The problem#
If you run more than one business, most of your day is not the work — it is the overhead around the work. Which emails matter. What that meeting is about. Whether the insurance lapsed. What you promised someone three weeks ago and have not thought about since.
The assistants that promise to fix this all want the same thing first: give us everything. Your mail, your calendar, your contracts, your finances, uploaded to somebody else’s servers to be read by somebody else’s model. For a business owner with employee salaries, legal matters and bank statements in that pile, that is not a small ask.
The approach#
This one runs on your desk. It reads your email and calendar, prepares you before meetings, tracks money in and out, keeps your tasks and projects, captures notes, and remembers what you committed to — organised by which of your businesses it belongs to.
The part that matters is where the thinking happens. Work is sorted into tiers before any model sees it. Public, generic things go to a fast cloud model. Personal things go to a different one. Anything sensitive — salaries, HR, legal, health, finances — is answered by a model running locally on your own machine, and if that local model is unavailable the request fails rather than quietly falling back to the cloud. That rule is enforced in the code, not in a policy document, and every single request is logged so you can audit what went where.
What it does#
A morning brief. A single inbox across your mail and messaging. Meeting preparation fifteen minutes ahead. Finances, with bank mail parsed into a ledger. Tasks, projects and a decisions log. Compliance and renewal dates that would otherwise be discovered late. Vehicles, properties, travel, contacts, and a document vault that is encrypted at rest.
It is built as modules, so a deployment includes the parts of that list you actually want and leaves out the rest.
Where it runs today#
I run mine daily, across three businesses. It is the tool I would least like to give up, which is the only recommendation I trust.