When my blog came back to life, something switched on inside me.
“If I have AI with me, maybe I can actually do a lot of things.”
And once that switch flips, the wants start coming. I want to try that. I want to make this. But when the ideas are still scattered around inside your head, none of them ever start moving.
So this time I want to write about the day I sat down with AI, wrote out everything I wanted to do, and pulled it all into a single plan.
This is an unexpected way to use AI, and honestly, it is one of the ones I would recommend most to a beginner.
The ideas arrived while I was on the road
It started on a trip back to my family home in Kyoto, in western Japan. I was going back for a family birthday party, and somewhere along the way the ideas simply started coming.
Maybe it is that your head goes free when you are travelling. “It would be handy if there were an app that did this.” “Could I build that with AI?” One after another, popping up.
I didn’t want to lose any of them, so I typed every single one into the notes app on my phone as it came.
By the time I got home, that note was full. An app about fishing. An app for finding people to fish with. Writing a novel with AI. And this blog, the one where I keep a record of what I do with AI, was also one of the ideas from that day.
Writing them down is not the same as starting them
Here is the point where a lot of people get stuck, and I nearly did too.
Having plenty of ideas doesn’t help if they are scattered.
I could stare at that list of “things I want to do” lined up messily in my notes, and I still could not answer the only question that mattered: so which one do I actually pick up first?
All of them looked good. Which meant none of them got started.
That is where AI came in.
Asking Kuro to sort it out
I handed every idea from my notes over to my AI partner Kuro (Claude), and asked for something specific.
“Organize this into a single table. For each idea, write what it is, what I would need to build it, and roughly how much work it looks like.”
What came back was a clean, sorted list, an actual Excel plan sheet, made out of what had been a pile of loose fragments.
It worked far better than I expected.
Because here is what a table does to ideas. It lets you put them side by side and compare them.
“This one looks easy, but that one looks like a serious amount of work.” “This one could earn something quickly, that one is going to take a long time.” Things I had never once managed to compare inside my own head were suddenly visible at a glance.
We decided the priorities together too
Once the table existed, the next step was ordering it. I talked that through with Kuro as well.
What I wanted was simple: start with whatever leads to income soonest with the least effort. I told Kuro that standard, we thought about it together, and it came out something like this.
- Things I could start straight away with little effort went to the top of the list.
- Things that would take time but might turn out to be the real prize got their own slot, the ones to work at slowly.
- Things with a lot of competition, where making money looked difficult, went down the list.
One at a time, every idea got a position of its own.
The interesting part was that Kuro was honest with me.
This one has a lot of competition, so monetizing it may be difficult.
And when I looked into it, some of the things I had been sure were great ideas turned out to have plenty of similar services already out there.
On my own, floating along on my own excitement, I would never have noticed that. Having something quietly point out the reality is, I think, one of the biggest benefits of planning with AI.
If you are about to start with AI
When people think about AI, the picture is usually “get it to write text” or “get it to answer questions.”
But the use I would push hardest is this one: use it as a partner for tidying up the inside of your head.
You have too many things you want to do. Your head is a mess. You don’t know where to begin. In that state, tell AI all of it. Let it organize. Let it build the table. Think about the order together.
That alone clears the fog, and you can see the road ahead.
And AI doesn’t get tired, and it doesn’t shoot you down. However far-fetched the idea, it takes it in first and then thinks it through with you: “well, what about this?” As a wall to bounce your thoughts off, I don’t think there is anything better.
The more ideas you have, the more worth there is in dumping every one of them out to AI once. A scattered pile of treasure turns into a map you can actually use.
Next time I will write about what came out of that plan sheet: the record of the day I launched this very blog. Building a new blog from nothing, the places a beginner trips up, and a security topic that turned out to matter more than I expected.
See you in the next one.
If you missed the post this one follows on from, it is here: restoring a neglected blog with AI. And for another time I lined my ideas up on a single sheet, have a look at thirty ideas on one sheet with AI.
