If you are reading The Leverage Years, you are probably the kind of person who has read about AI tools, opened them once or twice, and quietly closed the tab. Not because they were bad. Because they did not feel like they were for you yet.
There is a smaller commitment than "use Claude every day." The smallest one that still produces a useful result is ten minutes a week. Below is what to do with it.
The ten minutes
Pick a real piece of work you would have done anyway this week. A recap memo. A reply to a complicated email. A first-pass summary of a long document. Something where a junior associate, if you had one available, would have produced the first draft.
Open Claude. Paste a sanitised version of the input (use placeholders for names). Ask it to do the first draft. Read what comes back. Edit it the way you would edit a junior's work.
That is the whole exercise.
Why this works when daily use does not
For senior professionals, daily AI use is the wrong fight to pick early. It feels artificial. You end up using the tool for things that did not need it.
Ten minutes a week, on one real piece of work, is different. It anchors the tool to the kind of work you already do. The first time the draft is genuinely useful, you will remember. The second time, you will start to reach for it on a Tuesday morning without thinking.
That is the moment AI becomes useful to you. Not before.
What to expect on week one
The first draft will be too polite, slightly generic, and miss the one judgment call that mattered. You will edit it. The edit will take more time than you wanted.
By week three, the prompt will be sharper. By week six, the edits will be smaller. By week twelve, you will run this loop without thinking, on the kinds of work where it helps, and you will not run it on the kinds of work where it does not.
One Weekly Briefing. One thing to try.
The Club is built for the ten-minutes-a-week person. Every Monday, one short briefing. One prompt. One workflow. Read it on the couch. Use it on Tuesday. Skip the rest.
The one rule
Use a real piece of work. Not a fake one. Not a tutorial. Not "tell me a joke." A real recap, a real follow-up, a real review. The tool is only ever as useful as the work you point it at.
That is the whole letter. Ten minutes. One real piece of work. Then go back to your week.
Filed under Letter · The Leverage Years · Vol. I, Issue 04.