Start With You: Tinker Time is The Real Secret to Unlocking AI at Work
Everywhere I go, people ask the same question: “How can I leverage AI at work?” Well, it’s often worded differently… they actually ask: “WTF do I do with AI?”
It’s a fair question — after all, the pace of change in artificial intelligence has left even the most innovative companies scrambling to keep up. But after speaking at dozens of events over the past few months, I’ve found myself giving the same answer again and again:
Start with you. Before you try to AI-ify your organization, you need to AI-ify yourself.
The only way to truly understand what’s possible with this technology is to integrate it into your own daily life — not just your job. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be far more capable of transforming how your team and your organization operate.
Why Most Organizations Haven’t Become “AI-ified”
Let’s be honest: if AI is so transformative, why haven’t most companies already reinvented themselves around it? The answer isn’t technical — it’s human.
People simply can’t carve out time during their day jobs to learn AI. Tinker time, as I refer to it, is a nice to have, not a must have. Managers rarely make “AI exploration” a priority. And even when they do, something more “urgent” always takes precedence: the client deadline, the team offsite, the quarterly review. AI, ironically, ends up being a “someday” skill in a world that demands real-time results.
The result is a paradox: organizations want to harness AI, but the people within them never get the space to experiment with it. You can’t delegate transformation to a tool — it starts with understanding, and understanding takes time.
The Personal Path to Applied AI
So where do you find that time? The answer isn’t waiting for permission. You find it in the margins — your free time, your side projects, your curiosity. You start by applying AI to your personal life.
That’s exactly what I did over the past three months. I built what I call my personal AI stack — a collection of tools that now power almost everything I do. Here’s a glimpse:
Superhuman helps me write and manage email with AI speed.
Granola records meetings and instantly generates accurate, searchable notes.
Gamma creates beautiful presentations from rough ideas in minutes.
Lovable lets me build software without needing a full dev team.
Supabase helps me stand up databases from scratch — fast.
NotebookLM stores knowledge for all my projects, letting me prompt against my own ideas.
Suno composes AI-generated music, proving creativity and code can coexist beautifully.
These tools aren’t just “nice to have.” They’ve become extensions of my cognition — force multipliers that let me move faster, create more, and stay organized without friction. More importantly, they’ve changed how I think about what’s possible.
My Personal AI Vector Store
But the most powerful piece of my personal AI stack — the real unlock — is what I call my personal AI vector store.
For the uninitiated, a vector store is like a digital brain for your data. Every piece of information — an email, a note, a calendar event, a conversation — is converted into a numerical representation called a vector. These vectors capture the meaning of the information, not just the words. When you query your vector store, AI doesn’t just do a keyword search — it understands context, relationships, and intent.
Here’s how mine works:
Emails from Superhuman
Calendar events and scheduling context from Google Calendar
Meeting notes captured automatically by Granola
Handwritten notes from my iPad, piped in via Apple Shortcuts and n8n
All conversations — what I say and what others say — captured by my Limitless Pendant
All of these inputs flow into my vector store. It’s continuously updated — a living, searchable memory of everything I read, hear, say, and write. From there, I can query it directly (“What did I discuss with Sarah about the MIT course last month?”) or integrate it with AI agents that help me write, plan, or make decisions.
In practice, it feels like having a second brain — one that never forgets, and that can surface insight instantly. It’s the foundation that connects every tool in my AI stack, and it’s how I bridge the gap between personal data and personal intelligence.
When You Start With You, You Scale to Many
Once you’ve personally experienced how AI amplifies your own capabilities, something changes. You stop seeing AI as a distant corporate initiative and start seeing it as an everyday advantage. You begin to notice where it could streamline your team’s workflow, automate the repetitive, or unlock creative output that used to take hours.
And that’s when the real transformation happens: not from the top down, but from the inside out.
The best evangelists for AI in the workplace aren’t executives or consultants — they’re the people who’ve used it to make their own lives better. When those individuals bring their personal AI experience into their professional world, they become catalysts. They model efficiency, curiosity, and innovation in action.
The Future Belongs to the AI-Curious
If you want to future-proof your career, stop waiting for your company to roll out a new AI policy or toolset. Instead, make AI a part of your personal operating system.
Learn to prompt better. Automate your own tasks. Build your own tools. Create your own workflows. Because the future of work isn’t about replacing people with AI — it’s about augmenting people who understand it.
And the only way to truly understand it?
Start with you. Prioritize tinker time.