Every AI advice/prompt/thought-piece post I’m seeing right now assumes that everyone wants the same thing:
everyone wants to finish more, faster
everyone wants their business to run without them
I mean, kind of but not really! I have a slightly different perspective on this:
I want to spend more time on the things I love and less time on the things I don’t
I want my expertise, discernment, brain power and magic to be focused on things that are human in my business while what I have already defined as a repeatable thing, repeat themselves without draining my energy.
This may sound similar but the intention is different.
I want freedom, not fast. I want to be in my business where the ME matters.
And if you know anything about me or my work, you know that I NEVER look at anything as a one-size-fits-all situation. AI is no different here.
In this series HD + AI, I will be breaking down how each energy type can use AI to run their business in a way that supports what they are good at, and makes the rest easier to manage.
Let’s Talk about Manifestors
I'm a Manifestor. Starting is the fun part.
My brain throws off new ideas the way a bonfire throws off sparks, constant, bright and completely uninterested in staying lit past the moment it caught.
Finishing is where my whole body starts negotiating. The energy that felt urgent on Monday can feel like somebody else's assignment by Thursday.
The first 20% of a project → I am SO IN.
The last 20%? I’ve already moved on…3 projects ahead of where this started.
For years I called that a flaw. Discipline, I told myself. Build the habit. Push through the resistance. None of it worked, because none of it was built for a Manifestor.
Manifestors Initiate
That's the whole strategy: inform, then act, on our own timing, without needing permission.
We light the match. Somebody else, or something else, has to carry it after that. The rest cycle after a spark is how the design keeps working. A Manifestor who never rests between bursts is running on fumes and calling it hustle.
I’ve designed my client work around this. Every project has a distinct container around it. There is no “ongoing forever and ever” project. I pad in time for rest cycles. So even if executing on something takes 2 days, the client timeline is 2 weeks so that the likelihood of hitting a creative urge is high and I don’t feel pressure to work when I’m in a rest cycle.
That part feels really dialed now (and thank fuck because code took years to crack). What is harder is my own business.
Why it’s so hard to figure stuff out for ourselves when it feels so easy to do for clients:
I've spent 23 years in design, tech and product, so systems thinking is native to me.
I was the first Director of Design Systems at Hearst Magazines. Before I pitched “How to Design a Website in 3 Days” to the president of Digital Media, we were designing each magazine website as a bespoke project. There were 50 titles globally (Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Elle, Car & Driver, etc) and they were taking, on average, 18 months to design and build. That 18 months turned into 2 months for a new magazine and 2 weeks for a redesign to be implemented.
Ya girl is used to gnarly systems designs, at scale, with a lot of stakeholders. So why is it so hard to develop a system for the Manifestor energy type? Because the goal isn’t scale and how fast things can move.
A system to support a Manifestor has to account for…
a nervous system that dreads the middle and sees the finish line like a distant memory
a creative cycle that literally CAN’T be “on” all the time
a way to hold all the ideas that come pouring out in a creative urge…and then give them legs so they don’t quietly die in a notes app
You see, Manifestors actually work best when they have a whole team to execute. Back at Hearst I had a team of designers, many engineering and product teams and a pretty solid budget to execute on every system I designed.
Now? It’s literally just me…and Claude and Notion and Flodesk and Squarespace and Acuity.
I would LOVE to have a team to make all my ideas come to reality but my businesses are both fairly early and I’m just not there yet.
And this is where the majority of my clients are too.
Maxed out, stressed out and not ready to expand into a team yet.
So this is what I am using AI for. I’m treating it like my own team of product managers and engineers so that I can hand-off my idea. I am not interested in building a habit to make me better at admin. I don’t want to do admin at all.
I also need AI to act like the other energy types for a well-rounded team. Who doesn’t need generator energy from time to time.
