How to Use AI to Reclaim Your Time and Build a Life You Actually Love

Full video transcript

So I want you to think for a moment and imagine two business owners. They’re both passionate, they’re both chasing their dreams of success, but the first one scales really fast. They’re making lots of money, they’re bringing in new clients. But the problem is that every day starts to feel like a grind. They have a lot of late nights, they’re missing time with family, and they start to feel like the business is running them rather than the other way around.

The second one grows their business steadily, but they have a lot of clarity around what they’re doing, and their business fuels their life and enhances it. Now what’s the difference between the two? The difference is that the second one’s business is aligned with their personal vision, and this is where AI can be used to change the game for you. It’s not just a tool that can be used for building efficiency in your business, but it can also build a business that helps to support your life instead of consuming it.

I want you to think about this for a moment. Many business owners wake up in the morning and they grab their phone and start checking text messages or looking at email. In fact, you could say that they’re reacting to their business on a daily basis rather than focusing on building it. Ask yourself: how much time do you spend every day doing things you actually want to do? How much of your time is spent on tasks that drain your energy rather than energizing you? Does your business feel like an extension of your passion, or does it feel like an endless list of to-dos?

If the answers to any of those questions, or the questions alone, cause you to think, then you’ll understand what I’m saying: growth without alignment ultimately leads to burnout. But what if AI could help you scale in a way that protects your energy and helps you build toward your long-term success?

AI can really change the game in a number of different ways. Instead of guessing what your success could look like, you can use AI tools to help bring clarity and align your business with your vision of your ideal life. To do that, there are a couple of things you want to look at. First, you have to define what success really means to you, so that your business actually supports the life you intended to build rather than draining it. The vast majority of people who start a business don’t start it with the vision of working 80 hours a week. They have a dream of something they want to accomplish, either for themselves, for the family, or maybe even for the world.

Then you also have to think about how growth actually happens. You want your business to grow strategically so that you’re attracting the right kinds of customers and the right kind of opportunities, all without wasting a lot of additional time and effort. No matter where you are in your business journey, you can do this. Startups have an advantage: they can build with alignment from day one. Established businesses will have to make gradual adjustments, refining the process step by step each day, so they can stay true to their existing processes while also pivoting toward their long-term business goals.

Before you dismiss this as a bunch of woo-woo, I want you to know that I’ve worked with a number of different business owners, and while some truly just have the passion of making as much money as they can, the vast majority are trying to build a life. You can think of this process like every great athlete does. Every great athlete, salesperson, architect, marketer, teacher, or business entrepreneur starts with a vision or goal of what they want the future to look like. Some are very explicit about it: they write detailed plans, schedules, charts. Others are a little more intuitive, constantly refining their process in their minds, using that internal vision to modify their daily activities so that picture ultimately guides their decisions. In either case, whether you’re more intuitive or more strategic, having a clear picture of what your future should look like will help you with day-to-day decision-making.

That’s what we’re going to work on now. We’re going to look first at what I call the Northstar vision creation process. The purpose of it is to define what success looks like both in your business life and your personal life. You can use AI to help clarify that ideal business structure so it supports that long-term vision. The prompt I use to do that is: “Act as a life coach for business owners and help me craft a detailed vision of the life I want to live by asking me questions one at a time related to the following four areas: freedom and impact, family and friends, fitness and health, and faith and finance.” When you hit enter, it starts asking you those questions.

After I’ve set that vision, I move on to what I call the ideal day visualization. This is more than wishful thinking; you can almost think of it like your SOPs, your standard operating procedures or strategic operational plan, a set of things you want to do on a regular basis that ensure you’re moving consistently toward your goal. You’ve seen this before: if you’ve ever been on an airplane, you look in the back of the seat and there’s that chart with pictures showing what to do in an emergency. What’s kind of cool about that is, almost regardless of your age (probably seven or older) and regardless of what language you speak, you can quickly look at that information, understand what you’re supposed to do, and get on with it. That’s the same idea behind this visualization process for your daily procedures.

The long-term purpose of it is to help eliminate unnecessary tasks and clarify any areas where you can use automation or AI to streamline or speed up day-to-day operations. It looks like this: “Act as a strategic business coach or mindfulness coach and guide me in developing a written visualization of my ideal day, from waking up to going to sleep. Include details about my location, companions, activities, and feelings.” Of course, if you’re doing this for business, you may alter those prompts to work however you want. “Prompt me with relevant questions throughout the process, one at a time. Once done, compare my visualization to my strategic vision and identify any misalignment.” That last part is quite important, because you do want your strategic vision and your daily activities to align. “Summarize the result into a format that can be copied and pasted into another document.”

This prompt assumes you’ve done the two exercises back-to-back in one session. But if you’ve copied information from one document into another, you can include that document by hitting the plus key and uploading it, or simply copy and paste it in and reference it as part of your working with the AI. Once you enter the prompt, it immediately starts asking those questions. In this case, I would have preferred it ask them one by one, and I probably should have included that more clearly in the prompt, but you can answer them as steps, or just tell the AI, “please ask each question in turn, one at a time,” and it will prompt you in a way that’s more useful.

