The admin of being me, handed to a chat window.

01 ~ The point

Admin, by text

One of the first things I told Instinct was that I wanted to be “the greatest CEO of my life.” Very modest. Very chill. Then I asked it to help me remember my goals, because apparently being ambitious and checking your own calendar are separate skills.

I'm an engineer, a creator, and I teach. The work around the work is what slips: briefs to read, applications to write, revisions to track, deadlines in another time zone, messages sitting inside platforms I have to remember to open.

Instinct lives in iMessage. That's the whole interface. I text it the way I text a friend, between a coffee and a class, and the conversation goes from job applications to Spanish conjugations to “did that brand reply yet?” There is no elegant theme. It's my actual life.

The kind of thread I send. Paraphrased, not a screenshot.

For creator work, I ask it to check the UGC platforms I'm on with me. Read the brief. Work out whether I can actually do it. Prepare the answers. Show me the rate and the deadline before I decide. A paid brief that needs filming in a country I'm not in is not an opportunity. I don't need an exciting list that becomes homework when I open it.

02 ~ The setup

How it fits together

Texting alone would just be a long chat I scroll back through. What made it work was giving the day a place to land. Five pieces, each doing one job.

The dashboard never talks to Drive itself. One routine reads the folder and posts each report to the dashboard's API, keyed on the date, so running it twice changes nothing.

03 ~ The handoff

One file a day

The report started as a wall of text. Useful, but I read it like terms and conditions. So I gave Instinct a format, and the dashboard renders each part of it differently. This is the shape I asked for:

# 2026-09-18
Energy: steady · Focus: cash first · Win: client approved, half paid

## Shipped
- [x] Submitted 6 UGC applications
- [ ] 3 applications prepared, not submitted

## Money
- Client ~ $4,500 approved, 50% received

## Needs you
- Decide on the brand's ask for full channel access

## Missed
- Spanish ~ conflict

## KPIs
- Applications: 6 · Emails sent: 8 · Deals advanced: 13

## Tomorrow
Film the client video.

A few rules carry most of the weight. The header line becomes three chips, with the win in pink. Checkboxes say what actually happened. Every missed item ends with one reason from my operating manual. And Tomorrow is a single sentence, because the dashboard offers to make it my first action in the morning.

The sync has been running since mid-September. One report per day, no gaps:

04 ~ The HQ

Where it lands

My Today page runs in three phases: Start, Run, Shutdown. Instinct's report lives inside Shutdown, right before I write the day's story. I read what moved, then I write what mattered. The list first, the moment second.

Instinct's Oct 9 report, as the HQ renders it. Names swapped out.

Needs you sits at the top in pink, because decisions are the part I avoid. Prepared work keeps an empty box until it actually goes out. The missed item carries its reason as a pill, so a pattern shows up fast. And the green button at the bottom turns Instinct's Tomorrow into my first action for the next morning.

The Journal page reads the same reports from the other side. The week comes first, with my five daily checks counted: Cash, Create, Spanish, Gym and Sleep routine. Then each day with its report folded under the story.

The week, read first. Spanish held. Sleep did not.

I don't want congratulations for being busy. I want to see what moved and what I keep avoiding.

05 ~ The honest comparison

Claude is great, but not enough

Claude is where I build. The dashboard in these screenshots, the routine that syncs the reports, my morning brief, the lead board. It's the best engineering partner I've had, and I'm not switching.

But Claude waits for me. It works when I open a session at my laptop and ask. Most admin doesn't happen at my laptop. It happens in a queue, on a walk, at 11pm when I remember I never answered a brand. By the time I sit down to build, the small things are already late.

Instinct is the opposite shape. It's a text away, it keeps going through the day, and it uses a phone and a computer the way a person would: forms, portals, inboxes. I don't open anything. I text it, and later I read what happened.

So it's not one or the other. One builds the house, the other keeps it running, and the dashboard is the kitchen table where I read the mail.

06 ~ The honest part

I've had to correct it

I've told it to stop sounding like AI. “And honestly?” was one of the phrases I specifically complained about. We've worked on journals, posts and scripts, and I keep asking for less polish when the polish stops sounding like me.

The mistakes go beyond writing. A brand follow-up once went out with the same paragraph twice in one message. I noticed it and hated it, and I'm not waving it away because an assistant did it. I've also had to ask where a promised update was. Having help doesn't mean every handoff works.

What helped most was asking for evidence over vibes. The reports now say “prepared, not submitted,” “approved, still unpaid,” and “an auto-reply is not an approval.” A submitted application is not an interview. A sign-in alert is something to check, not proof I've been hacked. When nothing happened, I want the report to say so.

It cannot make a brand reply. I have asked.

07 ~ Copy this

The checklist

• One report per day, in a fixed format, saved somewhere your tools can read
• A Needs you section at the top, so decisions don't hide under a list of wins
• Status words that mean something: sent, prepared, approved, paid. Prepared is not sent
• Missed items with one honest reason: energy, unclear, distracted, conflict or avoided
• The report read inside a routine you already do, not in a new app you'll forget to open
• Letting anything go out under your name without reading it first

I'm not writing this because I've become perfectly organised. Read our chat. Clearly not. For now, Instinct stays on admin duty, Claude stays on building, and I keep deciding what I apply for, what I say and what I make.