transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:09] Hello, and welcome to Best Laid Plans. This is your host, Sarah Hart-Unger, and this is the podcast where we talk all things planning and planning adjacent. I promised you last week that we would have a topic that I wanted to talk about for a while that has some controversial aspects to it. And yes, here we are. I have an expert today on AI, and someone though who comes from a planning background, who has actually taken my courses, who I have known in the digital space for a while, and who I respect quite a bit. So I thought she was the perfect person to talk today about how she has integrated various aspects of AI and agents and bots into her day-to-day productivity. And honestly, by the end, I felt really inspired and reassured overall. Now, of course, this is still an area rife with uncertainty. There is so much we don't know about what is coming, but what we do have is what's here now. And I think it is helpful to really understand the landscape and what the opportunities and tools that exist that are out there. So I think no better person to do that than my guest today, Emilie, and I really hope you enjoy this conversation. Here we go. Well, I am so excited to be here today with Emilie Schiario. She is the VP of Engineering at Kilocode. She's also a mom of three kids under the age of five. And I have to throw in that she is a Best Laid Plans Academy alumnus as well. Welcome, Emilie, to the show.

Speaker 2:
[01:34] Thank you, Sarah, for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

Speaker 1:
[01:38] I am excited and I'm really excited to talk because I feel like I've gotten to know you a little bit over the years in various forums. And now, I wasn't following closely, but I go and look and you're like doing some amazing things in the tech world in a leadership position with a lot of attention on what you're doing. Can you share a little bit about, I don't know, the past few years and where you are right now in your work and parenting journey?

Speaker 2:
[02:02] I started a company called Turbine many years ago. We were acquired by a company called Settle. And while I was at Settle, I had my third baby, AI coding was becoming all the rage. But like a lot of working professionals, I didn't have a lot of time to play with those tools. There's a learning curve for anything. And I was watching, seeing what people were posting, but was not knee deep in them. And when I had my third baby in fall 2024, I took my maternity leave and I said, I'm going to make the AI coding tools, my maternity leave project. And so I dug in, I started playing with Bolt and Lovable and went kind of down the rabbit hole from there. I came back to work and I was suddenly very AI-pilled. And I think I annoyed every coworker because I had just spent the last couple of weeks knee-deep, eight weeks of playing with AI tools in between feeding and changing a newborn baby. And I was just like, you have to try this thing, you have to try this thing. I'm sure I was the most annoying coworker there was.

Speaker 1:
[03:14] And by the way, you've already used some words and like names of tools that probably are so commonplace in your industry. But to me in the medical world and other people that have no tech backgrounds whatsoever, just make sure we keep it at the third grade AI level for the rest of us.

Speaker 2:
[03:32] Good call out. Thank you. I think the big two tools that I mentioned there were Bolt, which is Bolt.new and Lovable, which is Lovable.dev. And both of these are, think ChatGPT where you type in a message, but you get out a website. So you can just kind of, I want a website that lets me log my goals or log my reading and you can use that. It's going to build the website for you. It's going to host it for you. We have our own version at Kilo called Kilo App Builder. That's a much earlier product. I think there are so many tools out here and I can't even, it's my job to keep up with them. And it's still hard to keep up with them. And so the thing that I always tell people is like, it's not about the tools. It's about being the ability to like jump into something you've never used before and give it a go. And kind of developing some of the skills that you need without it being tool specific.

Speaker 1:
[04:29] Which is so interesting, because that's parallel to what I teach in my very analog world about planning, which is like, there are methods and there are tools. And like, those are two kind of separate things. And I'm sure that can probably be applied in a way in the AI world. Well, okay, so taking us back to like 20, I think you mentioned that you actually left social media in something like 2018 or 2019. So were you like a very analog kind of planning person? And how has that shifted over time?

