Hey beautiful human,
Tuesday started at 4:30AM.
Not because I'm a morning person. Because Smidge had to be at his office 30 miles away and I had three things to handle before noon: oil change, haircut, pedicure.
For most people, that's just a Tuesday.
For me - ADHD, no daytime car access, nerve damage in my feet since 2016, and a calendar full of calls I couldn't move - it was a logistics puzzle that needed actual solving. So I did what I do. I opened Perplexity, mapped the stops, estimated the times, built everything around the calls.
Executive function, outsourced.
It was going beautifully until the pedicure ran 105 minutes instead of 60 and I found myself sitting in a spa chair, feet submerged, joining my virtual book club and a StartupExperts call. In a nail salon. In public.
totally normal business meeting. nothing to see here. please do not zoom out.
(For the record: pedicures are not relaxing for me. Nerve damage means they range from uncomfortable to nope depending on the day. Add two calls, a packed waiting room, and 45 extra minutes I didn't have? Full sensory experience. Nobody asked for it. I survived it.)
I scheduled it.
After months of deciding pedicures were a luxury I couldn't justify - the math had opinions, as it does - I put it on the calendar. Got up at 4:30AM for it. Built a whole routing situation around it. Because I was speaking at Minnebar20 on Saturday and I was going to be on the Best Buy corporate campus in front of a tech audience and I could not with the state of my toes.
The whole week had that same energy. Things I'd been quietly holding space for just... showed up.
I got pulled into an AI Partner network with Nobody Studios - basically I'm on their roster of AI experts now, and when projects come up that match my brand of this work, I'll be in the mix. Already met some genuinely interesting folx. Still watching to see what it becomes.
Emily Worden reached out about doing more work around AI in job search. More on that as it develops.
And Saturday I gave my first real public talk since going out on my own. Minnebar20. A 5-minute AI Lightning round (I'd originally signed up for 40 minutes and scaled way back - good call). My angle: AI is a language tool. At a tech conference.
Yes I was a little nervous about that. No I would not have said it differently.
Minnebar is an unconference - built by and for the people who show up every year - so the room was warm and genuinely curious. I left feeling like I'd said a true thing to the right people. The full video is over in Last Week's Shenanigans if you want to see it.
The weekend wrapped with a MindStudio hackathon using their newest tool, Remy. Some of you might remember my SheBuilds buildathon last October where I made a very basic version of my Toodle (to-do list + noodle - it makes sense when you see it). I tried to turn it into a mobile app with Remy. Mixed results. But it exists, it has a vote button, and I am not above asking for upvotes.
The consistent thread through all of it: trust. In what I'm building. In the connections that keep showing up. In the Tuesday that needed a 4:30AM alarm and a Perplexity routing plan just so I could have decent toes for a speaking gig.
This is what it looks like right now. And honestly? I'm good with it.
Radical remembering
Here's what I keep forgetting: you're worth planning around.
Not after everything settles. Not once you've earned it. Right now, in the middle of whatever this is.
I drove 30 miles at 4:30AM so I could get a pedicure I'd been putting off since September. It cost money I'd been calling a luxury. It ran 45 minutes over and I ended up on two calls in a nail salon pretending to be a professional person with normal feet.
Still worth it.
You have a version of this. The appointment that keeps getting bumped. The errand that needs more coordination than it should. The thing you keep deciding you'll do when things calm down.
Things don't calm down.
Schedule it. Not as a reward. Just because it's yours.
Last week’s shenanigans
I don’t remember much of this past week (the gift and curse of having ADHD) but here are some links to things that touched, moved, inspired me, or simply made me laugh entirely too hard.
Me Speaking at Minnebar20 About AI (Yes, Someone Filmed It)
Fair warning: the sound is a little funky because Smidge filmed it on his iPhone like the supportive husband he is. It's 4 minutes and 47 seconds. I've watched it once and spent the whole time cringing at every place I went off script. You will probably have a much better time watching it than I did. The short version of what you'll hear: AI is a language tool, not a tech toy - and that makes you more qualified than you think.
One minute. That's all this needs. If you have ever spent an embarrassing number of hours trying to explain to a chatbot exactly what you want only to have it completely miss the point over and over again - this will make you laugh and wince at the same time. Possibly simultaneously.
My friend Nicole Eisdorfer is one of the most honest humans I know. If she doesn't know something, she says so. If she thinks you're lying to yourself, she'll say that too - warmly, but clearly. In 43 seconds flat, she names the stories we're all walking around with that are not serving us. Every woman needs to see this. Watch it twice.
I'm putting this disclaimer right up front: this video is long. But I laughed so hard I nearly had an incident, and I feel it's only right to share that experience with you. Even the first 30 seconds will do something to you. You'll either furrow your brow in genuine confusion or immediately understand exactly why I am the way I am about Midwesterners.
Partner of the week
Turns out newsletters don't pay for themselves. Who knew?
This week's partner helps keep the lights on (and I’m fascinated by their website and their team…)
Your next great hire lives in Slack.
