Episode 827: Too Many Ideas, No Clear Plan? Use AI to Decide What Comes Next With Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju

EBT 827 – Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju

[00:00] Megan Porta

What if your biggest growth strategy is to decide what to stop doing? Shruthi from Urban Farmie shares how she uses AI to turn an overwhelming to-do list into a focused weekly plan and why giving one goal ninety days changed everything.

[00:16] Megan Porta

Shruthi, hello, welcome back.

[00:19] Shruthi

Hi, thanks for having me back.

[00:21] Megan Porta

Hi, and so soon! I’m so happy to talk to you again. You were last on just a few months ago in June, but we have some important stuff to talk about today, right?

[00:31] Shruthi

Yeah, I think so. Lots of priority setting and goal setting.

[00:35] Megan Porta

Yeah. Leaning into AI for just planning and making a more robust schedule for our lives and businesses. So before we do that, if people don’t know you, give them a little background on who you are and what you do.

[00:50] Shruthi

Yeah, absolutely. I’m Shruthi. I run the blog Urban Farmie. It is a global vegetarian recipe site. And I think the last time I was on the show, or maybe on the day that I was on the show, was when I had literally turned in my laptop at my company. I was also a partner at a large management consulting firm, and I used to work professionally in the food system space and was blogging on the side. I was traveling 200 days a year and I left, and now I run Urban Farmie full-time. I also teach food bloggers and other bloggers how to more effectively run their businesses with Claude and AI tools specifically. I’ve had two live cohorts that I’ve taught so far, over 60 bloggers. And yeah, I’m excited to share lessons that I’ve learned along the way and chat a bit more about prioritization and how we effectively use the time that we do have available to us today.

[01:51] Megan Porta

Great intro. Thank you for all of that. And yeah, so specifically with AI, we’re going to dig into how to figure out what to do this quarter, which is more manageable, I think, than what to do this year. And then pairing that back and deciding what to work on now or this week, right?

[02:09] Shruthi

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So essentially, in the process of running the two live cohorts of the course that I taught, before I started the class each time I sent out an intake form and I said, “Hey, what is on your mind? What would be most helpful? What would you consider a success if you got out of this course and you checked the box on?” And I think the thing that almost every one of them said was, “I have a giant list of ideas. And I feel that especially in this evolving, volatile landscape in blogging, I have to do all of them. I have no idea what to do first. And how do I even know that I’m just checking the box on something versus truly putting the right amount of effort into growing an income stream or fixing something that was broken or whatever it is?” And I think that is the real problem: sometimes too many good ideas is actually a bad thing.

[03:11] Megan Porta

Yes. Oh my gosh. Shruthi, I hear this all the time. Just yesterday I was on a call and somebody was saying, “I know I should do X,” X being a certain project within food blogging that a lot of people are doing. And I was like, “Well, I don’t feel like that is really lighting you up. Are you sure you should do X?” But people feel all of these shoulds and they feel the pressure of that. So I think AI can really help us to figure out, okay, is this X actually good for you and your business, right?

[03:15] Shruthi

Ha ha.

[03:45] Shruthi

Mm-hmm, exactly. And I think there’s this sense of finality, as if, if you choose not to do something in this moment, what if I can never get back to it again? And I think truly, if you take a step back and think about it, very few things in food blogging are like that. Even to the point of, if you stop publishing posts, your blog will still probably chug along for a little bit before it truly has any kind of impact on your traffic numbers. And I think the other part of this is that I’m sure most of us have a ginormous to-do list, a never-ending stream of tasks. And every idea on that list probably looks good on its own individually, but that’s why the list never shrinks, right? And I think AI actually makes this worse because you get more new ideas, and faster, than you were ever able to generate. We were talking about Instagram before we got recording, and before you used to rack your brain and come up with two hooks, but now Claude’s like, “Here’s fifteen,” and you’re like, “What do I do with that?” Now I’m overwhelmed, you know what I mean?

[03:56] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[04:26] Megan Porta

Yes.

[04:44] Megan Porta

Yeah, that’s true. Yep.

[05:01] Megan Porta

Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

[05:06] Shruthi

And I think the second part of this is that, especially with complex tasks, and this is something I run into a lot, you start a task in AI, it’s running, it’s responding, it’s thinking, it’s doing something, and you’re like, “Ooh, let me not waste time, let me just switch to this other thing.” And then you start something else. That back and forth and squirreling type of behavior is sometimes helpful in certain contexts, so that you’re keeping things going. But a lot of times it actually distracts you, because let’s say you had 10 hours a week spare. You can split them across 10 things, or you can pick one priority. Ten things at an hour each means, I don’t know, will any of them get done properly? Maybe a few smaller tasks. But I think this was a big lesson that I brought over from my consulting days: the clients who did well weren’t necessarily the ones with the best ideas. They were the ones who were not afraid to say, “not now,” or “not this.” They were the ones that were able to pick a priority and say, “I understand that I’m making trade-offs, but that’s where your business judgment comes in.” And before you can make a decision like that, you need to be able to see what’s on your plate, right? So with bloggers, I talk to a bunch of them and a lot of them say, “Well, I don’t know what to outsource, because I just don’t feel like I have that process down,” or “No one will do it like I do.” And it’s because you can’t see everything you’re actually carrying. It lives in your head. It doesn’t get done. You might remember two things and forget five. So step one, always, with any of this kind of using AI to prioritize, is how do you get everything in your head into one list that is trackable, amendable, and remains the source of truth.

