The Question That Changed How I Use Claude

The biggest struggle I hear from solo operators isn’t “how do I use Claude.” It’s “I don’t know what to ask it.”

I was on a call the other week with a group of business owners and asked what their biggest AI struggle was. By far the answer was the same. The promise sounds cool. They just can’t picture what Claude would actually do in their business.

I get it. Online, half the feed is people building apps and shipping code. And if you’re running a one-person business, that can feel a million miles from your real everyday work.

Over the past two years I’ve been figuring out how AI can take on more and more of the work in my business. Sometimes that’s something small, like uploading the office hours recording to my community after every call. Sometimes it’s bigger, like having Claude edit all my videos.

And every single one started the same way.

I asked Claude: can we do this?

Honestly, you don’t need another list of use cases. What you need is to get in the habit of asking. And once you do, you’ll start noticing way more work you can hand over than you expected.

So here are five ways I got started when figuring out what work Claude (or any AI) could do in my business.

1. Start every task in Claude

Get into the habit of opening Claude before you start the work. Tell it what you’re about to do, and ask what it can help with.

Something as simple as:

I’m about to [task]. What can you help me with here?

Don’t overthink the prompt. Most of mine are not perfect and me just rambling about what I am doing. That is the point. It’s getting in the habit of asking Claude how it can help.

Do that enough times and you start spotting all the things that come up in your day that Claude can take on. The email you’ve been staring at that just needs a first draft, the pile of notes you need turned into a proper doc, the two options you’re stuck comparing for a client. Stuff that used to sit entirely on your plate because there was nobody else to give it to.

2. Paste in your to-do list every morning

This is one of my favourites, and I tell people this all the time.

Before you start your day, paste your to-do list into Claude and ask what it could deal with.

Here’s my to-do list for today. What can you help me with?

Do that every morning for a couple of weeks and you won’t just knock a few tasks off. You’ll start noticing which jobs on that list never needed to sit with you in the first place. It’s the same reflex that I had to learn when I had a team. I would start every day not by jumping into my work. But by looking at my work and saying - what can I delegate today?

Now I do exactly the same but AI is my ‘team.’

This is also the perfect way to start building workflows for those repeatable tasks you do all the time (more on that in number 5).

3. Check your inbox

If you work solo, your inbox is where everyone else’s work lands on your desk.

Client asks, collab requests, “quick favour” emails, follow-ups you said yes to three weeks ago but are buried. There’s nobody sorting that pile for you. It just sits there waiting for you.

So the easiest fix is to connect Claude to your email and ask it to look through what’s come in. Not so it can write polished replies for you, but so it can spot the requests and jobs hiding in there that it could actually help with.

Look through my recent email. What requests are in here that you could help me with?

Once you start doing this and Claude is knocking things off your to-do list, you feel the difference pretty quickly. And the more comfortable you get with it, the more you might want to put it on a schedule in Claude, so it’s checking your inbox every morning and the work is already moving before you even get to your desk.

Most solo operators I talk to aren’t short on work in their inbox. They’re short on a second pair of hands, and this is one of the first places you can give yourself that.

4. Look through your meetings

Same idea with meetings.

If you already record your calls, you’ve got a pile of work sitting in those transcripts that has to get done. The follow-up you promised, the doc you said you’d send, the proposal that needs to be written.

But when you’re on back to back calls all day you never seem to get to all the stuff until 7pm at night when your brain is fried.

So what I do is this…After a call, point Claude at the transcript and ask what it could help with from the meeting.

Here’s the transcript. What tasks from this meeting could you help me with?

I do this after almost every call now. Claude shows me what came out of it, I pick what to hand over, and the follow-up is already moving before I’ve closed the window. On heavy meeting days that one habit has saved me more time than I can count.

The common pattern

I hope you’re starting to see the pattern here. It’s not impressive prompts. It’s literally just one question: What can you help me with?

That’s the whole habit. All you have to do is just start asking Claude what it can help you with. The more you do that the more you’ll start noticing things yourself and handing them over to Claude.

5. Map every workflow in your business

Up until now I’ve given you habits that help you spot the day-to-day work Claude can take on. It’s where you should start if you’re still at that moment of ‘what can Claude actually help me with.’

But if you’re ready to start having Claude be a real operator in your business. And I mean like getting real work done, acting like a partner in your business (yes it’s actually possible) then you need to stop discovering workflows one task at a time and start mapping the whole business so you can hand bigger chunks over on purpose.

I use a method that I call the Codify method to do this. And it all starts with mapping out all the workflows in your business. Here’s how it works:

Get out a big piece of paper (I love a big piece of butcher’s paper on the wall) and list out all the roles you play in the business. Then under each role list out all the workflows that you do daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Do that for all the roles: Content. Ops. Clients. Community. Admin. All of it.

That is your map. What you want to start doing then is ‘teaching’ AI to do each one. Don’t try and do it all at once, that will overwhelm you. But pick 2-3 each week and build a skill in Claude for it.

This is the exact method I have used to codify hundreds of workflows in my business to the point where AI takes care of hundreds of things every week so I can focus on the things that only I can do.

If you want to learn the whole method and start doing the same I built a toolkit for exactly this. The Codify Your Work Toolkit helps you map the workflows in your business and then gives you the tools to be able to teach your AI how to turn them into repeatable skills.

Just ask Claude

Bottom line is this. The best way to figure out what Claude can do for you is to be curious and just ask. It’s not really a technical challenge. It’s a reflex.

Open the task in Claude, paste the to-do list in the morning, check the inbox, point it at the meeting, and when you’re ready to go deeper, map the workflows across the business.

You just need to ask one question: Can we do this?

— Ev

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PS. Whenever you’re ready to stop guessing what AI can do in your business and start building the system that runs it with you, here are three ways I can help:

1. Map your workflows and turn them into repeatable skills with the Codify Your Work Toolkit. Hand it to your AI agent and it walks you through mapping your business and codifying the work you’re already doing.
2. Change the way you work as a solo operator by building your AI Chief of Staff agent. The course goes deep on your agent OS folder and the pre-built CoS skills to get you started.
3. Or go all in with my membership, The College of Knowledge, where we build your full personal agent operating system together. Ongoing support, monthly workshops, office hours, toolkits and a community of other solo operators doing it alongside you.