today about A-D-H-D and A-I workspaces, at our website, myweirdprompts dot com. There is also a contact form there if you want to send us a prompt like Daniel did. We read every single one.
We love getting those. They always push us into interesting new territory. Whether it is about productivity, philosophy, or just plain weird tech, we are here for it.
Alright, that is it for today. This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks for listening, and we will talk to you in the next one. Keep those brains moving, even if you need a little silicon help to do it.
Until next time! Stay productive, but stay human.
I think I am actually going to go try Motion now. My to-do list is looking a little bit like a mountain range, and I think I need a staircase.
Just make sure you don't let it schedule your sleep. I know you like to stay up way too late reading technical manuals about large language models.
Hey, that is my deep-work time! The A-I will understand!
Sure it is, Corn. Sure it is. Just don't blame the A-I when you are tired tomorrow.
Alright, alright. Bye everyone!
Bye!
