Flipping the AI switch: the boring task that changed how I work

I had a 30-page legal document sitting in my inbox for 10 days. As someone who aspires to inbox zero every day, that was unusual for me. I'd opened it maybe four or five times. Each time I'd get a few pages in, lose track of something I'd read two pages earlier, flip back, try to cross-reference a clause that pointed to another clause three sections away, and then close it again. Not because it wasn't important. It was important. I just couldn't get traction on it.

I'd been using AI for about a year at that point. Chatting with it a few times a day, sometimes more. Drafting emails, bouncing ideas, getting a first pass on copy for a proposal. Useful stuff. But I was reaching for it the way I'd reach for Google Sheets or Figma - open it when I had a specific job, close it when I was done.

So there I was with this legal document I'd been avoiding, and a new tool I'd just installed that I wanted to play with. Claude Code. It runs in the terminal, which meant opening a terminal window to do actual productive work for the first time in probably 15 years. I'm a former software engineer so I wasn't totally lost, but it felt like flexing a muscle I hadn't used in a very long time. And honestly, once you're past the flashing command line, it's just the same chat box. Just without the white UI.

I needed something to try it on. And I wondered if the excitement of using this new tool might be enough to get me through something I'd been putting off for ages - something I kept avoiding purely because of how boring it felt every time I sat down to do it. I wasn't expecting a breakthrough. I was just hoping it would make the task tolerable enough to actually finish.

Created a folder. Dropped the legal documents in. Gave it a couple of paragraphs of context and asked it to help me work through the document systematically, step by step, in plain English.

The first pass gave me 10 key issues to review. I knew about 8 of them already, but there were a couple I hadn't considered. So we saved that list and went through each one. Where I needed more understanding of what something actually meant, or what the standard legal position was and how far this document deviated from it, it broke things down for me. Not summaries - actual explanations. This sentence means this. This clause connects to that one. Here's the bit that should concern you and here's why.

An hour. That's what it took. In that hour I understood the document properly, worked through all 10 issues, drafted proposed amendments on the ones I wanted to push back on, and then cleared the context and got a fresh pass to cross-check that everything I'd written actually lined up with the original document.

Work that would have taken me the best part of a day of painful reading, done in an hour. But that's not the bit that mattered.

The bit that mattered was what I realised afterwards. I'd spent a year using AI when I got stuck. The shift was simpler than that: start every task here. Don't wait for a problem. Don't wait until you're four pages into something and losing the thread. Begin with it.

That sounds obvious written down. But living it is different from knowing it. And that one change - starting everything in Claude rather than reaching for it mid-task - rewired how I approach every piece of work I do. 23 years of working one way, and then one hour with a legal document I'd been putting off, and the switch flipped.

It didn't just move me from basic AI chat to something more advanced. It opened the whole view. Within weeks I was living in Claude Code 7 or 8 hours a day. Not just work - personal admin, family stuff, things I'd wanted to do for years but never had the time. Building tools, automating workflows, creating skills, optimising not just my productivity but the way I think about what's even possible to get done in a day.

I keep trying to explain this to people at work, to friends, to other founders. And I know the words don't quite land. I can describe what happened, I can show them what I'm doing now, but there's something about this that you can't fully convey until someone's been through it themselves.

I think it's like trying to tell expecting parents what it's going to be like. You can describe the sleepless nights and the way your priorities completely rearrange themselves. But you know, deep down, that they won't really get it until they're there. And then they'll say: oh. Now I get it.

I think a lot of people are going to have that moment over the next couple of years. It might come from the most exciting use case or the inspiring demo, or like me it might come from the boring stuff. The document you've been avoiding. The admin you keep pushing to next week. The task that's too tedious to start but too important to ignore.

For me that's where the switch flipped.