Automation
How I Keep Up With AI
By John J. BakerJuly 16, 20267 min read
I run ClearOak, which means most of my day belongs to the actual work: clients, builds, calls, the business itself. But the ground under all of it moves weekly. A new model ships, a tool changes, a technique that was clever in March is table stakes by June. Keeping up with AI while getting the day-to-day done is its own job, and nobody hands you the hours for it.
For a while I did what everyone does. I skimmed newsletters between meetings, half-listened to podcasts in the car, scrolled a few Slack channels, and hoped the important thing would surface on its own. It rarely did. What surfaced was whatever was loudest that day, which is not the same as what mattered to me. So I built something better, and it has quietly become one of the most useful things I own.
What I actually built
Every morning I get one short briefing: the five pieces of news that matter most to where ClearOak is heading, pulled from every channel I already follow. Each one comes with two or three sentences on why it matters to us, and a link if I want to go deeper. Everything else, the noise, never reaches me at all.
It reads the newsletters, the feeds, the podcasts I listen to, and my Slack channels. Then it applies my judgment, not a generic summary, and hands me five things ranked in order of what I should care about. That is the whole product. Five items, a reason each one made the cut, and a way to click through if it earns it.
Everything you already follow
- Newsletters and feeds
- The podcasts you listen to
- Your Slack channels
Your judgment, applied
- First pass reads each source the way you would
- Second pass ranks every candidate against your goal
Your morning briefing
- The five that matter most, in order
- Two or three sentences on why each one matters to you
- A link if you want to go deeper
Why five, and why filtered?
Because attention is the scarce resource now, not information. We live in an age where you can drink from the firehose all day and end up knowing less, because your head fills with whatever shouted the loudest rather than whatever was true and relevant to you. A filter that thinks the way you think is the antidote. It protects the one thing you cannot make more of.
Five is a number I can actually read and act on before the day starts. Twenty is a to-do list I will resent. The constraint is doing real work: it forces the tool to make hard choices about what earns your attention, which is exactly the discipline that keeps nonsense out. The best thinking gets sharper as you strip it down, not as you pile it on, which is a principle worth more than any single tool.
How it works: the four things I wrote down
I did not start with a tool. I started with four things written on a page, and everything else followed from them. If you only take one idea from this piece, take these four, because they are what make the output sound like a judgment instead of a summary.
Every channel you get news from
Write down exactly what you read, watch, and listen to. The newsletters, the podcasts, the Slack channels, the feeds. You cannot connect what you have not named.
A way to connect them
Find how each source can be pulled into one place so they land together instead of scattered across ten apps you check at different times.
Your judgment about what matters
Write down, plainly, how you decide what is worth knowing and what is noise. This is the filter, and teaching it to the machine is what makes the output sound like you.
What you do and where you are going
Describe your business and its direction in a few tight bullets. That North Star is what turns a merely interesting item into one that is relevant to you.
One, every channel I get news from. I wrote down exactly what I read, watch, and listen to. The specific newsletters, the podcasts, the Slack channels, the feeds. It is dull work and it is the foundation, because you cannot connect a source you have never named.
Two, a way to connect them. I found how each of those could be pulled into one place so they arrive together, instead of me chasing them across ten different apps at ten different times of day. This is the plumbing, and it is the part most people assume has to be hard. It usually is not.
Three, my judgment about what matters. I wrote down, plainly, how I decide what is worth knowing and what is noise. What I always want to hear about, what I never do, what looks important but rarely is. This is the filter, and teaching the machine to decipher things the way I would is what makes the whole thing feel like mine rather than a generic feed.
Four, what we do and where we are going. I described ClearOak and its direction in a few tight bullets. This is the North Star, and it is what turns an item that is merely interesting into one that is relevant to us specifically. Without it, the tool can tell you what happened. With it, the tool can tell you what it means for you.
The discipline that makes it work
Everything above is written concisely, and that is not an accident. Nothing runs longer than two or three sentences a bullet, including the part where I describe what makes something relevant to ClearOak. Two or three sentences, no more.
That constraint is the secret. A short, sharp description forces the machine to make a real judgment instead of hedging with a paragraph that covers every angle and commits to none. When I keep my own thinking tight, the tool is forced to think the way I do: pick a side, rank it, say why in a breath. Give it room to ramble and it hands you back a summary. Give it a tight filter and it hands you back a decision.
The two layers of judgment
There are really two passes happening, and the order matters. The first pass reads each source the way I would read it, one channel at a time, and pulls out the handful of things worth considering. The second is a single, final judgment that takes every candidate from every source, weighs them against each other and against where ClearOak is going, and decides the top five.
That second pass is the one that earns its keep. Anyone can summarize a newsletter. The hard part is looking at a model release, a podcast episode, and a Slack thread side by side and saying, honestly, which one of these actually matters most to me this week. That is the judgment I used to make badly, in scraps, between meetings. Now it happens once, cleanly, before I have had my coffee.
What it produces
A short, ranked list where every item earns its place. Here is a sample of the shape it takes, so you can see what lands in front of me.
A major provider ships a cheaper, longer-context model tier.
Why it matters to you
Lower cost per run widens the set of everyday workflows worth automating for the owners we work with. It strengthens the case that the foundation matters more than the tool, because the tool just got better on its own.
Read the source: provider release notesA new report quantifies where small teams actually lose hours.
Why it matters to you
The categories line up with the direct-cost and overhead work we help teams hand off. It is a credible outside reference we can point clients to when they doubt the size of the problem in their own week.
Read the source: industry research brief
and three more, ranked below
The line that matters most on every item is the middle one: not what happened, but what it means for where I am going. That is the sentence written in my judgment. The headline is just news. The relevance is the product.
You can use this personally, or in your business
The pattern generalizes, which is the real reason I am writing it up. It is four inputs, and the topic in the fourth one is the only thing that changes.
For yourself, point it at whatever you are trying to stay current on and stop letting the loudest voices set your agenda. For a business, it is a way to keep a whole team current without everyone independently drowning in the same feeds, so people share a filtered picture instead of ten scattered ones. It works just as well outside of work: a teacher keeping up with their field, a parent tracking one subject they care about, anyone who wants signal instead of volume. Same four inputs, different North Star.
If it sounds like a lot to build, it is less than you think, and you learn it fastest by building one real version rather than reading about it. Start with the four things on a page. The tool comes after.
The short version
Write down your channels, connect them, encode your judgment, and point the whole thing at where you are trying to go. Keep every part of it tight, two or three sentences a bullet, because the discipline is what forces a judgment instead of a summary. Then let one final pass hand you five things a day, ranked, each with a reason and a link. In an age built to flood you, the skill worth having is a filter that thinks like you do.
I am happy to get on a call and walk you through exactly how I built mine, or how it would look pointed at your business. Schedule a call or reach me directly at john@clearoakconsulting.com, and tell me the one topic you are tired of trying to keep up with.