Field Note: A shot list for the paperwork

This week I’ve spent five hours or more in the car, driving between schools to move our kid from one to another for the new school year. It’s a mixed process — a lot of paperwork, and not all of it can be done online. And when a step can be done online, there’s a fair chance they’ll still ask you to hand something in on paper, which is exactly what happened last week.

Somewhere in all of that was a stack of documents I had to get through, in the right order, in the right format, with the right signatures, and into a school office before eleven this morning.

My one rule with Spanish bureaucracy: photograph everything.

So I scanned the lot with Preview on my iPhone and waited for it to sync across to my Mac. Then I dropped it all in a folder in my Workbench and pointed Claude at the location. The ask was plain:

Claude already knew the shape of this. It’s seen the recent ID-card renewals and the other applications, so it knew where to look on my file system without being told.

So am I using AI to do the work for me? No. It’s helping me break the problem into manageable pieces:

• Scan / Ingest— give it all the information it needs.
• Brief — tell it exactly what you need out of that information, and what it should do with it.
• Research — tell it where to get its answers, so there’s less room to guess.
• Instruct — have it write instructions for the human to follow.
• Verify — you stay in the loop and check the output makes sense; the time you save is best spent verifying.
• Iterate — go back a step and adjust.

I still had to sit down with about ten forms and sign and date each one — but next to me was a paper shot list (gasp) I’d printed out, so I could tick each thing off by hand as I went.

That’s AI meeting me where I need it: helping organise the information, the task, the project.

Did I still end up driving between two schools this morning over a clerical error? I did. But it could have been a lot more inconvenient than that.

So let AI meet you in the middle — a versatile toolkit that fills in the gaps.

— Jim

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