I like to swim four or five mornings a week. For a while, booking the pool time was the most annoying part of the routine.
The reservation system was outdated and clumsy. The search barely worked, and I could book a lane only four days ahead. The good morning blocks filled fast, often within minutes of the window opening at midnight. So keeping my regular schedule meant logging in almost every day, finding the right day and time, and clicking through the same checkout steps again and again. Miss a day, and someone else took my lane.
It was a small chore. But it repeated, it ran on a clock, and it followed fixed rules. That combination is what AI handles well.
So I stopped doing it by hand. I set up an AI routine to book the swims for me.
Here is what it does. Twice a day, once right after midnight and again in the early morning, it signs in to the booking site. It reads my existing reservations first, so it never double-books. It looks at every open swim day inside the window, finds the time block I want for that day, and reserves it. I gave it a few simple rules: book only in the mornings, skip Tuesdays (I have an early meeting then), and skip Sundays.
Cancellations were the part I liked. A slot that is full today is often open tomorrow, because people drop out. So the routine does not quit after one failed try. It keeps attempting a full day on every run, up until the day before, waiting for someone to release a spot. When it wins one, the swim shows up on my calendar. When a day cannot be booked at all, I get an alert. A miss is never silent.
Now I do not think about it. I show up and swim.
Here is why I am writing this down.
I run an I.T. company. At CIO Landing, my team and I spend our days automating technical work for other businesses. I think about AI for a living. And still, the thing that changed my week was pointing it at a pool reservation, something with nothing to do with my job.
Most people wait for AI to arrive inside the software they already use at work. That will come. But you do not have to wait for it. The small, repeating, rule-based chores in your own life are sitting right there. A booking you redo every week. A form you fill out the same way every month. A report you copy and paste from one place to another. Those are the tasks AI is good at today.
The skill worth building is noticing them. Once you see one chore that runs on a schedule and follows a fixed set of rules, you start seeing them everywhere. This swim booking is one of many automations I am building. What will yours be? Think outside the box.
You do not need to be technical to start. You need to look at your week and ask one question: what do I keep doing by hand that stays the same every time? Then point AI at that.
That is the whole idea. Look past the obvious uses. The good ones are hiding in your ordinary week. For this one, I used Claude Cowork, running on a separate, clean computer dedicated to these projects and disconnected from my work systems. If you are going to let AI take the wheel, put guardrails in place to keep it going where you want it to.