AI Minimalism
Here's what to actually use AI for.
The first thing you should transform with AI is your life.
Not your Claude Code setup.
When everyone is talking about how to configure AI, do the opposite.
Simplify your life and create space for new ideas and workflows to emerge.
I’ve been spending the cold and dark winter months on something I call “AI minimalism” and want to inspire you to do the same.
WHAT IS AI MINIMALISM
James Clear defines minimalism as focusing on and committing to the fundamentals, instead of wasting time, money, or energy on details. The Minimalists define it as a lifestyle that helps people question what things add value to their lives. At its heart, minimalism is just a fancy word for prioritization and focus.
Minimalists generally have less possessions, less commitments, less digital distractions because they take time to curate and reduce things in their lives. It’s what they have more of that matters though: time, energy, money and more freedom.
Today, AI is not a force for simplifying our lives.
You wake up in the morning to your phone buzzing with notifications from an app someone vibe coded.
You go check up on your agents to see if your new app idea is finished. You glance over a couple completed research reports from Perplexity and Claude Cowork bookmarking 7 articles to read later. You open X and read the bot replies to your latest thread.
It’s 10am and you wonder if you should prioritize getting something done today but you get distracted by your WhatsApp group that talks about how to best use AI. The door bell rings and the Amazon driver shows up with some new clothes. Oh yeah, you asked Claude to recommend you some new hoodies. You throw them in a closet and go back to looking over some more completed jobs.
Everything in your house, calendar and desktop is built around the old way of doing things.
The best way to adapt your life around the possibilities of AI while thriving cognitively is a complete reset.
PRESS RESET
Resets aren’t easy when you already feel short on time, distracted, with a mountain of ideas and responsibilities on your shoulders. Less time to prioritize means less clarity on what you can even consider dropping.
AI minimalism uses AI as a counter-force against the very reality that technology and AI has imposed on us.
A reality of material and informational abundance at negative marginal returns on happiness.
AI minimalism uses AI to overcome psychological (procrastination), knowledge and resource gaps to simplifying your life.
Point your favorite AI tool as a weapon to free up 3 key resources: money, time and focus.
CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS
Struggling to afford the $200 Max plan for Claude?
All you need to do is export your transactions from all your bank accounts and send them to Claude for an audit.
Anything you don’t use? Cancel it.
Then there are subscriptions you use that you can simply rebuild and forget about.
Here’s a concrete example, we had a smart contract development guide up on the Auditless website hosted by Webflow CMS. I was able to get rid of that subscription completely by getting everything exported into a cross-linked GitHub markdown book. Took less than an hour. I’ve seen people go as far as building their own versions of Calendly.
Nowadays the most useful applications are already free.
People are switching from Notion (complex to access via API) to Obsidian (just files, easy for agents to work with).
Others are moving from Linear to GitHub issues (although to be fair Linear are doing their best to adapt and I think they’ll crack it).
CANCEL YOUR MEETINGS
Recurring meetings are subscriptions on your time. Each meeting also further divides your workday and splitting one focus block into two is horrible for productivity.
What meetings exist just to keep people informed? Create an automation that summarizes Slack conversations and sends a weekly PPP update to the other team. Or have everyone record a 10 minute voice note, transcribe and combine.
What meetings can be made shorter and more efficient by building dashboards that provide valuable context on an automated basis?
For the remaining meetings, work with other people to move them to the same day.
I have been using Tuesdays for recurring meetings, for example.
The simple change makes other days feel more focused and impactful.
SIMPLIFY EVERYTHING
Declutter your house by using AI to categorize items and figure out where they can be donated or sold.
Remove all notifications apart from the ones that are completely essential.
Leverage daily email summarization to stop yourself from checking it compulsively.
Automate an AI calendar audit to get ideas for how to free up your time further.
Delegate more tasks to team members by sharing your prompts with them (another thing I did and prompts > playbooks).
What about boring things you have to do regularly like grocery planning? Can you create a recurring task that does this for you?
Same for a workout plan.
Scan restaurant openings or find other ideas for going out.
Automate data gathering for your personal investments to facilitate regular reviews and reallocations.
Not all these tips need AI but you can use AI to get them done.
Literally copy & paste this essay into Claude and ask it to make sure you get all this done.
CAN I UPGRADE MY AI WORKFLOW NOW?
Do this first before you focus on your AI workflow.
A month from now, everyone will have moved on to the next tool for managing 5 different agents and you will have saved a couple cycles.
Instead you will have learned a thing or two about how to use AI to actually create measurable improvements to your life (time, money, focus).
And now you can reinvest that time to improve your setup.
Or even build out your terrible app idea, but please do that last.