Once you’ve gone through that process and cleared up any conflicts or inconsistencies between your ideal day visualization and your long-term vision, you move on to what I call legacy reflection. Your legacy is how you want people to see you in the future, or how you want to see yourself in the future. By reaching into that future, at what that legacy is, and bringing it into the present moment, it’s another way of reminding you on a regular basis, weekly, monthly, yearly, whatever way you want, of what you’re supposed to be doing and whether you’re on track. It aligns your long-term purpose to something beyond just revenue, and you can use AI to highlight patterns in how you spend your time and energy so you’re creating the most impact on a regular basis.

The prompt I use looks like this: “Act as a legacy advisor. Help me reflect on the legacy I want to leave behind. Ask me questions one at a time, like what do I want to be remembered for by my family, friends, community, and the world. Once examined, summarize the reflection into a format that can be copied and pasted into another document.” Hit enter, and it starts by asking you those questions.

Ultimately, AI can pinpoint where your time is being drained. It can help you automate tasks like marketing, financial tracking, and client communication, and streamline your business operations. But clarity alone isn’t enough; growth needs to be strategic for you to have the fulfilling life you really want. That’s where a tool like the Market Sauce buyer’s blueprint can work together with your Northstar vision to enhance what you’re doing. There are two AI-driven tools that can be used strategically inside your business to make sure it aligns with your personal goals.

Think about the customers you might want. If your goal is to work with high-value clients who don’t waste your time, you can use these tools to analyze your customer data, identify your ideal audience, and get guidance on the language and strategies that lead to better lead generation. You can also use it to optimize your sales data. You can take your existing sales data, any surveys you’ve collected, and any demographic information, and insert it into your buyer’s blueprint so you have a more precise buyer brief and buyer avatar, ensuring that every time you reach out with marketing, you’re really targeting the kind of customer you ultimately want to work with. This ensures better alignment between your business goals, your ideal clients, and your personal goals.

The prompt: “Attached is my vision and my buyer’s brief. Analyze each and write a business plan that helps me reach my ideal customer and fully align with my personal vision. Be aware of and outline any key roles that will eventually need to be filled in order to maintain my growth. Scale my business to $1 million per year and maintain my personal vision.” Then I just attach the relevant documents, in this case a buyer brief and a summit (Northstar) vision, and hit go, and it immediately goes to work creating a business plan.

Bear in mind a step I skipped: a detailed finance plan where you discuss the lifestyle you want to live, the home you might want, the car you might want to drive, how many vacations a year. I actually encourage you to think about all of that in detail, because it helps determine what size business you actually need. Everyone wants to be a billionaire, but you don’t need to earn anywhere near a billion to live the lifestyle most people would like.

Looking at the output, it automatically considers the kinds of clients I might want: high-ticket consulting clients, group coaching clients, and how much I’d want to earn per year for each, plus digital books and playbooks I might want to target. What’s important throughout is that it constantly tries to align with the vision I wrote for myself as well as the needs of the target customers developed inside the buyer blueprint. Bear in mind AI will sometimes be creative and the formatting may change, so if formatting matters to you, specify exactly how you want information to appear, tables, column headings, bullets, and so on. It concludes by looking at the overall plan, making sure it’s in alignment with the vision, and suggesting next steps to achieve your overall goal.

Let’s look at a case study. This is an avatar of a kind of customer I work with, let’s call her Alex. Alex runs a dance studio. She started it because she loves working with people, loves dancing, and loves teaching. But she found that instead of focusing on her students, she was drowning in admin work, managing enrollments, handling complaints, responding to emails, dealing with finances, and so on.

She made two key shifts in her business. First, she used the Northstar prompts to get a clear picture of what business model she needed to be working on, which allowed her to realize what she was doing and the kind of staff she needed to bring in so she could free up her time to spend more of it teaching and performing. Second, she applied the Market Sauce blueprint material to help her attract the ideal client, optimizing her sales and getting the most out of every day, so going to work was more of a joy instead of a burden.

This is the same thing I want you to do, and it’s really the next step in the process for you. Your three-step Northstar alignment plan: first, use AI to help define your Northstar vision and clarify the kind of life you want to build; identify what excites you versus what drains you. Second, identify the business processes that drain you by listing the top things you really like about your business as well as the things you don’t like, and figuring out a way AI might be able to handle them. Third, use AI to automate, align, and leverage the Market Sauce information and tools like Keap for a CRM, or GoHighLevel, or whatever you happen to like to use, to help grow your business without losing sight of your personal vision.

I want to make it clear that AI isn’t just about efficiency and scaling your business. It really can be used to help scale your life. Now, getting started might seem a little overwhelming, so let’s break it down. What thing can you do today? One small AI task you can look at today that you can either automate or use to speed up the process, so you’re getting more out of this day. If you do that regularly, just take one small task, automate it, use AI to help build it, and ensure it’s in alignment with your personal vision, where could your life be in a couple of years from now?