One of the core values at Edens View Coaching and Consulting is investing 10% of our time in personal growth. Not just for me. For everyone on the team. It's protected time on the calendar, and it's non-negotiable.
What you're about to read is proof of why.
Carissa has worked for Edens View for almost two years, and this piece came out of her own development work. She sat with a problem for over a year, kept experimenting when the tools weren't ready, and eventually built a solution that cut her daily decision load by 60%. She wanted to write about this because the process taught her something worth sharing. I hope you enjoy the read as much as I did.
With Anticipation,
David
The Mental Load of Folding Laundry and the Daily Task That Felt The Same.
By Carissa Di Scipio
Picture it: spring 2024. I’m a few days into my role as David’s executive assistant, still learning how everything works, and I get handed a new daily task. It’s called the GTD (“Getting Things Done”) Inbox: a list in ClickUp where David dumps everything. Forwarded emails, stray thoughts, things that need to happen but don’t have a home yet. Each item exists as its own task and my job is to filter the inbox every day and turn each ambiguous task into an actionable item with all the details filled in-between.
From the moment I met this task, I knew I was facing a new variant of my arch nemesis: folding laundry.
My most hated chore. I stare at a pile of clothes and each item needs something from me.
Who does this belong to? How should I fold it? Which pile? Which drawer? Has my son outgrown this? Who should I donate it to? This sock has a hole.
No single decision is hard, but there are so many of them, and by the time I’m done, I feel like I deserve an award. That’s what the GTD inbox was for me.
A forwarded email about a bill becomes a properly named task with a due date, an assignee, a category, and a home in the right project folder. A vague note from a conversation becomes a clear next step assigned to the right person. Each item requires about five decisions. On an average day, there are six new items. That’s thirty decisions before lunch. Except I didn’t know it was thirty until much later. All I knew was that every day I looked at the inbox, I felt like I was looking at a huge basket of laundry.
In those early months, the hard part was that I didn’t know David well enough to make those decisions confidently. Every item felt like a guessing game. My predecessor had documentation, but so much of the real knowledge, the patterns, the preferences, the way David thinks about priorities, only lives in the head of whoever is doing the work. You can’t put that in a document. You learn it by doing it, day after day, until one morning you open the inbox and realize you just know.
I reached that point. The guesswork faded. But the process of the task was still the same.
About a year ago, I sat in a one-on-one call with the ClickUp team and described this problem I’d been carrying around. There’s this task I do every day, I told them. It’s not complicated in any single step, but the number of small, tenacious decisions packed into it makes it complex. I asked them: is there any way to automate this? Even part of it?
We explored everything. Zapier integrations, different workflow automations, creative workarounds. And after going through all of it, the answer was: not yet. The technology just wasn’t there. There was no good way to automate something that required this much human judgment; this much knowing David, knowing the business, knowing the dozens of little patterns that only exist inside my head.
I remember the specific feeling of that moment. Not devastation (After all, I’m just clicking buttons). Maybe disappointment? That particular moment of feeling like you’ve finally found your missing AirPod under the couch but it’s really just a piece of lint. I told myself, okay. It is what it is. And I went back to doing the task the way I’d always done it.
But I didn’t stop thinking about it.
A year later, David helped me put a name to the problem, and it tied directly to one of our core values at Edens View: investing 10% of our time in personal growth. Each week, we protect dedicated hours on the calendar specifically for development to get better at the work we do. This specific week, he asked me to create a task filter: a complete list of every single thing I’m responsible for as his executive assistant. Then I placed each task into a zone in the Full Focus Freedom Compass™️: Desire, Disinterest, Distraction, or Drudgery. From there, I worked through my Drudgery Zone, figuring out which tasks I could automate, delegate, or eliminate.
The GTD Inbox landed exactly where I knew it would; squarely in my Drudgery Zone. It’s something I recognize the value of, something I know is necessary, something I get done. But it’s not what energizes me. Seeing it there in black and white, officially named for what it was, felt like permission to revisit my “not yet” from a year ago and ask whether “yet” had finally arrived.
So I locked in. I pretended I was Tony Stark stepping into Iron Man’s suit, deciding that today was the day…because now I had a tool I didn’t have a year ago: Claude.
I fired up the robot and did something I hadn’t done before: I described every single micro-step of the task, decision by decision, as specifically as I could. Not to find a solution. Just to understand the problem better.
That’s when the number thirty showed up.
Five decisions per task. Six tasks a day. Thirty decisions every day – from just one of my responsibilities.
Seeing this number changed something. Not the problem itself, but how I thought about solving it. Because now I wasn’t staring at one big overwhelming problem anymore. I was looking at 30 specific decision points, and I could ask a much sharper question: how can I cut this in half?
Lucky for me, this conversation with Claude took place as ClickUp released a feature that hadn’t existed during that call a year earlier either: AI agents that could be programmed to handle specific workflows.