Speaker 2:
[04:57] Yeah, I have always enjoyed paper as a tool for brain dumping, for being pretty, for getting things out. But my systems of record, like the primary calendar, the primary task list, all of that has always been digital. Mostly because I didn't want to carry paper around. And then as I moved from being a solo person to being a married person and now a married person with kids, I really want to make clear that things have to be multiplayer, right? So if I carried a paper calendar that is the family calendar and that's the source of truth, then no one else can update it. And one of the big things that I want to make clear is like, if we're committing that our system for this family is that we're going to update this shared Google calendar, that it has to be possible for everyone to update it. So really focusing on digital tools as the primary system of record. But the thing that people watching the podcast won't be able to see, but I'll show you here for us talking is like, I still write down my calendar every day so that I don't have to go check my calendar online all throughout the day. I can just glance over to the side of my desk and see what's available. So I always think about it as very similar to what you say. What are the constraints of your system? What works for you? At the end of the day, the best system is the one that's going to be there consistently for you.

Speaker 1:
[06:31] I love that. That's such a common way to be hybrid, which is to have some online reference point for the global scheduling stuff and the ability to share. But then every day, taking a moment to put it in analog form so that, yeah, you have something to refer to without having to interrupt yourself by going into that digital space, which is I think a hidden benefit people don't always think about. Then I'm guessing there's also some little bit of processing that goes on as you write things down or no? What is your ritual?

Speaker 2:
[06:59] Yeah. The first thing I do when I sit at my desk, so I switch. I've got a full focus that I sometimes use when I'm in the mood, or your audience will love to hear specifics on calendar. Yes, I will. Yeah, I don't like sharing specific planners. This is a sprouted planner that I'm using right now. I've been using this since the beginning of the year, and I used it for the second half of last year too. I'm working this six months daily. What I do is the first thing, I sit down, I look at the calendar for the day, and I put that in the 30-minute blocks. Most of my days run in 30-minute blocks. Today, I had a sales meeting, and then I had an engineering meeting, and then I had two one-on-ones, and then I had our all-hands meeting. I just write all of it down, and then over the course of the day, as that meeting happens, I will cross it out. I know that it's done, and it helps my eye go to where I need it to on the page. If it gets canceled, I will scribble it out. Again, it helps my eye go to the right place on the page. I couple this with out of my morning briefing, which is where we can get into the specifics in just a bit, but my AI agent takes a look at my day, it sees what the important tasks are across home and work, it gathers some context, it looks at the news, and it flags anything to me early in the morning. So while I'm having my first cup of coffee, that's often the first text message I'm reading, where I'm orienting myself to what might have happened when I wasn't paying attention, then after I've written down my calendar, I make a task list, but I only put one thing on it at a time. The reason for that is because I have one of those jobs where I'm constantly getting pinged by other people, and it's oftentimes really important to unblock other people. If I have a task list of four or five things on it, I was looking at that list and then deciding what I was going to tackle next. So what I started doing probably six months ago or so, and it works really well for me, is only having one to do item on that list. So I know when I get off this call, I need to work on the blog draft that we're trying to publish tomorrow morning. It's the only thing that is on this list that is unchecked. So when I'm looking at my list, I'm not deciding anymore. It's just kind of, this is the thing I'm working on. I have that to do list in Todoist for today and it's filtered and it's got all the systems. But what am I working on? It's just the one thing on the paper list.

Speaker 1:
[09:45] You are not pulling anything off of that Todoist. And this reminds me of all the Kanban type stuff. It's like, you have a flow. You're like, I'm in this one thing. And yes, all those things are out there and they're organized. And it sounds like I'm so interested in how you're using your AI tools to kind of look at those things. But you're, well, actually, I'm curious. So after you get your briefing, you're choosing your one thing. You're like, next one thing when I have space in my day. Is that an AI-aided choice? Do they give you a recommendation? Have your agents been trained to do that? Or is that usually still more coming from Emilie herself?

Speaker 2:
[10:19] It is still more coming from me. Like the decision is mine on what the most important thing is. But the agent is often filtering out information that can shake that decision. So like if an email came in overnight, that's like urgent, oh my goodness, this thing is on fire. That might bump something to the top of my priority list that wasn't on my top five before. So it's giving me kind of information, but at the end of the day, the decision is still mine.