[06:10] Megan Porta

Mm.

[07:10] Megan Porta

Mm. The source of truth. That’s so great. Yeah. The source of truth, right.

[07:12] Shruthi

It is the one source of truth, you know, kind of like the one ring to rule them all.

[07:17] Megan Porta

So how do we do that? Just a simple brain dump, like putting everything from your brain into AI, just audio to text sort of thing?

[07:26] Shruthi

Yeah, I mean, talking is a great way to do it. In the class, and I would be happy to share this with the listeners, I work through a very structured interview process. In fact, the entire course is never just “here’s a bunch of prompts.” Every single tool and skill and application that I share, I usually start out by having the AI ask you a series of questions, because everybody’s business structure is quite different. We all prioritize different things. We operate differently. Our brains work differently. So the first part is just going through that interview process, because it has follow-ups. It’s like the seven layers of why. You ask the first question, and then there’s more. And then what I suggest doing, so let’s say you get a list of, I think my original list was literally 110 items or something crazy. I didn’t even realize what I was doing the first time I did it. And then I said, okay, you’ve got to split the list into two. And this is where I think a lot of people conflate what I call the baseload, or “keeping the lights on,” so to speak. This is the work that you have to do every week, no matter what. For a lot of people, this might look like publishing something new, maybe updating, or, if you have an email newsletter, getting a newsletter out. But really, the way I think about this is: if you’re monetized, go to your dashboard. Or if you’re not monetized, go to your traffic and see what’s actually paying the bills. And if it’s not Instagram, that’s not on the baseload. If it’s not YouTube, it’s not on the baseload. If it’s not ebook sales, it’s not on the baseload. Those are potential projects that could become baseload in the future, but you have to show, almost like, what’s the evidence today? I hate to be morbid, but if you got into a traffic accident somewhere, what are the things that you would tell your partner or your child or somebody, like, “My God, these are the three things that just need to get done”? You’re not going to give them your entire list of a hundred things. So this is not even a priority. I think about this as the floor that you protect. If you worked 40 hours a week, like we did in a regular job, this would be the first 20 hours or so that you would fill every single week. And maybe that’s Mondays are for shooting photos and Tuesdays are for writing a post, and whatever, right? And then there’s the next layer that you bring on, which is what I tend to think of as big rocks. So it’s not the small admin tasks. It’s not “my God, I need to swap the opt-in form on my site.” That is a 10-minute task. It’s measurable. It’s something like “I want to grow Instagram,” which could be a big rock, because they are big, multi-step projects. It could be a digital product you’re launching, a new channel, maybe a site rebuild. This is what’s really going to compete for your extra time. And it’s nebulous and broad enough that you could fit a lot of things into it and not even realize that you’re doing this. I think a lot of people, myself included at the beginning, until I really sat down and thought about the structure, mix these things together, right? Because “grow Instagram” might have literally been one item on your 110-item to-do list. But “grow Instagram” is not just “grow Instagram.” Grow Instagram is pick the videos, film the videos, edit the videos, test, see what’s happening with the retention curve or whatever.

[08:10] Megan Porta

Yeah, I love that.

[08:21] Megan Porta

Wow.

[09:41] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[10:21] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[10:44] Megan Porta

Mm.

[11:08] Megan Porta

Ah, yes. Yep. Test the video. Yes. Yeah.

[11:17] Shruthi

And so what ends up happening is that when you put everything together, the urgent always wins over the important. And so then the big projects never move because you feel like you just never have time. You have lots of ideas, but where do you find the time if you’re constantly scrambling? So I think having that sense of truly sitting down and dumping everything so it’s not in your brain anymore, so you feel comfortable that, okay, I’ve dumped all of this into an AI and it has generated a list. Usually I have it group things in some kind of cluster pattern. And then you say, okay, out of the 110, maybe 20 are things I have to do every week. And the rest of it is maybe a random idea I had one day and it’s not even seasonally relevant. Maybe I should park it until later. Maybe it’s not even for this year. And it gives you the opportunity to actually look at everything at once. It’s kind of like, my husband used to joke, if only when you’re dating people, before you settle into a relationship, you could see all the people you could probably date at once, and you would be able to pick the right person. You know what I mean? Except you could actually do that with tasks. You can’t actually do that in a relationship.

