Accelerated Intuition: The AI Approach That's Helped Me Publish 32 Weeks in a Row
Week 7 of the Making Time Email Mastery Series
TLDR: Incorporating AI into your email program isn’t just about writing more emails, or writing faster. It’s about Accelerating Intuition from the strategy level down to individual copy-edits, ensuring you can build relationships at scale, over time, and according to your essentials goals and standards.
Read Time: 5.5 minutes
Happy Saturday, Timeless Leaders!
I'm working through revisions of this email while my daughter dances in ballet, and I'm struck by the irony of writing about machines, with machines, as I'm immersed in reminders of human growth, beauty, and fluidity.
Truthfully, if I had my way, nobody would be doing anything with AI right now. We have problems of human civilization that only humans can solve, and AI will not be a miracle panacea. Moreover, its presence is consuming massive resources and attention that make it harder to address poverty, ignorance, conflict, and environmental collapse.
Yet, AI is here, and its availability presents a choice: do you opt out, or do you learn to leverage its power for good? I’ve chosen the latter, and when it comes to writing, I’ve found that AI becomes genuinely useful not as a replacement for judgment or a robot who writes every word, but as a robust platform for strategic coherence and consistent execution, regardless of what else you have on your plate.
Email Consistency Is So Hard for Leaders
Every week of this series, we've uncovered the same underlying issue: email success requires sustained strategic thinking and constant execution, but leaders have many other balls in the air and only tend to look at email amidst rapid context-switching.
Yet whether you write emails yourself or direct a team, you need a way to:
Show up much more often than feels humanly possible
Maintain your strategic voice across dozens of touchpoints
Ensure each email builds on your established positioning
Keep editorial standards consistent when you're pulled in multiple directions
Transfer your thinking effectively to team members who execute
This isn't just an email problem—it's a leadership consistency problem. How do you maintain strategic coherence when time is scarce and your attention is constantly divided?
How Claude Accelerates Intuition
Of all the LLMs, I've settled on Claude from Anthropic as my go-to AI assistant (and the least problematic LLM from an ethical standpoint). More importantly, Claude has proven invaluable for maintaining strategic consistency across all the context-switching that leadership requires.
Instead of "artificial intelligence,” AI used well is better understood as "accelerated intuition." Its power rests in effective partnership with a human operator. For email specifically, tools like Claude can serve as memory (preserving your thinking between context switches), coach (pulling together disparate threads, and making new connections) and translator (helping team members understand and execute your approach).
Instead of using AI solely to write individual emails, use it as the engine for continuous evolution.
Build a Knowledge Base in Claude’s “Projects”:
Upload core context to the knowledge base (your bio and beliefs, details on your audience, your business goals and constraints, and samples of your writing)
Input text instructions on the type of role Claude can play (coach, copy-writer, editor), and provide explicit instruction on how it interacts with you (“Ask questions before dumping a wall of text”)
Initiate a dedicated conversation to codify your complete email strategy
When it looks good, copy-paste that refined strategy to your knowledge base
Launch new chats for specific groups of emails (like a sequence, campaign, or series)
Be honest and provide personal detail that can help Claude understand who it’s serving. I’ve shared how "My vision is to build a Democratic Ownership society through Save Time, Make Time, and Escape Time. The business is less than a year old, still building sustainable client growth while supporting a family." A page of additional detail follows. This allows Claude to understand not just what I do, but why I do it and what constraints I’m operating under.
Once you’re set up with a project, each chat becomes a workspace for rapid generation. The magic isn’t about nailing the perfect prompt with a ready-to-publish piece on the first go. It comes from investing the same time you’d take to hand write a first draft, and partnering with the AI to move through 20 drafts in the same time.
Prompting to Progress and Express Your Ideas
If you take a prompt engineering course, you’ll likely learn about “prompt chaining” as a “reinforcement learning” technique. There are some more best practices you can pick up from a course, but I’ve learned from practice that simply treating the LLM like a tireless sparring partner gets the job done.
Here are some prompts just from one of my lengthier chats that helped me develop break-through ideas and novel approaches to communicating them:
On email types: "Are there any established frameworks out there for grouping these and showing relationships between them? A 2x2 or spectrum graphic? Who's covered this and did they do a good job? Where's the gap?"
From the Main Street Millionaire work: "The line 'her framing misses the deeper stakes involved.' don't like this as the transition to the body of the piece. Prefer something that captures this idea as the limitation: 'she only covers the second half of the "democracy-ownership society" that we talk about'"
On the CEO’s role with email: “"Title: 'Commit or Quit' isn't the right contrast. Is this even an email about a decision at all? It's more about the CEO role + recognizing the cost of treating email as an afterthought."
A version of this used often, after debating and finally settling on an approach: “Generate a complete, updated draft of this piece that incorporates our new insights and perspective, and includes at least two strong examples from this chat to exemplify the lesson."
There are a lots of ways to get started in a chat to develop writing. You can upload a draft or an outline, or you can brain dump your thoughts, or you can ask a simple question “What should I write about this week?” The power doesn’t come from where you start, but from how you go back and forth, offer feedback and new context, take the reins yourself and fix the problem and then show the AI what good looks like, and finally… upload the final version and ask for a proof-read. ;)
AI for Email Isn’t Limited to Standard LLMs
There are many more ways you might look to incorporate AI into your email program. Specialized tools like oJoy from Frank Kern and Email Game Changers from Ian Stanley give you access to copywriting and email sequence techniques the experts use. Your ESP probably has AI built in as well.
Then there are tools like Clay which you can use to research the market, build target outreach lists, and generate personalized emails.
But whatever other tools you use, if you have a solid Claude Project for email you can use it to prep for those sessions, and you can test the outputs through Claude. Ask: Does this serve our larger goals? Does it fit our relationship-building approach? Does it maintain consistency with our established voice and positioning?
Working across tools (and for some of you perhaps agents) is one of the last, most essential techniques to get the most out of AI. It takes more orchestration and expertise, but it can completely change what’s possible.
For now, you can figure it out on your own, but Claude alone is able to help you do it faster, or do it 10 different ways, and ultimately, keep your emails sending while you attend to a million other things.
Where This Goes Next
The leaders building the strongest email programs aren't just using better tools…
They're maintaining strategic consistency at scale.
AI can accelerate your planning and content generation process, preserve your strategic thinking across context switches, and empower your team members. As a result, your email program reflects your leadership approach consistently, and can keep scaling, up-leveling your business across the board.
Are you using AI for email, or other types of writing?
What works? What do you want to try?
Send me an email, or leave a comment.
-Joe
P.S. Next week: you’ll get both Part 2 of the Season 2 finale, and the final post wrapping up this entire mini-series! It’s been a fun summer, and I appreciate you reading.