Speaker 1:
[10:48] Okay, good. Well, I'm glad to hear you, Rajeev, your final autonomy on things. So we're gonna take a quick break. And then I think it'll be really interesting to go through like how you're using these tools to keep your goal setting straight. I'm curious as to whether you're still using any version of Nested Goals. And then we'll go into like some sort of like everyday tasks and how you might use these tools to help you. So we'll be right back. Today's episode is brought to you with support from Green Chef. I think we've all seen those big promises from big diet trends. The idea that there's one quick fix that's gonna change everything overnight. And while some approaches can work for a while, they are generally not so sustainable long-term. That's why I really appreciate what Green Chef does. Where fad diets fail, Green Chef delivers real food and recipes that actually make healthy eating easier and help the habit last. Each week, you get access to over 40 recipes made with organic produce, responsibly sourced proteins and ingredients you can actually recognize. You can pick what works for you, Mediterranean, high protein or their new longevity line focused on brain and gut health. One of my favorite things is just how excited everyone gets for dinner when it's a Green Chef week. It feels like we're eating something a little more special without a ton of extra effort. Plus, they now even offer free one-on-one nutrition coaching, which is such a nice bonus if you're looking for extra support to stay on track. I definitely recommend giving it a try, especially if you're in your spring busy season. Head to greenchef.com/50-best-laid and use code 50BESTLAID to get 50% off your first month, then 20% off for two months. That's code 50BESTLAID at greenchef.com/50bestlaid. Today's episode is brought to you in part by Mint Mobile. I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. Unfortunately, traditional big wireless carriers also seem to like keeping lots of money too. One of my close family members recently told me about how much she started saving once she switched to Mint Mobile. The price difference is huge and the difference in service for her has been undetectable. You too can stop overpaying just because that's what you're used to and get the financial benefit of switching today. At Mint Mobile, plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can bring your own phone and number and start saving immediately. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com/blp. That's mintmobile.com/blp. Upfront payment of $45 for a three-month, five-gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 per month. New customer offer for first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Today's episode is brought to you with support from IXL. It's that time of year again, the last push towards the end of the school year. I know my kids are super busy with so many spring activities, and there's the end of year standardized testing to look forward to as well. Whether you're a homeschooling parent or you want to provide some extra learning support for your child, IXL is a great tool, and this time of year is a wonderful time to try it out. My kids are using IXL and have been for years to learn and reinforce concepts, and I know it's made a positive impact on their learning. IXL can be used as enrichment, review or part of a home school curriculum. Everything is organized by grade and subject, and you can quickly find what each child needs without juggling multiple resources. The interactive practice and clear explanations and feedback make it easy to reinforce learning as you prepare for end of year assessments or milestones. Make an impact on your child's learning, get IXL now, and Best Laid Plans listeners can get an exclusive 20 percent off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com/plans. Visit ixl.com/plans to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. All right. We are back and we are just talking about super interesting how you are able to use this digest feature that you've set up to be able to kind of get an overview of your day. So you can intelligently and thoughtfully choose your priority tasks today. And again, you may go back and choose more tasks, but I love the fact that you're just putting one thing on your plate at a time. And I think it probably deserves to be said, it sounds like your day is already very structured as well. So it's not even like you're anticipating having eight free hours per day, probably most days you don't. And so that's one reason that and the reactivity, why having just one thing makes the most sense for you. Is that right?

Speaker 2:
[15:22] Absolutely. Some days I might only have like 15 minutes of free time all day. And so basically what I'm always asking my to do list is if I only get one thing done, what does that thing need to be? And so what makes it on my paper list is that one thing. So it solves that decision. I don't have to revisit what needs to get done until I'm done with the thing. That's the most important thing.

