Mostly Human #63: Turns Out I Only Do Admin in Hospitals

Coming to you from Fargo.

Here was the plan. My sister-in-love Brigitte was having surgery. Then we'd drive up this weekend so her step-daughter could get married into a hospital room over FaceTime. Everybody in one place, more or less, the way families manage it now.

What we didn't know was how long the surgery would run. Or that when it finally ended they'd take her straight to the ICU.

They had to take much more than they expected. She came out of it with a tissue graft inside her throat and a scar about ten inches long, curving from behind her ear to almost the middle of her throat.

Smidge got the message and came to find me and couldn't get a single word out. He just stood there.

That's when I told him we were leaving Wednesday.

Then a flurry of packing and math. How do you pay for a hotel on three days' notice... you use Hilton points you forgot you had from years ago, and you thank the folx who bought Summer School. Turns out spending days and weeks with ailing relatives eventually pays off. In Hilton points.

I've sat in this chair before. Different hospital, different city. Two adoptive parents, one bio parent, a few friends I loved very much. Fifteen years of learning what this particular chair feels like.

It's hard not being able to do anything when the people you love are in pain.

So you do the small things.

You advocate, because you have to. There are too few qualified people for the number of people who need care. I'm not throwing anything at the nurses and the doctors. What that job takes, the commitment and the sheer physical strength of it, I have deep admiration for. We live in a broken system, and the ones it hurts worst are the people working inside it and the people depending on it.

Which means somebody who loves the patient has to sit in that room and fill in the gaps.

Somebody always does. Look around the room sometime and see who it is. Who took the unpaid days off. Who noticed the IV was beeping and went to go find somebody. Who's keeping the list of questions in her phone, ready for the thirty seconds she'll get with a doctor in a hallway.

It's a woman. It's almost always a woman.

A few things I know now, in case you ever need them:

Go in shifts, and say the handoff out loud so nobody is guessing.

Be the runner. Food, a phone charger, a comb, an extension cord. Somebody always needs something, and going to get it is a real job.

Plan for the nothing. There is SO much nothing. Hours of it.

And when you've done every single thing you can actually do, you sit there and be witness, and comfort them with your presence.

Which brings me to the strangest part of Saturday.

I spent the afternoon in a room with Brigitte, my niece, and my hubby. And I did admin. Real admin. I set up Workona. It keeps everything for one project in one place, and I'm fairly sure it's going to fix the tracking mess I've had across my clients and my offerings.

I have had this app for months. I've never once sat down and set it up properly. It took 90 minutes.

Leave me alone in my office with that job and twenty minutes later I'm generating a picture of something ridiculous, or building a small app that nobody asked for and nobody needs. Put me in a chair next to people I love, with nothing else to do, and it just... got done.

There's a name for it. Body doubling. Somebody else is in the room and your brain stops negotiating with itself.

This many years in and I'm still finding out how my own head works.

I did not come to Fargo to fix my project tracking. I'll take it.

The wedding happened. A laptop propped open in a hospital room, a girl getting married on the other end of it, and from our side of the screen it went perfectly.

Brigitte was glad to witness it. She was also distracted and a bit overheated, having just done her first lap of the hospital corridors. And slightly stymied by the older lady who lapped her.

Now we're four hours from home with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban going, and I'm in the passenger seat.

Which is a luxury I got when I found my life partner at 43. Later than that, honestly, because I then had to learn how to let somebody else drive after most of my life lived as a single woman. That's a whole nother story.

Being a passenger can be lovely.

Here's what I keep forgetting: sitting there is the work.

We were raised to believe work leaves evidence. A file, a meal, a clean kitchen. Something a person can point at. No evidence, no contribution, and you should probably apologize for the day.

So a woman sits in a hospital chair for nine hours and tells her friend on the phone she's just been sitting around.

She caught the thing nobody else caught. She knew which question to ask and who to ask it of. She held the room steady so the woman in the bed didn't have to hold it herself.

