Your First Week With AI, One Small Job a Day

What am I meant to do with AI?

You've asked yourself that twice now since someone at work told you to try it. You made an account, typed "hello", got a cheerful paragraph back and closed the tab, and a week later it happened again.

AI needs a job, and a blank box is the worst introduction a tool could have. Nobody learns to cook by staring into an empty kitchen.

Here are seven jobs, one a day, and each comes from a page on this site. They're in the order I'd give them to someone I liked.

None takes more than ten minutes. By Sunday you'll know what AI is good for, and whether you want it around.

Tonight, two rules

Talk to AI the way you'd ask a capable colleague, with full sentences and some background. Why bother with the extra words?

"Flights Lisbon cheap" gets a search result. "I'm thinking about three nights in Lisbon in late October with my partner. We like food and walking. What should I know before I book?" That one gets you a conversation.

And every day, check what AI tells you against something you already know.

You might think AI is usually right, and usually it is. But AI will be confidently wrong at least once before Sunday, and that day will teach you more than the other six.

Monday to Sunday

Day	The job	Why this one	The page
Monday	Photograph the fridge and ask for three dinners from what's there, no shopping	Nothing much to lose, an instant result, and you'll catch AI calling yoghurt cream	Fridge
Tuesday	Ask how rare your name is, then ask how AI knows	Fun, and the most important habit on this site, learned in five minutes	Your name
Wednesday	Upload your phone contract and ask what you're paying for and when you can leave	First real money. First time you see AI read forty pages in ten seconds	Documents
Thursday	Type three sentences instead of one for something you'd normally ask in a line	The day the answers get clearly better	Three sentences
Friday	The email you've been avoiding. Ask for three versions, pick one, and write the last line yourself	First time AI does something you were dreading	The email
Saturday	Five minutes in the settings. Check the training switch, and read what AI remembers	You've used AI for five days. Now decide what it keeps	Settings
Sunday	Let AI interview you about next week. Then plan the week with a quarter of every day left empty	The method the rest of the site runs on, used on something you'll live through on Monday	Your week

Skip a day, swap a day, or do two on Sunday, because finishing matters more than the order. Each page gives you the exact words to type. The free plans have a daily limit.

If you hit the limit, that's the tool's limit, not yours, so come back tomorrow.

Midweek

By midweek a pattern shows up. AI is good at tidying, summarising, drafting, and finding the right line in a contract.

Facts, dates, numbers AI can't look up, and anything recent all need checking, and by Wednesday you'll have your own example of each. On Thursday, the gap between a vague question and a specific one stops being advice, because you'll see it in the answers themselves.

Sunday night

At some point you'll have thought "hang on, that's not right". Keep that moment.

People who use AI well have that moment, and people who get burned by AI don't. You got there in seven days.

Notice anything about the seven jobs? Each one ended with you deciding something. It might have been what to cook, whether to believe AI, whether to leave the contract, which email to send or what AI is allowed to keep.

I chose them for that.

A week shows you how AI works, not whether you need it. Plenty of people use AI twice a month after that, and I think that's fine.

The month after

Don't connect AI to your email, your files or your money for at least a month. Nothing this week needed them, so find out what AI is like before you let it near anything that matters.

If you want a second week, the pages on this site are the course, so pick the situation closest to your Monday.

On Monday, before you cook, photograph the fridge.