A confirmation email landed in my inbox this week. VIC N Drive Meet. A curated backroads blast with a bunch of fellow Nthusiasts, organised by Hyundai N Australia.

I’m a lifelong revhead. The smell of a good back road on a cool morning, a car that actually wants to be driven hard, and people who feel the same way about it - that’s a perfect Saturday. The i30 N is the best bang-for-buck hot hatch on the market, and I’ll die on that hill.

I’m registered, I’m keen, and I already had the booking email and a calendar entry sorted.

Then I asked Claude Cowork a simple question: “I have these details in my calendar and Gmail - should I capture this information elsewhere? Why? How?"

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The pitch for AI in the workplace has always been about output: write faster, analyse more, respond at scale. And the tools deliver on that. They deliver relentlessly. The problem is that more output doesn’t automatically mean more throughput. Sometimes it means more to review, more to cross-check, more decisions to make before anything ships.

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My last website was built in 2014. Not “maintained in 2014” - built from scratch, tweaked, launched and then mostly left alone. Since then, the skills have sat in a corner gathering dust, relevant only to projects that drifted off the priority list and stayed there.

So when I recently spun up something new and realised the www subdomain wasn’t resolving - visitors typing www.whatever were hitting nothing - I did that familiar thing: the slow, reluctant calculation of how much time it was going to take to remember what a DNS record even is, which type I needed and where exactly in the interface the setting lived.

I logged into Cloudflare. And then, mostly out of curiosity, I tried the help bot.

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Every few months, another “how to set up Obsidian so it really works for you” essay does the rounds.

This morning I found yet another one. It looked good. Genuinely thorough. The kind of post where someone has clearly spent weeks refining their setup and another week writing about it.

And I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

Do I read it now? File it somewhere? But where? The irony of not knowing how to file a productivity system article inside your productivity system is not lost on me.

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Relentless Productivity™ has a dark side. The more capable your tools, the faster the work accumulates - and with Claude Cowork, that accumulation happens session by session, each one spawning its own entry in an ever-growing sidebar list that becomes harder to read by the day. I know this from experience. My Cowork sidebar had grown to the point where I could no longer tell what was live, what was done and what was waiting.

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As I prepared to race out the door this morning, I snatched up the hand-scribbled agenda for the team meeting and thought: “Oh, at a minimum, I should photograph this.” So I don’t lose the piece of paper. The next thought was: “Hey, I should send this to Claude.” Before I knew it, Claude had read it and turned it into a proper document - ready to throw into the stack for the day ahead.

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Geir Isene sat down at his computer last week and realised something unusual. Almost every program he touched - the window manager, the text editor, the file manager, the terminal, the email client, the calendar - was software he wrote himself. In a few weeks, with Claude Code as his engineering partner, he had replaced his entire desktop computing environment. All of it command line. All of it terminal-native. All of it his.

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A friend of mine, let’s call her Jane, runs a marketing consultancy. Fifteen years in, small team, strong client list, had used Claude for chat only. I offered to spend an hour showing her what’s possible now we’re well beyond that. Wednesday night I realised winging a 75-minute demo next morning would burn too much time on navigation and too little on value. I opened Claude Cowork, uploaded a brief I’d quickly hacked together from emails and went on with my evening.

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