What I wish someone had told me four years ago
How AI helped me dig out of a brain fog backlog, and the one small step I’d suggest to anyone still buried
On the last morning of a retreat for people living with chronic illness, I got talking to a woman who told me it was all so overwhelming.
The emails, the post, the things that needed doing and kept not getting done. And there was no one to keep her accountable. No one to notice when things slipped, or to help her pick them back up.
I knew that feeling well. So I told her how I manage it now: AI checks my email every morning, my to-do list sorts itself, and when I don’t know where to start, I ask.
“That sounds amazing,” she said.
And I suspected, as she said it, that she wouldn’t do it.
Not because she wasn’t capable. Because I’d just described it in a way that sounded like a project, and a project was the last thing she needed. This article is my second attempt at that conversation.
I know the title is a bit theoretical. Four years ago, none of this was possible. Heck, I’m not sure it was possible twelve months ago. But it is possible today. If I hadn’t discovered what it could do for me, I’d want someone to tell me. So that’s why I’m writing this.
The years it didn’t work
There wasn’t one bad moment. It was worse than that. It was every day.
For nearly four years, I felt overwhelmed by day-to-day admin. The stuff you just do because you have to. I’d always done it, until one day I no longer could. Emails I couldn’t face. Post I didn’t know what to do with, so it sat in a pile. Utilities were a constant low stress. Insurance renewals came round every year and felt confusing every single time.
None of these things was hard on its own. I’d spent a career handling far more complicated things than a home insurance renewal. But brain fog doesn’t care what you used to be able to do. Each task needed starting, and starting was the thing I couldn’t do. So the pile grew, and the bigger it got, the harder it was to begin.
If that sounds familiar, I want you to know it isn’t a character flaw. It’s what happens when the effort of starting costs more energy than you have.
The brain fog tax
There’s a cost to that pile, and it isn’t only stress.
Life gets more expensive when you can’t keep on top of it. Insurance renewals roll over at a higher price. Energy tariffs quietly lapse onto something worse. Savings sit in accounts paying next to nothing. Debts stay on higher interest rates than they need to be.
None of it is dramatic. It just adds up, year after year. It’s effectively a disability tax. A brain fog tax. And the people least able to fight it are the ones who end up paying it.
The tools that helped me are free or nearly free, and they can help you stop paying that tax.
The day it felt different
The change didn’t come from a clever system. It came from a conversation.
ChatGPT had released a voice mode, where you can talk to it out loud and it can do things while you talk. I tried it on my emails and my to-do list, which I kept in an app called TickTick at the time.
It felt completely different. I wasn’t sitting down to work. I was just talking, the way you might talk something through with a friend who happens to be very organised. It would look at an email, tell me what it needed, help me reply, and add anything that needed doing to my list. I’d say what I wanted, and it would get on with it.
I got through things that had been sitting there for months. It didn’t feel like doing admin. It felt like having a chat.
That was the moment I understood what had actually been stopping me. It was never the tasks. It was facing them alone.
Where it went from there
I built on it slowly. These days an AI checks my email every morning. When I was away at the retreat and stopped looking, it noticed, and asked if I still wanted it to keep running. That’s the accountability the woman I met was missing: something that notices, asks, and leaves the decision with you.
Within a few weeks, I went from nearly four years of backlog to having free time. I didn’t get more energy. I just stopped spending it all on trying to begin.
The barrier isn’t technical
Here’s what I got wrong that morning.
I told her about the whole setup, the schedules and the apps. But she didn’t need any of that. Most people haven’t heard of to-do apps like Todoist or TickTick, and there’s no reason they should have.
The real barrier isn’t technical. It’s knowing what’s possible, and knowing what to ask. Once you know what to ask, the AI can take it from there. The prompts can be tiny.
I saw the same thing in my old career. Most of what I did wasn’t difficult. It just needed knowledge people didn’t have, and when you have the knowledge, it stops looking hard.
A word of caution
I’m telling you what I do, not advising you to do it.
Emails and letters often contain sensitive information: account numbers, health details, personal circumstances. Putting that into an AI tool is a choice, and it’s yours to make. If something feels too sensitive to share, don’t.
But it’s worth weighing that against the other side. Not dealing with things carries real risks too, and some of them come with a price tag.
What I’d say to her, and to me four years ago
If I could have that conversation again, I wouldn’t describe my system. I’d suggest one thing.
Take the letter that’s been bothering you. Open ChatGPT on your phone, take a photo of it, and ask: “Can you tell me what this letter wants from me, in plain English?”
Or tap the voice button, hold the letter, and just talk it through.
That’s it. One letter. You don’t need to set anything up, learn an app, or understand how any of it works. If it helps, try another one tomorrow. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost five minutes.
Everything else I’ve built came from that same first step. It just took me four years to find it.
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