If you've been on my list for a while, you'll notice this looks a little different. I've relaunched my weekly newsletter as Built in Beta — a weekly experiment log in AI and automation, written for founders who want the inside view, not the highlight reel. Same Catherine, new format, more useful. I hope you enjoy it.

I've been thinking a lot recently about where my time actually goes. Not the time spent doing things, but the time spent deciding what to do next. Checking the list. Reprioritising. Checking it again. Wondering if the thing I'm doing is really the most important thing right now.

Decision fatigue is real, and for me it's particularly acute. I have a three-year-old and a six-month-old at home. By the time I sit down to work, I've already made about forty decisions before 8am.

Mornings recently have felt overwhelming. My children are waking earlier than ever now it’s summer, and I already feel like I’ve done a full day’s work before I sit down at my desk. Freshbat has also just been through a significant restructure — exciting, but it’s felt a lot like reprogramming my brain while still running at full speed. And the to-do list, as ever, never ends.

So this morning I tried something different. I wrote my priorities in my notebook, took a photo, and dropped it into a Claude project I've set up as a project manager — with Monday.com integrated so it can see my live task boards too.

What came back was a time-blocked schedule with tasks categorised and sequenced. Not perfect — my finance block took five minutes, my content block took three hours instead of the fifty minutes allocated. But that's not really the point.

The point is that I stopped checking my list. Claude knew what was next. I just had to report back when I was done and move on. That accountability loop turned out to be more satisfying than I expected. And the hour I'd normally spend hovering between tasks, quietly anxious about whether I was working on the right thing, I just didn't lose it today.

If you're running a professional services business, your most valuable resource isn't time — it's the cognitive capacity to use time well. Every decision you offload, even a small one like "what should I do next," is energy returned to the work that actually needs you.

You don't need a complex setup to try this. A photo, a project with a bit of context about how you work, and a prompt. That's it.

What in your business are you still doing manually because you haven't trusted a tool to do it yet?

If you try it, I'd genuinely love to know how it goes. And if you want to know exactly how I've set up the Monday.com integration, I'll cover that in a future issue.