build it, automate it, forget it

First things first: yeah, this is landing on a Thursday. Life happened. I'm not going to pretend I had some master plan — I just ran late.

But here's the move going forward: Stacked drops every Tuesday at 9 AM ET. That's the schedule. Set it, forget it, grab your coffee.

Now — something changed with this issue.

I asked what you actually want from Stacked. The answer was clear: workflows. Systems you can set up and use today.

So that's what this is now. Every section is a workflow you can steal, set up, and let it run. Simple enough to follow, powerful enough to automate.

Pick what fits. Let's go.

I used to start every morning the same way: open inbox, panic, scroll through 47 unread emails trying to figure out what's urgent, what can wait, and what I can ignore. By the time I actually started working, 45 minutes were gone. And I still felt behind.

That's not a time management problem. That's a systems problem. Your brain shouldn't be the sorting machine.

So I built one that does it for me. Every morning at 7 AM — before I'm even awake — an automated workflow pulls my unread emails, sorts them into priority buckets, preps my meetings with talking points, and plans my day. Everything lands in a Notion dashboard. I wake up, open it, and just execute.

Here's what runs while I sleep:

Email triage. Every unread email gets sorted into four groups: Do Today, Do This Week, Hand Off, and Archive. Each one gets a 5-word reason WHY — that forces the AI to actually think about priority, not just guess.

Meeting prep. It reads my calendar, pulls context from previous notes and emails, and builds a cheat sheet for every meeting: 3 questions to ask, 2 things to bring up, 1 thing that could go wrong. I walk in looking like I spent 30 minutes preparing. I didn't.

Daily game plan. Max 5 tasks. Hardest work slotted before noon. Similar tasks grouped together. If my plate is unrealistic for one day, it flags it.

The whole thing took one afternoon to set up. Now it runs forever.

The cheat sheet has the full blueprint — every tool, every connection, and one prompt you paste into Claude Code that builds the entire system for you. Claude walks you through it step by step. You don't need to be technical. You just need to follow along.

Everyone's worried about AI taking their job. LinkedIn is full of people posting "10 skills you need to survive AI" lists like they're writing fortune cookies. Let me give you something real instead.

AI is great at following instructions. But it's terrible at three specific things. And these three things are exactly where your job security lives.

Reading the room. AI doesn't know that Craig's wife died 6 weeks ago. You do. You give him space and grace. AI doesn't know that. AI doesn't care. You do. Empathy, context, timing — these aren't features you can add to a model.

Making gray-area calls. AI thinks in black and white. You live in the gray. Every day you make judgment calls that require context, nuance, and gut instinct that no model can replicate. The client who says they're "fine" but sounds off. The project that looks good on paper but feels wrong. That's you. That's not going away.

Managing AI itself. This is the big one nobody's talking about. AI can do work — but someone has to tell it WHAT to do and check that it did it right. Think of it like showing your grandpa how to use Microsoft Word — except the "grandpa" is your entire company and the "Microsoft Word" is an AI system that could 10x their output. The person who bridges that gap? They don't get fired. They get promoted.

This shouldn't scare you. This should make you grateful. You have the chance to be one of the first people to pioneer AI solutions at your company. You want to be the person where your boss says "we can't lose them — they're the only one who understands what's going on."

So here's how you become that person — with receipts.

I built a system that watches for my repetitive tasks, auto-drafts them using Claude loaded with my company context, and logs every single task with time-before and time-after into a Notion dashboard. When review season comes, I'm not saying "I think I've been more efficient." I'm showing a dashboard that says "I saved 14 hours per week across 6 workflows."

The email replies, the meeting summaries, the weekly status reports — they draft themselves. I review, approve, send. What used to take hours takes minutes. And every time it runs, the ROI tracker updates automatically.

The cheat sheet has the full blueprint — every tool, every connection, and one prompt you paste into Claude Code that builds the entire system for you. Your company context, the automations, the ROI dashboard — all of it. Claude walks you through it step by step.

Huberman is one of the greatest content creators alive. The guy takes super complex things the human body does and translates them into everyday action items you can actually use. I'm going to be doing the same thing here — taking his research and simplifying it so you can use it today.

I can tell you firsthand this works. I did it for 2 years straight. I was THAT guy. I wanted the edge nobody else had. When I was locked in? I felt like a different person. More energy. Better sleep. Sharper focus. And the best part — it's not a supplement, it's not a gadget, and it's not a $49/month subscription. It's walking outside.

The protocol: Get outside within 30 minutes of waking up. No sunglasses. Face the general direction of the sun (don't stare at it). Stay for 5-10 minutes on a sunny day, 15-20 on a cloudy day. That's it.