[12:27] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[12:32] Megan Porta

That’s funny. Yeah, right. Not realistic with relationships, but yeah, that helps so much, just to be able to see everything on paper.

[12:44] Megan Porta

Just taking a quick break from the episode to talk about something I’m really loving right now. If you have ever opened your blog and thought, “I know I need to update something, but where do I even start?” I want to tell you about a tool I am loving, Phynite Analytics. Phynite has become a one-stop hub for me for understanding my statistics and finding opportunities for growth. You can connect to Google Analytics, Search Console, Pinterest, Raptive, and more, bringing so much of your business into one spot. But my favorite part is how it helps me move from looking at numbers to knowing what to do next. Which post needs attention? What should I change? How much time should I set aside? It takes so much of the wondering out of updating my blog. It feels like a gentle hand guiding me toward the next step, which makes the whole process feel more manageable. You can find my affiliate link in the show notes at eblogtalk.com/urbanfarmie3. That’s U-R-B-A-N-F-A-R-M-I-E-3. If you sign up through that link, I may earn a commission and you get a month free. Now back to our conversation.

[13:51] Megan Porta

You talk about the things that are baseline, those urgent or not urgent, but what did you call them? The…

[13:57] Shruthi

Baseload, yeah.

[13:58] Megan Porta

Yeah, those tasks, obviously, those are one tier, and then how do you prioritize the next tier? So let’s say I want to grow Instagram. Like you said, it’s not just an hour a week growing Instagram. It’s many hours a week doing many subcategories of that. So how do we figure out how to sort through that each week, I guess?

[14:10] Shruthi

Mm-hmm.

[14:21] Shruthi

Yeah. No, it’s a really good question. So even before you pick, what ended up happening was I actually had a bunch of big rocks that I wanted to do. I wanted to do Instagram, I wanted to do YouTube, because I was so close. I was monetized and then I stopped posting for six months because I had my first baby, and they demonetized me. I know that is a possibility. Sorry, I know it sucks, but it happened. Since then I’ve just been at the precipice, like, “If only I could get it.” But then I think once a quarter I pick a big rock. And it doesn’t need to be calendar quarters. I just mean you’ve got to give it twelve weeks. You’ve got to give it 90 days. And there’s a lot of science behind why that number, because I think a year is too much. I don’t think you will actually be able to keep track. Most of us can’t. And also it doesn’t mean that the other work stops. It just means in my head that one of them gets extra attention. So if suddenly I realize, “Yeah, my husband can take my daughter for a walk in the park and I have an extra hour,” that’s what I’m putting this hour towards if I choose to work in that hour. And Instagram was actually the example that I had picked in summer. I had finally quit my job, and I said, “You know what? This thing has been bothering me so much.” Because I actually really like making videos and I really love the creative process of it. And I was like, why am I not doing well on Instagram? I was stuck at 2,000 followers for maybe two years. And I was like, okay, I’m going to do this. And I can talk a little bit more about how that works. But I think…

[14:44] Megan Porta

Ah, what?

[15:06] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[16:07] Megan Porta

Yeah. Yeah, let’s hear it.

[16:09] Shruthi

Yeah, the reason to pick Instagram and not YouTube, for instance, was because I always look at that list of big rocks and I say, “What if this works? What number actually changes? And by when?” And I think that’s really important because sometimes it’s vanity. Growing followers didn’t really matter. You can have 100,000 followers and not have anything happen.

[16:34] Megan Porta

Yeah, absolutely.

[16:37] Shruthi

Or in my case, what I found out in the 90 days is that by really strategically working on Instagram, I grew a lot. I went from 2,000 to 15,000 followers over the summer. And by the time the second month rolled around, I was averaging somewhere between five to six million views on that small follower base. I had added 1,500 people to my newsletter. I think I had over 15,000 sessions in one month to my site, and it was a very good RPM. So that’s the impact, right? And I couldn’t see it when I started the project, but you have to be able to project and envision what this could do for you. And the thing is, we’re all very good at projecting what could be nice. The second question is, can you actually make progress in twelve weeks with the life you have? Not the version where everything is perfect and kids never call in sick from childcare or school. With Instagram, it was possible. With YouTube, I wasn’t sure, because the amount of effort it would have taken for me to film long-form videos, edit the long-form videos, the number I would have had to get out in order to hit the bar felt like a lot more effort than I had at the moment. And I think finally, the last question is nebulous, but it’s really important: I had to keep asking myself, is this the business I actually want? Or am I just doing it because somebody else is doing it? Because competitors, social media pressure, and guilt all show up here, right? You just have to really think about it. And this is where it also fits into checking what you really believe about your ideal reader. A lot of my brand documents, a lot of the stuff that I’d done, I had always thought, okay, I am all about a busy professional mom who’s feeding a vegetarian in the family and wants something that is good for the family. But then I surveyed my readers and only 9% were families with kids.