None of it files anywhere.

We discount all of it the same way. The listening. The remembering of birthdays and dosages and which cousin isn't speaking to which one. The showing up and staying.

It costs what work costs. Almost nobody thanks you for it, because they can't see where it went.

You still did it. Count it.

Three this week. If you're new here, this is where I share the stuffs I encountered on the interwebs that touch, move, inspire, or simply make me snort-laugh.

Professor Glitch (7:43)
I know, it's a long one. But it's one of the best explainers I've seen on setting up your AI workspace so it does what you want it to do. Plain language. No jargon. I'm gonna be using this one to help me teach other people. It's that good.

Lettuce or something (1:08, WARNING: NSFW)
The funny stuff today seems to be swear-y. This one made me snort real bad, partially 'cause of the mobile game we played in Brigitte's room that required coming up with a body part starting with 'u' between Ureter and Uvula. She lay there and let us entertain her with it. ICU on Wednesday, Uvulas on Saturday. I don't think we ever figured it out.

Archie the Frenchie (under 10 seconds)
10 seconds of Archie, possibly less, is all you need this morning. I'm a cat person (like you couldn't tell) but this puppy and his ilk sometimes make me question my loyalty.

The doctor came in, said fourteen things, and left. You caught four. One of the four you're not even sure about.

That's not a memory problem. Nobody retains new information delivered at speed by a stranger while a person they love is in a bed three feet away. Your brain is busy.

Try to write down what you remember and you'll get four lines and stop. Get asked questions instead and more comes back, because you're being asked about the room rather than the medicine. What time was it. Who else was standing there. Did anybody hand you a piece of paper.

So this one interviews you. One question at a time. It stops after 8, or sooner if you tell it to.

Apply it this week
You don't need a crisis. A routine appointment where you always forget the one thing you meant to ask. A parent's appointment you're driving them to. The specialist you waited five months to see.

Or a vet appointment. Works the same and nobody's scared.

Want to go deeper?
Run it in the car park before you go in, not after you come out. Answer the questions about what you're worried about instead of what you remember, and you walk in with the list already made.

Then put the list in your phone's notes app, not in the chat. You'll be in a hallway with no signal.

Three quick hits, every week. The Scoop: one AI word, decoded. The Skinny: one move you can steal today. The Lowdown: one tool, one honest verdict, from my own use. A word, a move, a verdict. In and out.

THE SCOOP
Custom Instructions

Every chat you open starts with the AI knowing nothing about you. So you explain yourself. Again. Every time.

Custom instructions are the box where you write it down once. Who you are, what you do, how you want to be spoken to, what to never do. It gets read at the start of every chat, as soon as you send your first message (which can honestly be a simple, “hello”.)

Not the same thing as Memory. Memory is the AI making its own notes about what you’ve done together. This is you telling it, on purpose.

Every tool calls it something different, which is annoying of them:

ChatGPT: Custom Instructions, under Settings then Personalization.

Claude: Instructions for Claude. Click your initials, bottom left, then Settings.

Gemini: Instructions for Gemini, under Personal Intelligence.

Perplexity: Introduce yourself, under Personalize.

(Gemini's isn't switched on yet in the UK, the EU, Switzerland or Nigeria. If you're reading from one of those and can't find it, it's not you.)

Mine has a list of words it isn't allowed to use. Leverage. Synergy. Unlock. Empower. Robust. Seamless. It also says to assume I'm competent, overwhelmed, and moving fast, and that if I start writing in corporate jargon it has to say so and rewrite it instead of going along with me.

I wrote that months ago. It reads it at the beginning of every chat conversation.

Here’s why you’d care: most people who try AI then give up, or complain about it not sounding like them never filled out this box. They start from zero every time and then blame the machine for not sounding like them.

