I stopped writing lists. Here's what I do instead.

I have always kept lists.

Notebooks. Word documents. Scraps of paper. Voice memos I never listened back to. WhatsApp messages sent to myself at 11pm that made perfect sense at the time and complete nonsense in the morning.

If you run a creative business - especially one where every commission is different - you will know exactly what I mean. The ideas, the tasks, the things you absolutely must not forget, they do not arrive when you are sitting at your desk ready to write them down. They arrive when you are in the middle of sandblasting a memorial stone, or driving back from a supplier, or lying in bed when you should be asleep.

By the time you get to a notebook, half of it is gone.

I have been running Pooil Vaaish Engraving for 27 years and this has been the background hum of my working life for most of them. The perpetual mild anxiety that something important is living in my head and might not make it out.

A few weeks ago I found something that has genuinely changed this. I want to share it with you -- not because it is complicated or expensive, but because it is so simple that I almost dismissed it before I tried it.

The standard to-do list has one fatal flaw: it requires you to be organised at the moment of capture.

You have to be somewhere you can write. You have to remember not just the thing itself but enough context to make it useful later. You have to decide where it goes - is this urgent? Is this a work task or a personal one? Does it belong on the job sheet or the weekly list or the big list of things I will definitely do one day?

That is too much thinking for a moment that usually arrives when you are covered in slate dust with your phone in one hand and a grinder in the other.

What you actually need is something that just catches the thought. No decisions required. No organisation in the moment. Just - I need to get this out of my head and somewhere safe.

That is what I found.

I set up what I now call a capture inbox using Claude, an AI tool I already use for my business. The idea is straightforward:

You send it things whenever they occur to you. By voice, by typing, by dictating on your phone while you are doing something else entirely. It receives everything, confirms it has been noted, and does absolutely nothing else.

No sorting. No summarising. No asking you clarifying questions. Just a warm acknowledgement and silence.

When you are ready - at the end of the day, or when you have five minutes, or whenever it suits you - you say one word: process. And it goes through everything you have sent since the last session, sorts it into categories, presents you with a clean summary, and asks if it looks right before doing anything with it.

The categories it sorts into are ones I set up for my own businesses: tasks, job notes, ideas, website things, pin ideas for my Pinterest content, wins from the day, worries that need acknowledging. You decide what categories make sense for your life.

Once you confirm the summary is right, it formats everything ready to drop into whatever systems you use. Tasks become a numbered list. Job notes become a table. Ideas go somewhere you can find them.

I tested it for the first time while doing some admin on the sofa. I dictated four things in one go - a client follow-up, an appointment reminder, something I needed to check with my web developer, and a thought about a new product. I rambled. I repeated myself slightly. I did not finish one of the sentences properly.

It came back with: "Got all four -- captured."

Nothing else. No questions. No reorganisation. Just confirmation that it had heard me.

Later I said process and it gave me back a clean list sorted by category, with a note next to each one about where it belonged in my systems. The unfinished sentence had been interpreted correctly. The rambling had been distilled into something useful.

I have been using it every day since.

You need a Claude account. The free version works for basic use but the paid version - Claude Pro at £18 a month - is more reliable for holding multiple days of captures and connecting to other tools.

You set up a Project in Claude (think of it as a dedicated space with its own instructions) and paste in a prompt that tells it how to behave. The prompt is what makes it a capture inbox rather than just a chat. It tells Claude to stay quiet during capture, what categories to sort into during processing, and how to format everything at the end.

I will be honest: setting up the prompt takes a little time to get right. The generic version works well. But the version that works really well is one that is tailored to your specific business - your job types, your systems, your language, the places where your captured information actually needs to end up.

I want to be honest about something before you decide whether this is for you.

Even if you use the free version of Claude or ChatGPT - no subscription, no paid plan - and even if you just paste your jumbled notes into a chat and ask it to make sense of them, you are already a million miles from a handwritten list, a Word document or a voice memo you will never listen back to.

Here is why. A handwritten list captures things but does nothing with them. A Word document organises things but only if you organise them yourself first. A voice memo preserves the words but leaves you to do all the thinking later.

An AI - even a free one - will take your rambling unordered brain dump and do the following without being asked very specifically:

It will distil your notes into clear actionable items, removing the repetition and the filler and the half-finished sentences. It will put them into whatever order you ask for - by urgency, by category, by the day of the week, by which business they belong to. And if you want it to, it will ask you what you would like to do with each item. Not in an annoying way. In the way a genuinely helpful assistant would.

That alone - even on the free tier, even without a custom prompt, even without any setup at all - is a significant upgrade to how most small business owners manage their mental load.

The paid version goes considerably further.

With Claude Pro you can programme the inbox to take action on your list items rather than just organising them. It can draft a full reply to a client email from the notes you dictated on the way home - something you can copy, paste and make more you in two minutes. It can format job notes ready to drop directly into the Jobs tab of your business organisation system. It can be connected to your calendar to add appointments and reminders. It can be set up to know your business - your clients, your job types, your language, your systems - so that everything it produces fits straight into your workflow without you having to explain the context every time.

This is not science fiction. I am using it right now, every day, in my own business.

The free version is a very good starting point. The paid version is where it becomes genuinely transformative.

If you would like the prompt I use, email me at rosie@rosieglassey.co.uk with the subject line INBOX and I will send it back to you directly -- along with a note about how I tailor this for clients who use Just Three Places, my done-for-you business organisation system, to make it even more powerful.

It is free. It takes about five minutes to set up once you have it. And if you are anything like me, you will wonder how you managed without it.

Find out more about Just Three Places →