Speaker 1:
[15:46] I love it. And I think for, I mean, this is not even the takeaway that I thought we were going to mostly be like these are the AI tools. But for people listening who have kind of to do list angst because they have tortured themselves with lists that have too many things on them for many years, I think this is such a hot tip and I just wanted to bring it out. Okay, but now I'm curious, do you do any longer term goal setting rituals? Do you do some of the things we talked about in Best Laid Plan? It's okay if you don't, but like when you're setting annual or seasonal goals, do you use any sort of interesting electronic tools to track these, to choose from these? I'm interested.

Speaker 2:
[16:21] I do. I'm a paper girl when it comes to this kind of stuff, in part because when you're sitting at a computer, at least for me, there's 12,000 things, beeping and blopping and booping at you. And so there's something about sitting down with pen and paper and brain dumping and seeing what comes out without all these distractions. And so I still do a lot of my yearly goal setting on paper. I'm looking at that 12-month calendar. I do have the Amanda's favorite 12-month collab with.

Speaker 1:
[16:58] Ashley Shelley.

Speaker 2:
[16:59] Yes. Yes. So I love that calendar. I have two of them, one in my office, one on the kitchen fridge. And so I sit down, kind of look at the year, what are the things that are going on? What are the things that I want to see be different by this time next year? And use that to set my goals, my yearly goals. And then I don't really set seasonal goals in like a structured format that I loosely do in my head. So for example, one of the goals that I set for this year was like max out my Roth IRAs, which is something that I want to do in the beginning of the year, because the sooner you can get that money into the market, the better, right? So that's not necessarily a goal for Q1, but I think of it as like a January goal. So I make it reflect on my monthly page and then I revisit the goals. My day is the 25th of every month. So on the 25th of every month, I go through, I look at the calendar for the next month, I do a reflection on the goals, and then I set my goals for the following month. Just having that date locked in, like I have an hour on the 25th where I'm planning on doing this, it makes everything easier. The other part about that date that's really nice is that oftentimes, I then need to coordinate something with my husband or my sister and my brother-in-law. Like, hey, we had talked about going strawberry picking in April, so what weekend do we want to do it? And then it needs to kind of inform the calendar. And so by doing it on the 25th, I can lock in a lot of these things before the end of the month.

Speaker 1:
[18:34] I love that. So you, I mean, to me so far, this sounds very much like my fairly analog system. Do these goals get inputted anywhere that they are stored in the cloud and fed back to you? Or do your AI tools come into play looking at these goals?

Speaker 2:
[18:50] They do. So the planning system, I really enjoy the experience of pen and paper. But they always made their way digitally, whether it was an Apple Note or a Google Doc or a blog or something. That's always just been a part of my flow because I wanted to be able to see them when I was sitting at a coffee shop and I didn't have my paper planner with me, or my goal setting notebook or whatever it might be. It was always important to me to have an on-the-go version of the goal with me. Now, what that ends up turning into is a Markdown file. Markdown is just a format of writing that if you've ever used ChatGPT or Claude, you notice it comes out with asterisks for before it bolds things or asterisks for bullet points or two pound signs. I was going to say hashtag, but I don't know what the kids call it these days. If you see two pound signs and then that turns into a header, like that style of writing is called Markdown, and it's basically a way to do all of the formatting you need in just text. Today, I have those Markdown files stored on my computer where it doesn't really matter. It's just that information is stored in a format where an AI agent can read it easily. And that's the big thing, is that then when I do my monthly check-in, which now is supported by an AI agent, it becomes a lot easier for the agent to also say, hey, you're on the road for three of the four weeks this month. It's unlikely that you're going to hit your goal of getting to the gym 25 times.

Speaker 1:
[20:32] Okay. So for those of us who are like, wow, that sounds super cool. I want to feed my goals into an agent and get feedback on them. I will say, I have done very rudimentary things like this, where I'm like, oh, let me paste my blog post into ChatGPT and see if it has any thoughts or things like that. I also have the ridiculous advantage of basically being able to tell these companies who I am and there's thousands of posts about me. So it's a little creepy but also somewhat helpful sometimes. However, how does the average person who maybe has never used an A2I tool in their lives, how can you set something like this up in a simple way?

