The Solo Consultant (research, Follow-up, Scheduling)

The agent crew for a solo consultant:

MORNING BRIEF. Before your first meeting, an agent has read:

• Your calendar for today (from Google Calendar).
• Your inbox since yesterday's brief (from Gmail).
• The news in your specialty (from RSS feeds you specify).
• Recent activity from your top 5 client accounts. And written you a 1-page summary: who you're meeting, what's pending, what changed. Read it on your phone over breakfast.

EMAIL TRIAGE. Your inbox is the productivity tax of being known. An agent sorts incoming mail into:

• URGENT (a client's name in the subject, or a meeting confirmation): surface to the top.
• CAN WAIT (newsletters, updates, "I'd love to chat"): bucket for later.
• NOTHING (LinkedIn notifications, generic outreach): archive automatically. You start each session at 12 emails to read instead of 80.

MEETING PREP. 15 minutes before each meeting, an agent:

• Looks up the attendee's company and recent news.
• Pulls your past correspondence with them (Gmail search).
• Reads any related project files in your Google Drive.
• Summarizes "what we last talked about and what's open." You walk into the meeting prepared without having spent 20 minutes preparing.

POST-MEETING FOLLOW-UP. After a meeting:

• If you took notes (typed or dictated), the agent extracts action items.
• For each action item assigned to you, creates a task in your task manager (Things, Todoist, ClickUp).
• For each action item assigned to others, drafts a follow-up email asking for status by [reasonable date].
• You review the drafts, send them.

WEEKLY REVIEW. Friday afternoon, an agent compiles:

• Hours worked vs. billed (from your time tracker).
• Open items from the week's meetings.
• Pipeline status (emails out, replies received, calls scheduled).
• Recommended priorities for next week. You spend 20 minutes on Friday reviewing instead of 90 minutes on Monday morning catching up.

Hardware: a Mac mini at home, or a Mac Studio if you're already a Mac power user. Frontier model for the language tasks (these benefit from quality), local model for the routine pulls.

Recurring cost: $20-50/month for a frontier subscription, depending on volume. The hardware pays back in saved hours within 60-90 days.