It's the highest-return 10 minutes in the whole thing, and it's sitting in a settings menu nobody opens

THE SKINNY
Body doubling

There's a task you've been not doing for months. Not because it's hard. You just can't make yourself start.

Text a friend: "Video call Thursday at 10. 45 minutes. Cameras on, we don't talk. Bring whatever you've been avoiding."

Then run it like this. Say hi. Each of you says out loud what you're about to work on. Then quiet. Heads down, cameras on or off, 45 minutes. At the end you tell each other what you got done, and you thank her like you mean it. She gave you her morning.

She hangs up knowing she made a difference to somebody, which is why she'll say yes the next time you ask.

Nothing clever happens in the quiet part. There's another person there, so the part of your brain that spends 45 minutes negotiating over whether to start has nobody left to negotiate with.

It doesn't matter that she's working on something completely unrelated. It doesn't matter if it's a stranger, there are services that will pair you with one. What matters is that somebody is in the room, even when the room is a rectangle on your screen.

This is one of many things I've found that a chatbot flat out cannot do for you. There's nobody in there.

THE LOWDOWN
This week: Notion

Before Notion I had email, a pile of random files, and a memory that has never been reliable.

Notion is a filing cabinet you build yourself. Mine holds the context I need to be able to pull up for everything else I'm working on, a Capture Board where I dump any website I might want to find again, and every one of my Fathom call recordings.

What it fixed: the oh-sh*t-where-was-that-thing panic. It's a lot quieter now.

The catch, and it's a real one. The thing that makes Notion great is that it arrives completely blank. Build a landing page, a wiki, a database, whatever you want. For a brain like mine that's catnip, and I could spend the rest of my life customizing it and produce nothing. It's also built on blocks, which means typing "/" to get a menu, and if you've spent your working life in Microsoft that is not where your hands go. It took me a while to work out how it’s structured (or not, as the case may be). It's also powerful enough that you can build yourself a rabbit warren you can't find the way out of.

Cost: there’s a free tier. Plus is $10/month. I’m on Business at $20/month, mostly because I got a good deal on it and it makes sharing with other people who use Notion super easy.

Verdict: yes, with one caveat. I’d take a Notion for Dummies beginners course BEFORE setting anything up, instead of the way I actually did it (which was basically download and dive in.)

Summer School with Em & Deb: Session 4
Create More Conversations, Interviews + Offers
Tuesday, August 25, 2026 | 11AM CT/12PM ET

You updated the profile. You posted the thing. Now you're waiting for somebody to notice, and it's quiet.

This one's about starting the conversations yourself instead, and what moves one from a nice chat to an actual interview or an actual offer. Emily & I run it live, with the replay and materials going to everyone registered.

$47 for this session.

Or $177 for all four, which is the only way into Homeroom, Emily's community for job seekers. That also gets you the replays from the first three and this one live. Homeroom is open through September 30th.

Prompt Along: AI Improv
Tuesday, September 22, 2026 | 6:30PM-7:30PM CT (Complimentary)

Prompt Along: AI Improv is my free monthly hour where we play with AI out loud, together. You bring the questions. You bring the curiosity. You bring that one tough problem you've been poking at for three weeks. And we prompt our way through it, live.

Get the invitation from Lu.ma

Before anything else. We left Brigitte on Sunday afternoon and she was wiped out. The fire alarm had gone off that morning, on top of everything else, and she was exhausted. But if she can get food and her meds down by mouth, the feeding tube comes out, and she may get to go home as soon as Monday. She might be in her own bed while you're reading this.

I've been body doubling on Zoom for over a year. Saturday was the first time I've done it in person, and it got 90 minutes out of me that months alone in my office never did. I'm going to see about arranging that more often, ideally without a hospital involved.

Tell me about a time you sat with somebody and came away thinking you hadn't done a thing.

And make time this week to do something good for yourself. Something that makes you happy. No ROI, just because it makes you happy.

💜

Take care of yourself, take care of each other,

Deb