Speaker 2:
[21:12] I'm trying to decide where to start. AI is a tool and I think you have to reach for the tools that are going to make your life easier, but you also have to recognize that with any tool, there's a learning curve. Starting a new planner is no different, where the first couple of days or the first week in a new planner, it's like, I really liked my meal box up here, and now it's at the bottom and it's kicking my butt. A new tool, whether it's a new piece of software you're using at work, or a new calendar you're looking at, or an AI agent, there's a learning curve to all of them. My suggestion is always start with, what is the problem you're trying to solve, and then back into what is the best tool for this. I'll give you a really specific example that I was dealing with. We mentioned earlier, I've got three little boys, all five and under. Two in daycare, one in preschool, we're almost at the end of the school year here. In Georgia, the school year ends in May, very similar to you in Florida. My biggest surprise about having kids across two different schools this year, is that the volume of e-mail has been insane. I did not expect anywhere near this much e-mail. And it's not just like reading the e-mail, it's also making sure that the information from that e-mail makes it to the adult who is responsible for the children that morning, right? So Wednesday, for example, they're wearing purple at preschool. You're laughing because I'm sure you understand this.

Speaker 1:
[23:01] No, it's a perfect example. And every time I would get one of those things, I was like, why? The kids don't care. You're giving me assignment. Okay, sorry, that's a total digression, but like, oh my gosh, I feel like I've rooted the problem, needs fixing in addition. But I'm here for your management. Keep going.

Speaker 2:
[23:19] So, okay, Wednesday is purple day, got the email, and then the normal thing to do is to like send the text message to the group text that has all the adults who are responsible for in the morning, and making sure whoever's on Wednesday knows that they're responsible. This particular kid, not all the kids, this particular kid needs to wear purple on Wednesday. It's a lot of email, and the reality is like, it is not a task that I need to do. That is the thing that I really accepted at some point, is like, we need to know that the kids are wearing purple on Wednesday, but I don't need to be the person communicating that. It became a task that I decided I could outsource to an AI agent. How did I do that? The first thing I did was, I set up an OpenClaw bot using Kiloclaw. OpenClaw is a very trendy AI agent, but even as I say that, I realized not everyone is following AI trends, so maybe not. We offer at Kilo, we want to make it really easy for people to get started. We do have a Kiloclaw, which is just like a hosted version of it, so you don't have to worry about installing anything on your machine. I created a new Gmail email address for my bot. My bot is named Chad, by the way, Sarah. I'm going to call it Chad for the rest of this conversation. But to Chad is my household assistant, and then Snivel is my work assistant. Okay. So Chad has its own email address, and I set up a filter in my Gmail that all of the emails that came from either the preschool or daycare get auto-forwarded to Chad. All day long, these emails are skipping my inbox and just going to Chad. Then what I get every day at 6 PM is one update from Chad that says, here's all the updates from school. And so what it started as was like, here's a summary of those emails. But I don't care about the whole email. My kid is in preschool and daycare. So I don't need to know what's happening in fifth grade. I don't need to know what's happening on the high school girl softball team. So over time, I kept giving Chad the feedback of, I don't care about the volleyball tournament. I don't need to know about what's happening in first grade. And I worked with Chad over the course of a week to get to a world where only the information that was relevant to me was passed on in the summary. And then I put the summary someplace where it landed for both me and my husband. And so it was this over the course of a week, 10 days or so, I went from getting 10 emails a day across both schools, to a 6 PM email summary, here's the things you need to know. And that one small thing I solved for was like, my god, this is amazing, how do I do more of this?