[17:01] Megan Porta

Nice.

[17:19] Megan Porta

Mm.

[18:19] Megan Porta

Mm-hmm.

[18:51] Megan Porta

Interesting.

[18:53] Shruthi

I was like, gosh, I was so wrong. Most of them are cooking for one person or for themselves, and most of them were confident cooks. So there was not a lot of “I don’t know what to do with tofu” type of stuff. And I’d been building content for the wrong audience, and this is what really flipped the switch in terms of what started working on Instagram for me. If I’d not said, “I’m going to pick one thing this quarter, I’m going to focus all my attention on this,” I don’t think I would have even stopped to diagnose, or ask the six whys behind why this video did not work. I thought, I mean, this was perfect for my audience. And it flatlined. And then you would post something else. I still remember, it was literally… I was in my pajamas. I filmed a tomato tart before I was going over to our neighbor’s house for a Fourth of July gathering. You could literally see the pajamas in the video. One of my daughter’s modular play couches, I just turned it around, put a white foam board on it next to the window, and set my phone on a tripod. I filmed it, went to the Fourth of July gathering, posted it, came back, and it was at 500,000 views. And I was like, wait, what? This is wild. And then I was like, but why did this do well? What’s the draw? And I think asking why, and then coming up with some hypotheses, and then testing the different hypotheses. I was like, okay, it’s either because the tomatoes look beautiful, or because it’s a quick recipe, or because it’s just convenient. It was literally puff pastry, [unclear], and tomatoes. Anybody can do this, right? And I was like, okay, how do I test this? I can make another tomato recipe, and I put out another tomato recipe. And then I said, I’ll make another tart recipe, and I made a zucchini tart. And then I was like, okay, let me do another quick recipe that has nothing to do with this. And it was cottage cheese scrambled eggs or something, and I threw that out. And the tomato one flopped. That was my leading hypothesis, because I was like, my God, these are beautiful heirloom tomatoes. They’re so beautiful.

[19:27] Megan Porta

Mm.

[19:35] Megan Porta

Yes.

[19:52] Megan Porta

Ha ha ha.

[20:05] Megan Porta

Nice.

[20:16] Megan Porta

Whoa.

[20:50] Megan Porta

Right. Yep.

[21:05] Megan Porta

Hm. Interesting. Yep. They’re so pretty, yeah.

[21:11] Shruthi

And it did okay. It still got a little bit more than I normally did. But then the next zucchini tart also hit 300,000 views. And I was like, oh, interesting.

[21:19] Megan Porta

Okay, on to something. Yeah.

[21:22] Shruthi

Okay. And then the scrambled eggs did decently well too. So I was like, okay, I can’t reject this hypothesis yet. And so I kept going. And I think Claude and AI was actually really helpful, right? Because that’s the thing machines are good at. It’s good at picking patterns.

[21:40] Megan Porta

Hm.

[21:40] Shruthi

It’s good at doing things repetitively without making mistakes if you give it enough instructions, because its eyes don’t glaze over like ours do. If I had to sit and do all the manual tasks sometimes, you know what I mean?

[21:50] Megan Porta

I know. It’s so true.

[21:54] Shruthi

And then, midway through, I was like, is the number moving? And I could see the results, even in one month. Sometimes it might not be immediate, but that’s why you need to give it some time. Stuff like social media is very temperamental, so it is probably faster to see the results. Stuff like a newsletter is really hard because it is contingent on so many things, right? Instagram is not. All it takes is one video that you post on trial reels to go viral, and you can see the results. And I know you have also seen a lot of great results in the last couple of months.

[22:34] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[22:35] Shruthi

But with a newsletter, if your goal is to grow the newsletter, actually you need to grow your traffic, right? Because it’s a funnel. Just think about the diagnosis of what happens when I talk about setting a goal and a priority. If my goal was I want to grow my newsletter from 15,000 subscribers to 20,000 subscribers, first of all, you’ve got to get new people into the funnel, meaning they have to look at your opt-in or what you have to offer. And then that times how many people actually convert is what you’re going to get, right? So you can play with either of these two levers. But if you’re not getting enough people in the funnel, it doesn’t matter how good your conversion is, in some ways. You know what I mean? And every…

[22:43] Megan Porta

Right. Yeah.

[23:17] Megan Porta

That’s a really good point. Yeah. Yep. And people don’t often think of that, right?

[23:21] Shruthi

Yeah.

[23:23] Megan Porta

That’s something that we miss. AI, like you said, is probably really good at pointing that out.