Viktor is an AI coworker that connects to your tools and ships real work. Ask Viktor to pull a report, build a client dashboard, or source 200 leads matching your ICP. Most teams hand over half their ops within a week.
This week’s freebie
The Slide Deck Shortcut
I built this because I've watched smart women stall out in front of a blank slide deck for longer than the actual presentation takes to write.
It walks you through the whole thing - finding your POV when your brain is mush, one prompt that works in Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini, and three free paths from chatbot to Canva. With a real example all the way through, not a sanitized placeholder.
The Slide Deck Shortcut
Twenty minutes. A real deck. No tech skills required.
ROCO Tip O’ the Week
The Errand Brain Prompt
This one has nothing to do with content creation, email writing, or anything that sounds like an AI use case. This is for the Tuesday where you have three errands, a two-hour window, and zero bandwidth left to figure out the sequencing yourself. Use this in Perplexity. (Free account allows for unlimited regular searches, 5 deep searches a day.)
ROCO = R (Role) - O (Objective) - C (Context) - O (Output)
Paste this in and just answer the questions as they come. That's it.
Role: You are a meticulous errand planner for someone with a tight time window and limited bandwidth for logistics. Ask me one question at a time and wait for my answer before asking the next one.
Objective: Build me an optimized errand route that fits my time window, works around actual business hours, and accounts for when each place is likely to be busiest.
Context: You don't have any information yet. Gather everything you need by asking me one question at a time in this order: where I'm located, what errands I need to run, whether I have specific places in mind or need suggestions, how long each errand typically takes, what my available time window is, and whether I have any hard stops or calls during that window.
Output: Once you have everything, give me a sequenced plan with arrival times, estimated time at each stop, and any tips for reducing wait time. Include actual business hours for each location.When I ran this for my own Tuesday in Minneapolis, it looked up real hours, flagged which stops would be busiest at which times, and suggested I check into Great Clips on their app while sitting at the oil change so my spot was already held. When I said 7AM wasn't going to work because I still needed to shower, it rebuilt the whole plan in about four seconds.
The pedicure still ran long. That part was on me.
(P.S. - I do not recommend doing this in a regular chatbot like ChattyG or Claude. They are not optimized for web-scrapping like Perplexity and may give you out-of-date answers.)
The Matriarchy Minute
The Matriarchy Minute is where I spotlight women doing work in AI that you should know about but probably don't.
This week: Brannon Skillern
Brannon is a former Chief People Officer who looked at AI the same way I did - not as a threat, not as a gimmick, but as something worth actually understanding - and then built a whole business around that instinct.
She's the founder of Carnelian Collective, a fractional CPO, an AI enablement strategist, and one of those rare humans who manages to be deeply competent and genuinely warm at the same time. She's also the person I've been doing B2B AI training with. And watching her work in a room is something. She brings the same HR instincts that made her good at people operations and points them directly at the question of how organizations actually adopt AI - not the pitch deck version, the real version.
Married, kids, running her own business, pivoting into a field that didn't exist five years ago. Doing all of it with humor and a profound amount of grace for other humans. If you're in HR, people ops, or trying to figure out how to bring AI into your organization without it becoming a disaster, she's worth knowing.
Find her at carneliancollective.com.
What’s coming up
Hacking HR: Workplace Wellbeing and Mental Health Summit
Thursday, May 7 | 10:20 AM CDT
I'm on a panel this Thursday: "Early Intervention Strategies: Responding to Wellbeing Risks Before They Escalate." Which is a formal way of saying: let's talk about catching people before they fall apart instead of after.
It's free. It's virtual. Register here.
Friday Jam Session - Joy Prompt Club
Friday, May 8 | 10:30 AM CDT (30 minutes later than usual this week and next!)
Friday Jam Session with Joy Prompt Club. 30 minutes. No agenda. Just prompts, play, and people who get it. Open to anyone who wants to join in and has questions or a problem they’re trying to solve. You do not need to be in Joy Prompt Club to benefit from these fantastic humans.
If someone in your world needs this...
The Executive AI Edge - Digital course (90 minutes) with me and Kate Sargent. $449. For the executive in your life who's nodding along in AI meetings and understanding none of it.
AI Confidential for Teams - The corporate AI training that doesn't sound like corporate AI training. Send the link to whoever's making training decisions at your company.
Joy Prompt Club - My favorite little virtual place in all the interwebz.
AI Confidential Prompt Kits - 10 copy-paste-ready prompt kits for the stuff you actually need help with - resumes, LinkedIn profiles, interview prep, content, career direction, caregiver sanity, all of it.
That’s it for this week.
If the only thing you do this week is schedule the thing you've been bumping - the appointment, the errand, the hour that's just yours - that's enough. That counts.
Take care of yourself, take care of each other.
Deb 💜
P.S. If you try the Perplexity errand prompt, hit reply and tell me what it mapped out for you. I'm genuinely curious what a Tuesday looks like in your world.
P.P.S. The Remy app I built at the hackathon is still sitting there with a vote button and zero shame about asking for upvotes. Link is in the opener if you missed it.