Speaker 1:
[26:24] I love that, it's so simple, it sounds doable for even people who have not really had much experience. You're forwarding emails to one thing, and you're teaching that thing to read the emails and sending back to you. That probably is fairly straightforward to set up. It also sounds reasonably secure, like you're only sending it the information that you want it, it's not getting your entire inbox. Super interesting. So have you then gone to a point where you've trained it to act on some of those things? Those are pinging people's calendars specifically, like whoever's driving gets the information. I don't know, you can go even further here.

Speaker 2:
[26:58] So I have expanded slowly but surely because it's a little bit of a trust building exercise. The same way you might onboard an assistant at work. You give them a little bit more responsibility as they show you that they can take on more responsibility. So Chad now has access to the shared calendar that my husband and I have. If an event shows up, it can put it on the calendar. I'll give you a really specific example. Just a couple weeks ago, the 2026-2027 school year calendar came out as a PDF, emailed to all parents. The email got forwarded on, and it showed up on the shared calendar. I did not even have to intervene.

Speaker 1:
[27:43] Amazing. So, literally, all of it, all the dates, done.

Speaker 2:
[27:46] All the dates. When school is closed. Now, did it like book alternative child care for those days? Did it hand? No. But is it on the calendar? Yes. And that's huge because think about like, there's what? 15, 20 days that are listed on that PDF, and putting it in the calendar is not a task that like, requires thinking. It's not something that only me or my husband can do. It just needs to get done. And so finding those tasks that like, don't need brain power, they're like computer muscle power, I guess you would say. That's what really matters.

Speaker 1:
[28:24] It's very repetitive, it's very rote. I guess my only pushback thought would be like, well, except that's when I often would, I'd look at it and then like realize like, oh, their spring breaks don't overlap. So let me think about what I want to do for this. Like sometimes when you are forced to reckon with boring tasks like that, it does trigger other thought patterns. So I think you'd have to be very intentional about like, since I'm not doing that, let me still like take time to overview what it's done. But I like the idea of not doing the actual clicking and button pushing, and especially with electronic calendars, I find it extra more, like, at least writing in a notebook is sort of fun, but it's not fun to put things into Google Calendar.

Speaker 2:
[29:00] Like, no, it requires so many clicks and then you have to like invite the right people and yeah, I soccer calendar, soccer schedule, like there's so many of these. The thing I'll say to your point specifically is like, your reflection point just moves. So at some point you'd realize that the spring breaks don't line up or whatever it might be, and you still take that moment to pause and recognize that. I think my personal exercise, I still kind of do a year overview in that Ashley Shelley calendar, where I'm seeing the whole year and I can see, my kids are too small to go on spring break right now. So maybe in three years, I'll have like more specifics on how I've updated the prompts to reflect that. But broadly speaking, if you can find these like little tasks that any one is not overwhelmingly painful, but these paper cuts that don't need to be you, I feel like I have more hours in my day now. I'll give you one like totally different example. When we bought this house over five years ago, they said to us, by the way, at some point you're going to need to have an electrician out here to change the coax cable for the cable. Okay. Five years later, it's still mostly working. Last fall, we had someone out here and they were like, you need to change out that cable. So I added it to my to-do list, called the electrician, and then October went by, November went by, December went by, January went by, February, March. I was like, crap, I got to call the electrician. I gave this task to Chad. I said, Chad, here's my address. I need an electrician to come out to evaluate the coax cable. It booked an electrician. It had access to my calendar, so knew when the electrician could come out. I booked the appointment, it put my contact information, put it on my calendar, and the electrician came out and did exactly that. So the more that I'm still very much in this place where I'm giving Chad a task or I'm telling it to look at a task list and decide what it can tackle. But that's where I am in my AI adoption journey, and everyone has to start wherever their comfort level is.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 1:
[32:21] All right. Well, we are back and I have to ask, was the person who booked you on this show an actual human?

Speaker 2:
[32:31] It was a human.