[23:29] Shruthi

Exactly, exactly. And I think AI can also help you design thoughtful experiments. I’m using the word “experiment” really loosely, because it’s not as much of an experiment as it is small tests that you can put in place to really see what is happening. And one piece of advice there, which has nothing to do with AI, is that a number moving doesn’t mean it has to become a task immediately. And this comes back to your question of how you go from quarterly to a more weekly format. You open Search Console and you’re like, “My God, clicks are down 30%! Shoot, I’ve got to do something.” And because there’s so much cortisol response, I think, all the time, because there’s constantly something…

[24:02] Megan Porta

Mm-hmm.

[24:14] Megan Porta

Yeah. Emotion. Yep.

[24:17] Shruthi

Yeah, a core update, something happened, Pinterest turned something off, and it’s like…

[24:20] Megan Porta

I know.

[24:21] Shruthi

We’re living in this era of just constantly react, react, react. So your brain immediately probably goes into work mode. It’s like, my God, I need to fix that post. But that drop could be seasonal. Maybe it falls every September. It could be that fewer people are just searching for it because it was viral at some point. And there’s a huge recall on the main ingredient in that recipe right now, so nobody’s making that recipe. Or Google could be answering the question on the results page with an AI overview, so fewer people are clicking. But those are three really different diagnoses that require you to do very different things, right? And we don’t know. Yeah. Exactly.

[24:38] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[24:46] Megan Porta

Right.

[25:01] Megan Porta

Right. And we don’t know which one all the time, right? So we don’t even know what we’re assessing.

[25:08] Shruthi

And so you also have to take it into stock against your full list of priorities, which is why having a relative magnitude is always important. I’m sure many of us, like I have 600 posts on my site. I’m sure you have way more since you’ve been blogging for so long. A page that gets, I don’t know, 20 clicks or 100 clicks. Yes, it’s technically declining, but is it worth an hour of your life updating it? Even at a $50 RPM, if it gets 100 clicks, what do you make back? Is that what you would pay yourself per hour? And if your whole site is down 25%, but one post is down 7%, that post is actually doing better than your site. So maybe there’s a broader problem. You know what I mean? So sometimes I think teasing out whether this is a data question, or, in the case of what I was talking about with my readers, a brand question, matters. These are things where AI can actually help, once you pick the priority. First of all, figure out what the grand plan is. What is the strategy?

[25:37] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[25:56] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[26:19] Megan Porta

Hm.

[26:20] Shruthi

And I don’t mean that you need… AI is really good at this: it will generate a 15-page document that you’re never going to read. So often I would tell it, “No, give me five bullet points. What am I trying to do? Yeah, feel free to write the 15-page document, but what are the five that I’m going to remember in my brain?” And then, once you’ve made your decision on, okay, this is what I’m going to spend the quarter on, what I do every week is I created something called a Monday standup. This is something that is very common in corporate and startup culture. Back when I was in consulting, sometimes every day, depending on the project, but at least every week, I would meet with my team and we would do something called a stand-up, where we would sit down and say, “Here are all the priorities for the week. Who’s taking what? What is the status of that?” People would chime in with “this is what I’m owning, and here are the dependencies I have against that.” Somebody else would say, “Well, Shruthi, you’re blocking this thing, so I need that so that I can go to this client.” And so I’ve basically trained my AI to generate a version of that. Every Monday morning, eight o’clock, I get an email in my inbox that just says, “Here’s what’s happening with the blog, here’s what’s worth my time this week.” And there’s a simple version of it that you can start with, and then there are more complex versions that take a lot more wiring. Because again, like I said, all of this depends on where your source of truth is. If your to-do list lives on your desk, on a notepad, in ClickUp, in your calendar, somewhere on your notes app, nothing is going to be able to consolidate that. So step one is actually figuring out which one you actually use the most. And ideally it’s digital, because AI can’t write on your desk. I still put stuff down on paper when it’s “okay, these are the three things I need to do today.” But I use Airtable for my tracking. Notion’s great, ClickUp’s great, Trello’s great, they all have their pros and cons, but even Google Docs is fine. Or a sheet, a Google Excel. But you’ve got to pick something and say, “This is the source of truth,” which means anytime AI goes… because a Monday stand-up is not going to be effective if your list is always outdated and you’re like, “Well, I actually finished that, but you just didn’t mark it there.” It can’t read your mind, exactly.

[26:45] Megan Porta

Hm.

[27:34] Megan Porta

So great.

[28:14] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[28:46] Megan Porta

Yeah. It can’t read your mind. Yeah, unfortunately.

[28:56] Shruthi

And then I say, with the Monday weekly stuff, I start with hours, not with tasks, because the tasks will always fill the hours you have. I think it’s called the Peterson principle: the work will expand to fill the time you have available. Parkinson’s, that’s right. Yep, you’re right. It was Parkinson, not Peterson. This is roughly there.

