This is the system I'm proudest of, and it's deliberately worth nothing to anyone but me. I've been building it for about two and a half months. My goal? Free up time personally, and test and learn everything I was learning here so that I could be confident in building out things that are proper products at work (or, more accurately, architecting things for my team to build). So this system flies in the face of some of what we learn - it's not meant to have a product launch, it's meant to be so damn unique and customised that it holds no value to anyone other than me. Current outcomes (and I'm going to build again so this will improve): - ~63 hours per year freed up for me - ~ 104 hours per year freed up for my husband - ~$2400 per year saved in food costs (around $50 per week approximately) and reduced food wastage - A calmer family who are not stressed out about what needs to be done when for school - we've gone from a last minute scramble or forgotten gear about once every 2-3 weeks to one item that was a day late in the last two and a half months. (With the root cause of that miss fully addressed instantly in the system). - Three weekly runs in a row where I didn't have to change anything in the heaviest and most challenging workflow (the weekly planning workflow). I just reviewed and approved it to write. Every minute of build time has already been paid back with interest before counting the time freed up for my husband, and I'm only two and a half months in. In fact, the first thing I built paid back on the first run with me being an hour better off from that first run even when you factored in the build time. Here's how it's actually doing that: - Term-start — the first thing I built, and the one I love most. It takes a 7 day timetable screenshot and a CSV file exported from the school app and turns it into an ICS file I can upload into my calendar. Rather than manually creating it, it can apply the reasoning required over the root information and give me the output. It even has a second-pass logic built in for the edge case logic where days aren't in the CSV which usually happens for 1-3 days each term. It works flawlessly. It began as a series of saved prompts and was my first ICM pipeline once I found this community.

Sometimes you just have to stop talking, take action, and prove what is possible. Tonight, I’m sitting with my laptop finishing up a PowerPoint presentation. Tomorrow, I am hosting a Global Copilot Cowork Workshop for colleagues across multiple departments and countries. Looking back, things have moved at absolute lightning speed. The Timeline - March: I started experimenting with Claude Code and joined this amazing community shortly after. - May 4th: I had a high-level meeting with our global Head of AI. He gave me the green light to use Copilot Cowork since Claude Code isn't corporate-approved yet. - Today: I'm teaching others how to do what I just did. In just a short month and a half, I’ve built several custom skills focused entirely on our hardest finance bottlenecks. And the timing couldn't have been better. The Ultimate Test: A Compressed Month-End We were recently acquired, which meant our standard 6-day month-end closing window was aggressively cut down to just 4 days. Normally, this would mean pure panic and stress. We had never missed a deadline, but we always had to fight for it. During the May closing, I put my new Copilot skills to work. The result? It went so smoothly that on day 4, my boss literally looked at me and asked: "Did we forget something?" Normally, she works grueling hours, staying up late to log back on after putting her kids to bed. Not this time. I only had to work a truly long day on Day 1. Day 2 was slightly extended, and Days 3 and 4 were completely normal, quiet, peaceful workdays. We smashed a compressed timeline with zero stress. Tomorrow's Mission: Giving Back Tomorrow, I'm stepping up to the whiteboard. I'm running a workshop to show people what this tech can actually do. We are going to build a "light" finance skill together from scratch. The core lesson is simple but powerful: How to feed raw data into an AI agent and get a perfectly formatted, HQ-compliant report out the other side. What the Future Holds

Recently, I've been noticing posts about Google's groundbreaking work with folders over agents, and I think a bit of misattribution is going on. I see people offering to set the workflows up and wonder if they're legit. A lot of hopping on the bandwagon, suddenly popping off. Then, I wonder if it detracts from what we're doing here. Not sure. What do you think about this? The posts I see do not call it ICM or attribute it to Jake. Not fond of that.

Quick note for those of you in here just starting out and chasing your first clients: it ain't all roses and rainbows on the other side. Most of what gets posted in this community are the wins. Tonight you get one of the harder nights. Take it however you take it. Last night a client sent me a "you didn't deliver" email at 11pm. Hard read. The kind where your stomach drops and you start rereading every contract clause you signed three months ago. Spent the next 9 hours running an audit of every deliverable across two Fractional CMO contracts and a brand + website project. By 2am I had numbers on it. They paid us a bit under $20K combined. The audit showed I'd scoped out closer to $60K of work for that price. That number is the painful one. Four mistakes got me here. Maybe one of them is sitting in your shop too. ------------------------------------ 1. I ignored the human flags. ------------------------------------ Early on I saw how she fired a senior female colleague. How she talked about her husband on calls. How she described her key staff when they weren't on the line. That's a personality profile in three data points, not to mention the religious-speak. I noted it. Then I told myself "everyone has their style" and kept building. Bad call. The way someone treats the people closest to them is the way they'll eventually treat you. The clock just hadn't started. ------------------------------------ 2. I handed my thinking to AI. ------------------------------------ I let AI draft proposals without putting the same eyes on them I would've put on a 2019 proposal. Three different proposals from the same business in the same month, with three different ways of describing the same deliverable. Vague names. Duplicate items. One column literally called "SEO Content Alignment" that nobody on my team could actually explain to a client. AI isn't the problem. AI without my brain on top of it is the problem. My COO had been on me about this for weeks. I half-listened.

That title (with the word “your” adjusted to “my”) came straight out of what my Chief of Staff just told me. I’ve had an intense few days working on a major deliverable and iterating. I just locked it. In a state that I am genuinely proud of. It honestly reflects months of work coming together into something I can stand behind and advocate for. And I’m going to next week. My system helped on the fly in ways it was never designed for. Its own assessment: it gave me “scaffolding - voiced components, a structure; the financial reconciliation, a set of catches and a tireless second pair of eyes” - it scored that at 30%. I brought “the strategy, political judgement, receipts and nerve”. It scored that at 70% and “the 70% that’s the actual paper” at that. Nothing it handed me went out unedited - I read and audited every word (and adjusted most of them). And yes, this post is full of quotation marks, but I’m quoting my system, those aren’t my words. When it had a go at my voice, it said my voice had “teeth” - a point of view, brought unapologetically. It couldn’t do that, I had to bring it. That was the strategy and the nerve and I’d do it all over again each and every time. My system got me started with material I already had in there. It helped me re-run the numbers and catch a few grammatical errors and typos at the end (and a couple of phrasing choices that I refused to change, because they didn’t *sound* right - I’m going to sound like me, not sanitised). I did everything that matters. ICM let me get three days out of the system with no compaction and unanticipated use. My whole approach let me put myself where it mattered every time. How are you bringing your judgement in your system?