Speaker 1:
[32:33] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[32:33] I will share that I pitched the team on like, hey, what if I created an AI agent specifically for pitching and I had it send out some e-mails and the consensus was, that's a bad idea because AI agents are still very hard to control. And so you can tell it like, don't tell Sarah you're an AI agent. And then it might still anyway. And so you do have to be really careful with what information you give it access to. I'm not giving Chad my social security number. I am not giving it a copy of my passport. You might end up with a new mortgage in some city you've never been to before. So there does require some level of thoughtfulness. And I'm not saying this to scare people. That's certainly not my intent. But you, again, to use the intern or the assistant analogy, like you wouldn't give the intern your credit card on the first day. So you want to be thoughtful in the same way with your AI agent. But no, I promised Chelsea was a real person.

Speaker 1:
[33:31] Well, I kind of assumed that she was real because I can kind of tell when they're AI and I usually delete all of those. But also I knew your name, so maybe I wouldn't have deleted it anyway. I would have written you back and said, did you use an AI agent to pitch me? Because I really don't like that. But hi, I still want to have you on. Anyway, okay. So other things in your life other than booking podcast interviews, I don't know, I'd love at least one more use case. Are you using it for booking travel? Are you using it for, I don't know, planning in real life? Like, where does the digital and analog intercept? Because I think people are so interested in like, I want to do more cool things out there, and how could I use these tools to actually enable me to be less attached to my device?

Speaker 2:
[34:07] I keep coming back to this, what is something that needs to be done, but I don't need to be the person doing it mindset. And so two, one example from today, and then one like constant example. So the first, my middle is in swim lessons, and every day at the beginning of swim lessons, you have to fill out this Google form that basically says like, they didn't get sick from lessons yesterday, they didn't eat anything weird, no rash, kind of those waivers sort of things. It needs to be filled out, it does not need to be filled out by me. Chad now handles that for me in its entirety. The other example is adding things to the calendar. To your point earlier, it takes a lot of clicks. And then when you add that you're inviting kind of one, two, five adults to something, it is a lot of clicks. And so I've completely turned that into work that I do with talking. I will tell Chad, hey, we're going to the movies on Thursday night to watch Project Hail Mary. This is a real life example from last night. We're going to the movies Thursday night to watch Project Hail Mary at this movie theater at this time. Please put it on the calendar and add travel blocks before and after. And the reason that works is because the way I manage my digital calendar is I always want a 30-minute travel block before or after an event as a separate event, so I know that it requires this amount of time to travel there. And I know this about myself enough that I've given the guidance on how I like to manage my calendar to chat. And so I'm not expecting it to read my mind, it knows what I mean when I say I need a travel block. Or like when I go to the airport, if I have a flight at 1130, how do you backwards math to what time I'm leaving my house? I have that written down in guide, like I need this much buffer time, I like to be at the airport this early. So I've written that down into instructions so that when chat is adding something to the calendar, it can follow those guidelines. And the more specific you can be, just like an intern, just like an assistant, the better the results of the work that it produces are going to be for you.

Speaker 1:
[36:21] That is awesome. I love these real life examples. Okay, well, the question we have to get to because, and full disclosure, you've heard me talk, I'm not an AI enthusiast, but I'm also not like, oh, I definitely use it for some things and I see the value in it. I'm also like slightly terrified of many of these like worst case scenario things as a naive person that's probably very much on the outskirts of all this. And as well as I do that, healthcare is like the slowest industry to adopt anything. And so I do feel like we're a little bit behind people working in probably almost any other industry. Like I joke, like I want to order two simple labs and I've counted like I have to click 27 times in Epic. Like it's unbelievable. And then they're like, AI is taking over tomorrow. And it's like, but I'm clicking 27 times. So I guess what anything keep you up at night? What do you worry about? What are you excited about? Like, where are we going here?