[29:04] Megan Porta

Okay.

[29:07] Megan Porta

Mm, yeah. I think Parkinson’s Law. Yeah.

[29:16] Megan Porta

Whatever, Peterson, Parkinson. Oh, that is so true. Can I ask you a question about the Monday thing? So you have basically something set in the background so that Claude checks XYZ and then sends you an email, and then you have a plan for the week. Is that right?

[29:22] Shruthi

Yeah, yeah, of course.

[29:32] Shruthi

Correct.

[29:37] Shruthi

That is correct. Yeah. And it starts with the hours. So Claude is connected to my Google Calendar. It’s connected to my Airtable. It’s connected to my email. It’s also connected to my other data sources. So for instance, I have it live-wired to my Google Search Console and analytics. But if you have a tool like Clarity or [unclear], or Phynite, you can connect it there too. Essentially your ecosystem is all connected. And there are two pieces to it. One part is just recounting how things are going, and that’s where the data tools are really helpful. I think a lot of the tools actually do this separately as well, so you don’t need to have this as part of your stand-up. But for me, that’s one other email I have to read. I’d rather have everything in one place, because what is happening will also impact what you’re going to do that week. And then it goes and looks at my calendar and says, how many hours do I actually have, right? Because I also put all my appointments on my calendar. And that’s important. You don’t have to put it on your calendar, but then you have to commit to actually telling Claude on Monday mornings, “Here’s what I have for the week.” You are probably keeping track of it somewhere, right? If you have a school thing that you have to go to, a doctor’s appointment, something for your car service, or whatever, all of those things end up on my calendar, which means Claude can scan Monday to Friday, eight to five, and tell me, “Well, Shruthi, you actually only have 20 hours this week.” And the next layer of that is to actually have blocks for the things that are baseload and repetitive, like I was saying before. For instance, my daughter is not at home and she naps between, call it, two to three-thirty every day. Back in the summer, when the sunshine was more reliable, that was the time that I would film, because the house is quiet and I know that she’s not going to knock over my tripod or something like that. I used to have a block two to three every day just to film. So that is part of my working hours, but that hour is usually already allocated to something, so I don’t double dip into it. Because that’s what happens when you don’t have blocks: your brain assumes that you have way more space available. And then you feel guilty because at the end of the day you’re like, “Shoot, I wanted to get all of this stuff done.” And you completely discount what you actually did get done.

[29:45] Megan Porta

Okay.

[30:41] Megan Porta

Mm-hmm.

[31:33] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[31:36] Megan Porta

Ha ha ha.

[31:59] Megan Porta

That’s so true. I know.

[32:06] Megan Porta

Yes. I think we all do that. And the whole not judging the time right is such a problem. So something I used to do, I haven’t done it in a long time, is track my time. It’s so revealing. Is this something that you do as well?

[32:09] Shruthi

Yeah.

[32:14] Shruthi

Uh-huh.

[32:19] Shruthi

Mm.

[32:23] Shruthi

In a circuitous way, yes. I don’t use a time tracker or anything like that, but I actually try to keep my calendar updated. This is what I was saying with the Monday stand-up: it reads the hours and then it tells me, “Okay, you have 20 hours, and for your big project you can take up five hours, but here’s other stuff that you have going that you might be able to fill in here,” especially if it has a deadline. Like I needed to file tax-related things, and it was like, “You’ve got to do that today. That’s just not going to go away.”

[32:45] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[32:54] Megan Porta

Yeah. Some things do have deadlines, yes.

[32:58] Shruthi

And the other part of this is also having the discipline to close the loop. Monday stand-ups are one thing; they just give me, okay, here’s the week. And then if you want, you can replicate the same structure as a daily stand-up too. Some people like it, some people think it’s too much. I think it’s really on a case-by-case basis. But what I do is at the end of the day, usually around 9 p.m., when I’ve put my daughter to bed and I have a few moments, if I sit down or I’m cleaning up or something, I will open all of my work stuff. Everything related to my blog lives in one project in Claude. And so I’ll just open a new chat. I have a reminder every night at nine p.m. to prompt me to tell Claude what I actually finished. That’s what I call a stand-down, and it’s equally important, right? Because if you have your list of 110 tasks and you got through three today, it should come down, but a lot of times you don’t remember. And that’s how lists get outdated. And then you lose trust, because you’re like, “Well, I actually finished that,” but it didn’t know that I finished it. “Why are you telling me to do this when I’ve already done it?” And quickly that erodes your trust in the process. It might seem like a lot of process, but you’ll find that the first two weeks feel like, “My God, why am I doing this?” And then it just becomes second nature.

[33:07] Megan Porta

Mm-hmm.