Why it works (simple version): Your brain is like a clock that needs winding every morning. Sunlight is the winding mechanism. Morning light hits your eyes and triggers the alert, focused kind of cortisol — not the stressed kind. At the same time, it starts a 16-hour countdown to melatonin release. So this one habit wakes you up better AND helps you fall asleep tonight. Two problems, one free fix.

The science you can nerd out on: UVB light on your skin increases dopamine, testosterone, and estrogen through something called the p53 pathway. This isn't alternative medicine — it's a Stanford neuroscientist telling you that the sun does more for your mood and hormones than most supplements on the shelf.

The thing most people get wrong: They skip cloudy days. Cloudy days still have enough light to trigger the response — but you need to stay out longer (15-20 min instead of 5-10). Also: doing this through a window blocks 50x of the light your brain needs. You have to actually go outside.

The hard part isn't knowing this. It's doing it every day. So I automated the accountability.

I built a system that sends me a reminder every morning at my wake time — customized to the weather so it tells me exactly how long to stay outside. If I haven't logged my sunlight by 10 AM, it sends a nudge. Every Sunday night, Claude analyzes my week — energy scores vs. sunlight days — and tells me exactly what's working and what's not. The streak counter and the data keep me honest on the days motivation doesn't.

The protocol is free. The system that makes it stick is in the cheat sheet — the full blueprint and one prompt you paste into Claude Code that builds the tracker, the reminders, and the weekly analysis for you.

$340 a month. I was paying $340 a month for subscriptions I either forgot about or barely used. That's $4,080 a year. Invested at 7% for 10 years, that's roughly $57,000.

Fifty-seven thousand dollars. Gone. Not because I'm bad with money. Because subscription companies are designed to be invisible. They WANT you to forget. The $12.99 here, the $24.99 there — they count on you being too busy to notice. And it works, because you ARE too busy. That's the whole scam.

I found it all in 20 minutes. Searched my email for "receipt," "subscription," "renewal," and "billing." Pasted everything into Claude and said "list every subscription, the monthly cost, and whether it looks like I used it." Claude spit back a table that made me cringe. I canceled everything I hadn't touched in 30 days. Then I called my internet provider, said "I'm seeing better rates with your competitor, what can you do?" and shut up. They dropped it $35/month. Keeping you is cheaper than finding a new customer. They almost always fold.

The math on this is wild. $340/month isn't just $340. It's what that money COULD become. Park it in an index fund at 7% average return and it compounds into $57K over a decade. You're not just losing the subscription cost — you're losing the future that money could build.

But here's what bugged me: I had to do that audit manually. What about NEXT month's forgotten trial that quietly converts to paid? What about the price increase you never noticed?

So I automated it. Every Monday, an n8n workflow scans my Gmail for receipt and billing emails. Claude extracts the service name, cost, and billing frequency from each one. Everything gets logged in a Notion subscription tracker — service, cost, status, last used, auto-renew date. If it finds a new charge that's not already in the tracker, I get an alert immediately. No more surprise billings.

On the first of every month, Claude pulls my full subscription list and sends me a spending report: total monthly burn, services I haven't touched in 30+ days (with a recommendation to cancel), and a negotiation script for the most expensive bills I'm keeping. I spend 5 minutes reviewing it. Done.

The cheat sheet has the full blueprint — every tool, every connection, and one prompt you paste into Claude Code that builds the entire system for you. The tracker, the scanner, the monthly reports, the new charge alerts — all of it.

I have this thing attached to my phone every day. It records. It transcribes. I paste the transcript into Claude and get action items in 30 seconds.

Before Plaud, I'd walk out of meetings thinking "I'll remember that." I never did. Action items got lost. Follow-ups fell through the cracks. I'd sit down to write a recap and stare at a blank page trying to remember what was actually said.

Now everything is captured. Nothing slips. The recording is automatic — you don't even think about it. And because the transcript goes straight into my Claude Project, Claude already has context from my previous meetings. It connects dots I'd miss.

It's the single tool that changed how I work more than anything else. Not the flashiest. Not the most expensive. Just the most useful.

Oh, one more thing — I'm building a workflow that turns Plaud into the first step of a fully automated pipeline. Meeting ends, transcript flows into Claude, action items get drafted, follow-up emails write themselves, everything uploads to Notion. One prompt. No manual work. That's coming in a future issue.

Stack this

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." - Marcus Aurelius

That's Issue #002. Four practical workflow blueprints. Grab what fits and go build something.

See you next Tuesday.

— Zack

readstacked.com · @ReadStacked everywhere

5 referrals → Stacked community access (exclusive workflows & early access)

15 referrals → The Stacked Operating System ($99 value)

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