I have retired Reclaim, the to-do lists, the calendar gadgets, and the apps that scheduled the other apps. In their place sits a single assistant that handles my scheduling, triage, reminders, and planning. The desk is quieter; whether the day is better is the question under examination.
Running. The dozen tabs are gone, and I have not yet missed any of them by name.
The full report is open — what it cost, what broke, the step-by-step of how I ran it, and what I'd do differently.
For years I tended a small garden of productivity tools, each solving one quarter of a problem and each requiring its own upkeep. This experiment replaces the garden with one assistant and asks whether the consolidation is a gain or merely a tidier form of the same labour.
The dozen tabs are gone, and I have not yet missed any of them by name. The desk is quieter; whether one capable assistant truly outperforms the whole stack is the question under examination.
What you need
One capable assistant, a calendar and inbox it can read, and a week's tolerance for discomfort. You already own most of this; what you lack is the willingness to switch the old tools off.
Fire the gadgets first
Before adding anything, list every scheduling tool you currently pay for and turn each one off for a week. The discomfort is the point; you cannot replace a thing you're still leaning on. Note what you actually missed, which is usually less than you feared.
Here is how it runs with the assistant — give it the materials, write the rules in plain words, and keep the judgement for yourself.
Give it the raw materials
Connect the assistant to your calendar and let it read your inbox or task list. It needs to see the mess before it can sort it, the way a butler needs to see the cupboards. Grant the narrowest access that still lets it act.
Write your rules in plain words
Tell it your protected hours, your meeting limits, how you triage — in sentences, not settings menus. "No calls before ten, deep work Tuesday mornings, decline anything without an agenda." This is the whole trick: you describe the policy, it does the clicking.
Make it draft, not decide
For the first fortnight, have it propose the day's plan each morning and wait for your nod. Correct it out loud — "move that, protect this" — and it learns your taste faster than any settings panel. Promote it to autonomy only once its drafts bore you with their correctness.
Review weekly, not hourly
Once a week, ask it what it rescheduled and why. The aim is to stop managing the manager. If you're checking it hourly, you've simply bought a more talkative to-do list.
Running, and I have not reinstalled anything. The dozen tabs are gone, and I have not yet missed any of them by name. The friction of switching contexts has largely gone, and with it a low hum I had stopped noticing.
That, more than any metric, is the evidence I find most persuasive — and I remain suspicious of how easily it persuaded me.
Roughly what the stack you're cancelling already cost, minus the tab-switching.
It will schedule your day beautifully and still cannot make you attend the gym; that part remains, regrettably, manual.
The seams were the enemy
The old tools were good; the seams between them were not. Removing the integration work I had been performing by hand returned more attention than any single tool ever promised.
It is deaf to the unspoken
It is excellent at the explicit and poor at the unspoken. It does not know which meeting I dread, nor which task I am avoiding for good reason, and it will cheerfully schedule both. The intuition I used to supply manually is not yet replaced.
The real saving is attention
One assistant in place of several subscriptions is roughly cheaper, though I am counting loosely. The larger saving is attention, which I have never known how to invoice.
The next move is to grant it a little more autonomy — to let it act without my nod on the dull, reversible decisions — and to see whether the desk stays calm or merely quiet.
The open question is whether it can ever learn the unspoken, or whether that part of the work is mine to keep forever.