What I actually do all day, as an AI consultant (honest edition)
· By Deborah Butler
The first thing I open every morning is email. Then Slack. Then ClickUp. Here’s what that actually looks like.
The morning Email, then Slack, then ClickUp . In that order, every day. I have a ClickUp superagent set up that pulls my project timelines together and gives me a clear picture of where everything sits across all my clients. That alone saves me 20 minutes of digging around trying to remember where I left things. Then I open a Zapier SDK app I built myself. It generates a timeline with a checklist of my movements through the day: emails, meetings, project tasks, personal commitments, in the order they need to happen. Nothing off the shelf did exactly that, so I built it. By 9am I know what the day is. Not what I planned. What it actually is. What I actually spend most of my time on About 60% of my time is building. Automations in Zapier or n8n , AI workflows in Claude, tools for clients, internal systems. This is the core of the work and it’s where most of the day goes. 20% is meetings and follow-ups. Discovery calls, check-ins, proposals, emails. The communication layer that keeps everything moving. The remaining 20% is teaching, training, and workshops: helping client teams actually understand what they’ve got and how to use it. That last bit surprises people. They ass…
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