How to use AI to prioritise when everything feels urgent

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Mar 15, 2026

Neo Applin, Head of Inventium AI and training lead who helps teams apply generative AI to productivity. They explore using AI for a structured brain dump, interviewing you to separate urgent from important, estimating task durations, spotting the single most stressful task, and giving AI project context with tools like Claude Projects or Copilot Notebooks.

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INSIGHT

Overwhelm Is A Context Overload Problem

Overwhelm comes from juggling meetings, emails, projects and life admin simultaneously, not from poor prioritisation.
Your brain isn't designed to hold that mixed context, so externalising everything to AI reduces cognitive load.

ADVICE

Use An AI Brain Dump To Prioritise Your Week

Do a structured AI brain dump at the start of the week to list every task, big and small.
Ask the AI to interview you to sort tasks into urgent/important quadrants and estimate durations for realistic time boxing.

ADVICE

Tackle The Most Stressful Task First

Prioritise the task causing the most stress by asking AI to identify it and schedule it for Monday.
Then use AI to break remaining items into daily deep versus shallow work so you can hit realistic, focused goals each day.

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When your to-do list feels endless and everything seems equally urgent, it’s hard to know where to start. The overwhelm doesn’t usually come from one big task. It comes from trying to hold meetings, emails, projects and life admin in your head all at once.

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I walk through practical ways to use AI to help you prioritise when your week feels out of control. Not by magically deleting tasks, but by giving you a clearer structure for deciding what actually matters today.

We share two different approaches – one if your AI isn’t connected to your calendar, and one if it is.

Neo and I cover:

How to use AI for a structured brain dump so everything on your plate is visible in one place

Getting AI to interview you to separate urgent from important, and clarify what really needs attention

Asking AI to estimate how long tasks will take so you can time box more realistically

Using AI to identify the single task that’s causing the most stress – and tackling that first

Why context matters – and how tools like Claude Projects or Copilot Notebooks can help AI understand your work

Using AI to prepare for meetings, cross-reference tasks, and spot work that hasn’t been scheduled

Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn and via inventium.ai, where he leads Inventium’s AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams.

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/

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Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.

Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au

Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber

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