[33:47] Megan Porta

Nice. Like that.

[34:01] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[34:24] Megan Porta

Yeah. Right. And then AI has more data from you to build on, like, “You did this, you accomplished this two weeks ago,” whatever. So you’re building your archive as you go, I guess.

[34:36] Shruthi

Yes, and because of pattern matching, if you were prioritizing something and then you just didn’t do it today, you didn’t do it tomorrow, you didn’t do it the day after, at some point my Claude, very sassy, will be like, “Shruthi, you said that you really wanted to do this YouTube thing, and this is the third week in a row where we’ve gone an entire week without you prioritizing that. You’ve literally done everything else.” And I was like, you’re right. Ha ha ha.

[34:39] Megan Porta

Right. Yeah.

[34:48] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[34:54] Megan Porta

Mm-hmm.

[35:02] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[35:04] Megan Porta

So do you ever get to a point where you’re like, “Okay, we need to reassess. Let’s talk about this again. YouTube is not happening right now,” and then you rewrite a plan?

[35:13] Shruthi

Once a quarter. I try to stick to things once a quarter. But occasionally, yes, it does happen. For instance, I had thought I was going to extend my Instagram priority. The first one ran, I think, from when I took over in May through, whatever, the end of July. And I thought, okay, I’ll just extend it. I’ll do one more sprint, because I was doing really well. I was like, ooh, I wonder if I can hit fifty thousand before the end of the year. I wanted to set myself some real goals. And then I found out I was pregnant with our second baby. And in the first trimester, I just hit a wall. The last thing I wanted to do was film food, so that definitely did not happen that way. And instead I focused on a digital product and tried to get some of that stuff done. You do pivot. Stuff happens. Sometimes the gas breaks down and you’re like, “Great.” Or you were doing a kitchen remodel, right? You could have just been like, “Shoot, I’m just not going to do it.” Or you might say, “I’m just going to power through and figure out a workaround.” Some things you can work around, some things you might not be able to. If you have a sick child, or you’re caregiving for somebody else, or your husband had something crazy happen at work and you’re suddenly adjusting, or whatever, right? There are so many things that can go off plan. And I think that’s the best part of this job, that you have the flexibility. And maybe the good thing about all of us having a billion big projects that we could be doing at any given time is that hopefully, when you did your quarterly prioritization, you had one or two other things that were close, in the top three, and you just say, okay, I’m not doing the first one, I’m going to go to the next one on the list. The key is you start learning yourself a little bit better over time, in terms of how much runway you need to give to a specific project before you know instinctively whether this is going to work or not. Because I feel… yeah, exactly.

[35:18] Megan Porta

Okay.

[35:49] Megan Porta

Hmm. Yeah.

[35:51] Megan Porta

Yeah, absolutely.

[36:08] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[36:17] Megan Porta

Yeah, I know.

[36:37] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[37:29] Megan Porta

Should I keep going? Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So if somebody’s listening and they’re like, “Well, this sounds great, Shruthi. You’ve nailed it. You’ve got the system,” but they maybe don’t know where to start. So we talked about the brain dump. Start there. And then from there, do you just recommend using AI to help guide the process? Or where do they go after the brain dump?

[37:54] Shruthi

Yeah, so I’m happy to share, I can share a link with you after the podcast, Megan. I’m happy to share my quarterly prioritizer as well as my Monday stand-up, the actual process that I use. I’m happy to put it in a document somewhere so folks can then just go into the project that you use for your blog, in whatever tool of choice, and just start there, because it’ll usually prompt you. The way I have it set up, it’s not going to let you go to the next step unless you pick where your source of truth lives. But that’s where I would start. And even if you decide you’re staunchly anti-AI, you’re like, “I hate AI, I don’t like the idea of machines doing blah,” you can literally even do this on paper, right? You just need a day to sit down and think about all the buckets of work that you have, and write down a crazy master list of everything that you need to do. And then you can do the work manually too. I think a lot of us did before AI came about. You can group things. Before Claude rolled out, when I was in consulting, we would literally have an Excel spreadsheet where the column headers would be groups of tasks. For instance, it could be, whatever, social versus newsletter versus blah. And then you just write down stuff in there, and then you can go and look at it and mark it up. So it’s not… yeah. Sorry, go on.

[38:08] Megan Porta

That would be amazing. Yeah.

[38:27] Megan Porta

Yeah. Right.

[38:32] Megan Porta

Okay.

[38:36] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[38:43] Megan Porta

Hm.

[39:03] Megan Porta

Yes. Yeah.

[39:19] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[39:26] Megan Porta

Yeah, I mean, that works too. Yeah. And just to… yeah, you can go either way. Obviously AI is going to make it a little bit quicker, but…

[39:38] Shruthi

Mm-hmm. For sure.

