Let AI Do the Dishes. You Do the Art.

How AI Got My Creative Time Back

I know a lot of creative people hear the word AI and immediately tense up. I get it. When AI started generating images, writing copy, producing designs, and developing marketing strategies that looked a lot like what we do for a living, it felt like a threat, and in some ways, it still does.

However, resisting or ignoring AI is like resisting or ignoring the internet when it came out - it’s happening whether we like it or not.

With that said, I want to help expose another side of AI we don’t see that often - the utility side of it. The part that can take over mundane or time-consuming tasks so we have more time to do what we enjoy most - creativity.

Think about everything that competes for your attention before you ever get to work on your craft. Email, scheduling, invoices, research, and administrative tasks that pile up quietly until suddenly half your week is gone, and you still haven’t gotten through them.

Now add in all of life’s distractions - notifications, messages, requests, and obligations with friends and family.

Solopreneurs are constantly fighting for focus time before the real work even begins.

Most of us aren’t losing time to a lack of inspiration; we’re losing it to everything else.

Through my client work, I’ve been exposed to how other businesses are using AI and have begun embracing it more and more. I don’t use AI to do the things I enjoy doing; instead, I use AI to take care of the things that drain me.

• • • 

You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

~ Joanna Maciejewska

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I started experimenting with the one thing that was eating the most time in my week: email.

I manage several email accounts: one for personal, one for business, another for newsletters and downloads, and one for spam, shopping, and messages I don’t want polluting my other inboxes.

Even with that system in place, managing my email (unsubscribing, blocking, moving spam to junk, and responding to messages) was still consuming a lot of my time.

I looked into AI email management tools, but almost everything I found was built around Outlook or Gmail. I’ve been on a Mac using Apple Mail for decades, and I wasn’t about to switch platforms just to get a cleaner inbox, so I figured I was out of luck.

I’ve been using the AI tool Perplexity for research and asked for help trying to find a solution. Turns out, Perplexity’s desktop app can do this out of the box, and I decided to give it a try.

I knew going through the process of marking emails as spam, unsubscribing, or blocking persistent senders was the right thing to do, but when pressed for time, I just deleted the messages instead.

I could have set up more rules, too, but although effective, that process was time-consuming too, and neither approach solved the bigger problem of stopping more email from coming in in the first place.

I wondered if Perplexity could help with this, and after some “discussion,” I learned Perplexity could do all of this on my behalf.

I was still a little skeptical, but decided to give it a try. The tool scanned my inboxes and then created a “spam” and “unsubscribe or block” folder in each one.

 

Now, when I scan through my emails, instead of deleting emails from people or companies that are going to just send more, I move them into this folder and Perplexity takes over from there.

This is true automated email management. Perplexity helped me establish certain parameters, and when I move a message into that folder, Perplexity looks for an unsubscribe link and takes action. If it determines it’s better to mark as spam or block entirely, it does that too.

Here’s an example of the report that Perplexity sends me after a run:

• • • 

Run #9 complete — a notably busier run. Found 27 messages total, mostly a first-time spam surge in the Shirty Store account (19 messages, vs. its usual 0). iCloud and Black Pearl Publishing were clean; Notifications had 8.

Unsubscribed: 11 total

• Notifications (3): National Breaking newsletter, plus two Nextdoor digest emails

• Shirty Store (8): HuskiApps (a legit Shopify app), 5 separate marketing emails from the same company — Management One / Indie Insights Weekly — sent in under a week via HubSpot, and Citytech (a Shopify-partner cold pitch with its own unsubscribe link)

Blocked with 9 new permanent sender rules, all in Shirty Store:

• ageo.fr and floridagulfcapital.com (2 messages) — investment/loan scams disguised as “Funding” offers. Both had technical unsubscribe links, but per the standing rule against confirming scam addresses are live, I blocked instead of clicking them.

• 7 more cover cold outreach with no genuine list relationship: sara.green2102@gmail.com (SEO spam abusing Google Groups), dream-ind.cn (manufacturer spam), ecomxpress993@gmail.com, gzhm100.xyz, enfance.fvdp.org (a job-scam pitch sent from a mismatched/spoofed nonprofit domain), moyseoanalyst@gmail.com, and giftex.co (2 messages)

• • • 

Within a few weeks, I noticed a drop in my overall email volume. I was sorting through 300 emails a day, and now I’m down to about 75 a day, allowing me to focus on the messages that matter and saving me a couple of hours per week.

That may not sound like much time, but now I have “extra” time to learn something new, improve my craft, or simply create more. I may be able to use that time to get Perplexity (or another AI tool) to help me with another time-consuming task.

If you’re a solopreneur, you know that any time savings is a good thing.

So instead of seeing AI as a threat or a nuisance, think of it as what it actually is - a tool.

Computers didn’t replace writers when they replaced the typewriter. But they did remove a lot of the friction between the idea and the page. I think AI can do something similar for the business side of running your business, side hustle, or hobby.

Here are a few other places worth looking for that kind of time savings.

Bookkeeping and expense tracking. Some bookkeeping tools can categorize transactions, help organize expenses, and generate financial summaries. AI can act as your financial analyst, reviewing and analyzing chunks of data in minutes that would take you hours to do.

Organizing notes, receipts, and handwritten material. If you’re like me, you have hundreds of handwritten notes, receipts, recordings, and random files scattered throughout your desk or office waiting for you to organize them “someday.” I just started using AI to help me manage this as well. I take a pic of my notes, upload to Perplexity and it digitizes, categorizes and catalogs all my handwritten notes into one place. It even helps me prioritize what needs my attention and what does not.

Research and summarization. Stop spending hours reading through long articles, reports, or contracts. A tool like Perplexity, Claude or OpenAI can review all this data and provide a summary, and highlight the sections that are of value.

*I wouldn’t rely on the summary in place of reading anything important, especially a contract, but it can give you a useful starting point.

Scheduling and calendar management. AI assistants can help with things like finding meeting times, drafting scheduling emails, and spotting conflicts (Perplexity integrates with Apple calendar too). If you deal with multiple time zones, as many of us do now, have the AI coordinate that for you instead of you trying to figure it out.

First-draft communications. Most of us know the dread of a blank page - especially writers. Use AI to draft up your first draft for proposals, follow-up emails, client updates, reports, sales letters, and even posts. AI has yet to capture my voice accurately, but spending time editing instead of staring at a screen waiting for inspiration to strike has been incredibly productive.

If you notice, none of these involved creativity or strategy. Instead, they focused on tasks that can be time-consuming, need to be done and can be done by an AI tool to free up time for more valuable things like creativity, strategy, thinking, rest or family time.

The goal isn’t to use AI for everything. It’s to look at the tasks that keep eating your time without adding anything to your craft and ask whether AI can take some of that work off your plate.

I’d rather spend my extra “found time” creating, improving my business, or enjoying life more.