Speaker 2:
[37:16] People who are a lot smarter than me and know a lot more about the economy are thinking about this all the time. So I try to stay focused on like the tools that are directly in front of me. As a parent, I don't know what college is going to look like 15, 20 years from now. So that's certainly something that I'm thinking about is what does that mean for my kids? What does that mean for education? I worry a lot about all the research that's coming out about how kids can't read and I think about like, is no one going to appreciate the magic of great expectations anymore? So I don't know is the answer and I don't pretend to. I think the best thing that I can do is make sure that I have a mental model for how to use these tools well, make sure that I'm working really hard to stay on the edge of them, and then sharing what I'm learning with other people. Not everyone in my household is tech-forward. My husband does not work in tech. He is not using AI tools every day, I would say. I was talking about ChatGPT for a year before anyone at family dinner on Sundays gave me any sort of relief. But it's all a tool. It's all a skill you have to learn to use. There was once upon a time where people put Microsoft Word on their resumes, and today if you put Google Docs or spreadsheets, people would think that was a little weird. Using AI tools is a skill today. I think in the next five years, maybe not even that long, it's going to be commonplace and the best thing we can do is keep trying to push ourselves forward. It's also changing so fast. Like I was in a meeting this morning at work about an AI tool that two months ago did not even exist. And things are just moving so quickly. It does take a certain amount of work to stay up to date. My recommendation is like pick two or three sources or newsletters that you really like and follow those and trust that you're going to get covered on all of the big things. And that's probably enough.

Speaker 1:
[39:37] Awesome. Well, this has been such an interesting episode. I know I'm going to get lots of feedback from listeners. I don't know. Probably all types of feedback. Emilie, if you're able to, people can leave their questions on my website, show notes, and maybe if you're able to respond, that would be amazing. That's the shoebox.com. And then the show notes just come out the day the episode airs, which is Monday, April 13th. So yeah, so excited to have you on. And this has been such a fascinating conversation and inspiring in many ways as well. So can you let our listeners know where they can find more from you as you're doing this exciting stuff in the world?

Speaker 2:
[40:12] Yeah, so I don't have social media, or I guess Facebook and Instagram. I am on LinkedIn if you want to find me, my first name, Emilie, E-M-I-L-I-E, last name, S-C-H-A-R-I-O. And then I also have a occasionally updated sub stack, which is just my first name, emilie.substack.com. But if people have questions, they can also feel free to shoot me an email. My email address is just Emilie, my first name, at kilocode.ai. And if I don't have an answer for you, I'm happy to point you in the right direction. I don't pretend to have all the answers. I think I'm learning along with everyone else. But if I can be helpful, I'm always happy to.

Speaker 1:
[40:55] Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Emilie.

Speaker 2:
[40:58] Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:
[41:00] Well, I know that I learned a ton today, and I really could have talked with Emilie for much longer. I have a feeling some of you are going to have questions for her, so you can email her. Or if you think that question might also pertain to others, feel free to leave it as a comment on the show notes. That way, other people will be able to see it as well. And she has promised that she will make a note to check in with that page so that she can answer you if you do have questions. I really do think this is such an interesting time to be living where we have wonderful analog tools and methods, and then we also have this whole new set of tools that we probably wouldn't have even imagined as younger people or as we were doing our jobs 10, 20 years ago. But they do exist and it's up to us to figure out how or if we want to use them and in what way. Ways that are safe, ways that get us to move forward in the ways that we truly want to, using these tech tools to get us out in the world doing real things, for example. So just lots and lots to think about in today's episode. Feel free to take a look at the show notes and ask Emilie your question. I will be back next week with some more planning fun. I guess I will mention, I think that by the time this episode airs, BLPA 2.0 will be closed. As I'm recording this, I have one slot left, so most likely. But if you are interested in the waitlist or a future course, feel free to make sure you get on my newsletter list. It's theshoebox.com, theshubox.com/newsletter. And course info often shows up on my website as well at theshoebox.com/courses. You'll be able to see if there are still openings there or if we are on hold until the next round. All right, have a wonderful week. I'll be back with more planning fun, hopefully some more analog fun and maybe some personal experiments and some of the tools that Emilie talked about today. Who knows? But thank you so much for listening. I'll be back in your feed next Monday.

Speaker 2:
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