[39:39] Megan Porta

I was also going to say this episode is going live on November ninth. I just want to confirm that, yes. So we’re not quite peaked at Q4, right? We’ve got Thanksgiving coming up, we have all of the holiday hosting, and dessert, cookie trays, and Christmas. So you can sit down and do this before the peak really hits, which is good news. I think this is so timely, and we didn’t even plan it that way. Yeah.

[39:57] Shruthi

Yeah.

[40:10] Shruthi

Yeah, that’s great.

[40:13] Megan Porta

Anything else people need to know about your process or getting set up or anything in this topic?

[40:22] Shruthi

The thing I always say is that AI is good at a lot of things and AI is terrible at a lot of things. I think most of us instinctively recognize that, right? For instance, I don’t develop recipes with AI. I might feed it a recipe I’ve already written to make sure it follows my standardization, like “clove of garlic” versus “cloves of garlic,” whatever, right? That stuff, sure. It’s not really changing the content. It’s proofreading. What I hand off is all of the repetitive work that depends on remembering things or recognizing patterns. But at the same time, I think we spoke about this at the start of the episode, it’s really good at presenting itself as an expert. But don’t automate any process that you haven’t proven to work, because then you’re just automating something that is not working. For instance, with the quarterly prioritizer or the Monday stand-up, it’s automated in the sense that you can have it email you a copy every week. But run it sitting in front of your desk, Monday morning, 9 a.m., whenever you get to your desk. Run it a couple of Mondays. See what you like, see what you don’t like. Argue with it. Tell it, “This part is totally not helpful to me,” because then you actually have outputs that you will use. And once you’re like, “Okay, over the last two Mondays this has repeatedly generated an output that is usable,” then you can automate it. Otherwise you’re just automating something broken. The best systems are the ones that you are actually going to use. And if you’re going to keep fixing the same thing over and over, the problem’s not usually the AI or the output. It’s that something in your setup was not properly tested or pushed upon. So argue with your AI. You own your business and you know your brain and your business the best. What it is good at doing is extracting the things that you might have forgotten or that get pushed to the wayside. That’s how I think about the role of AI in business: it’s not to replace you. It’s to do the things that you really don’t like doing, especially when it’s repetitive.

[40:49] Megan Porta

Yeah.

[40:51] Megan Porta

Right.

[42:14] Megan Porta

Mm.

[42:26] Megan Porta

Yes.

[42:35] Megan Porta

Right.

[42:48] Megan Porta

Yes.

[42:51] Megan Porta

Yeah, I think we can fall into that: “Well, since it’s a robot, it knows best.” But it doesn’t. There are so many times where I’m like, “Hold on a second. I am the human. That does not work.” And then it’s like, “You’re right, Megan. I am so sorry.” And it concedes, but yeah, you have to remember that you are the human. You are the person that started this business. It is not in charge. And you have the right to bring out your humanity and keep that alive. So…

[42:59] Shruthi

Mm-hmm.

[43:04] Shruthi

You go.

[43:19] Shruthi

Exactly.

[43:20] Megan Porta

Good thing to end on. Good reminder. And I love this conversation, Shruthi. Thank you so much for this. And I also love that you’ve just decided to dig into AI in this cool way that’s really helpful for your business. And you’ve had a year of congratulations, right? Quitting your job, you’re pregnant with your second child. So happy for you. So many cool things came your way this year. So good to talk to you again. Thanks for joining us.

[43:42] Shruthi

Yeah. Thank you.

[43:50] Shruthi

Yeah, no, absolutely.

[43:51] Megan Porta

And food bloggers, I hope this was really helpful for you. If people want to get in touch with you, Shruthi, are you running any other courses, or is there anything else that’s helpful that we need to hear about?

[44:03] Shruthi

Yeah, so the last two times that I ran the course, I did it as a live challenge. It was a four-week structured process. Folks would join and I would guide them through the process. But after having done it twice, I realized some people want the accountability, but not necessarily just the four weeks, because life gets in the way. So the whole system has now migrated into a self-paced course. But you get three months of community access, so if you have questions, I’ll do office hours once a month. That way folks can pick and choose the modules they really want to tackle and also take it at their own pace. And I’m happy to share a link to the course, and your listeners will get a coupon for $100 off if they use EBT. So I will set that up as well.

[44:35] Megan Porta

Awesome.

[44:56] Megan Porta

Amazing. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. And…

[44:59] Shruthi

And if people want to email me, they can find me on Instagram or email. Happy to answer any questions that come up too.

[45:09] Megan Porta

Yeah, and your Instagram handle is just Urban Farmie with an IE, correct? Okay.

[45:12] Shruthi

Correct. That’s right.

[45:14] Megan Porta

So find Shruthi there if you’re interested. Thank you for all of this again, and thank you so much for listening, food bloggers. I will see you next time.