Picture this. It's 9pm and you're lying in bed after an exhausting day…where you got nothing done.

It's not that you hadn't tried — the day started with the best intentions. You woke up bright and cheery, your coffee was perfectly balanced, your jam was on the morning playlist. "Today is going to be a great day," you thought.

Until it wasn't.

Somewhere between then and now, all that happened was a lot of n o t h i n g. Email chains going in circles, meetings appearing from nowhere, and that lunch break that turned into a lunch situation. Suddenly it was 5pm and that important document — the one sitting in the back of your mind all day — was still unopened.

"One more hour," you say to yourself, opening Word. But the only thing stronger by 6pm is your relationship with Instagram. (Or in my case, you've just lost a bunch of 3-minute chess matches.) Your energy is depleted; you feel defeated.

Now it's 9pm and your mind is racing about everything you need to catch up on tomorrow. But tomorrow might be more of the same. How do you escape this?

We all have nothing days. I want to tell you how I'm using AI to stop fighting them and embrace the real me.

Now imagine this: at 9am tomorrow, instead of a blank doc staring back at you, you open a fleshed-out document with sensible structure and first-draft content that's actually a pretty close expression of what you've been wanting to say all along.

This happened to me this week; Monday was a nothing day. That night, lying in bed while my partner was scrolling Instagram, my brain finally decided to work (I’d already done the Instagram thing… and the chess thing). So I opened Claude on my phone and just... vented.

I told it what was weighing on me — the proposals I hadn’t started, the ideas I couldn't organize, the guilt I was carrying. But here's what made this different: earlier this year, I connected Claude to my meeting transcripts and my cloud drive. So when I mentioned the proposal I needed to write, it didn't start from zero. It started from me. It was able to look at what I'd actually said in meetings, it could read what the proposal actually needed. When I vented, it connected the dots.

Claude suggested a proposal structure. I pushed back — "that's not quite right, it should be more like this." It challenged me. I challenged it. Twenty minutes of back-and-forth, lying in bed, turning my midnight mess into crystal clarity.

When I said "go," it made a complete Word document — a formatted, structured, genuine expression of my ideas, saved directly to my cloud drive ready for me in the morning.

Here's the energy breakthrough: If I'd kept scrolling, I would've been thinking about this stuff anyway. It would've kept me up, ruined my sleep, and left me even more depleted in the morning. Instead, my mind-spinning created something real. And I slept great! I woke up to my own ideas on paper and after a series of mindful edits I shipped my proposal by noon. 

I’m not saying you should work late hours. I’m saying you can follow your energy, because the nature of work is changing in front of our eyes.

Here's what's becoming clear to me: AI means good work is now about clarity of thought, not hours of execution. AI can execute. You think. And thinking doesn't care what time it is.

But the real unlock isn't just AI itself — it's the infrastructure that connects AI to your context. When your AI is connected, you don't need to be at a computer to capture good thinking. You just need a way to speak it and point at the dots you need connected. When AI is effectively hooked up to your context, you can do this from anywhere: from bed, on a walk, at a graduation ceremony while waiting two hours for your person to cross the stage (true story).

So the next time you feel your 9-to-5 slipping away into nothing, embrace it — it's your body telling you what it needs. Go for that walk. Take that long lunch. Laugh with your colleagues. Buy your spouse flowers. Some days your energy shows up at 9am and some days it shows up at 9pm. Your clarity will show up when it's ready — not always when you think it “should.”

Build the pipes. Then follow your energy.

Curious how I use Claude Connectors and MCP to connect my drive and meeting notes? Reply and I'll point you in the right direction. And if you’re not ready to make the full integration, here’s my challenge to you: start a project by copy/pasting all of the context you have into a new Claude chat…then just start venting.

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