This is the how…
The Good SIR (Spark, Inform and Release) Method
Because I say “Thank you, good Sir” to my robots. They are men and I boss them around like trusted, but green, butlers. I actually never type in “thank you” because that’s a waste of water/energy/etc but that’s a convo for a different post.
Let’s get into the method.
⚡️ Spark
The second an idea shows up, I get it out of my head before I can talk myself out of it. This could be a new offer, something I am musing on, a new TODO, really anything that comes out of a brainwave or psychic download.
I'll talk it through out loud, usually via Apple voice memo (if it is long) and then dump the transcript into Claude OR I’ll yap straight into Claude using the voice to text feature.
Sometimes I’ll have it interview me further and I will always have it do SOMETHING with it:
Log it as a substack idea to revisit later
Fold it into an existing offer doc
Put it on my roadmap
Draft the email
Execute on it right them
This matters more for a Manifestor than almost anyone else, because our ideas have a short shelf life. If the spark sits in a notebook waiting for the right time to develop it, it's already dead. AI collapses that waiting period to minutes and moves it into action.
And ACTION creates MOMENTUM. Ideas don’t.
📣 Inform
Manifestor strategy isn't only initiate, it's initiate and tell people. So I use AI to hold the context I'd otherwise carry around in my head and repeat out loud every time someone needs an update.
A clear brief, a project summary, a set of instructions handed to a tool or a teammate, that's the informing your design already wants you to do, aimed somewhere useful instead of getting lost in a hallway conversation.
I have my robots trained to CAPTURE what I am doing, thinking, saying and then having them surface that when I need it. One example is my Content Command Center. This is an artifact I built that reviews all of my transcripts, chats from the week, docs created, notion progress, email and calendar and then tells me, based on my rules, what I could write about that week for my newsletter, my substack and my instagram.
To be clear, IT DOES NOT WRITE THEM. It gives me a recap of what I have actually done that week that might be helpful to my current and future clients. One paragraph per idea and then there is a button for me to have it interview me further and structure an outline.
This Substack Series came from that Command Center. It is reflecting back to me the things that I do that are awesome that would normally never see the light of day just because I am not designed to work that way.
🪽Release
Most productivity advice skips this completely.
Once the spark is out and the people who need to know, know, I let AI carry the follow through: drafts sitting ready for me to approve, reminders that surface at the right moment, small automated steps that keep a project breathing while I'm taking my daily afternoon bath.
That's what makes rest possible without the whole thing collapsing. I'm not managing every step BUT on the steps where I am specifically needed, AI waits and when I’m ready tells me what’s on my plate. I built a structure that keeps moving on its own, so my energy can go quiet without my business going quiet with it.
What does this look like?
When I get a referral from someone via email, that lead goes into my tracker
When I move a lead into the “won” category, it makes a client portal and sets it up based on the project details
When I need to make a proposal, it has everything it needs just based on the 30 min consultation call transcript to scope and price in a first draft for me to review
And soooo many more things. I get to use my brain on things I need my brain on and I get to fuck off and do what I want while it works on the things I have already defined.
None of this makes me a better finisher. It makes finishing beside the point. The work gets done in bursts, with real rest in between, instead of one long grind I was never built to sustain.
Do you feel seen?
If you’re a Manifestor reading this and quietly relieved someone finally said it out loud, you don’t need more discipline. That’s a crock of shit and a battle you aren’t meant to win. You need a system that can carry a project while you rest. Build one thing this week using Spark, Inform, Release, even something small, and see what it feels like to walk away without it dying on the vine.
If you're nodding along and also a little called out right now, leave a comment. Tell me what part of this is hardest for you or where you feel like you are stalling out. I'd genuinely love to help you think it through.
This is the first post in a series on how AI actually works for each Human Design type. Next up: Generators and Manifesting Generators and why the advice that works for them would burn a Manifestor out in a day.
This is so good. I love the reminder that the goal isn’t to force ourselves into someone else’s way of working, but to build around how we actually move. Freedom over fast, always. ❤️🔥