How I Use AI During Naptime to Run a Business

My son takes one nap a day now. He's two and a half and it's getting shorter every week, which is a specific kind of grief I wasn't prepared for. Right now I get about 90 minutes, sometimes less. In that window I run a small content business, handle anything that requires actual adult brain, and occasionally sit in silence and stare at the wall for five minutes because I need that.

I want to walk you through exactly how I use that time and where AI fits in, because I've seen a lot of content about "using AI to be more productive" that is clearly written by people with unlimited uninterrupted hours. This is the version for people who have ninety minutes and a monitor showing a sleeping toddler in the corner of their screen.

The First Ten Minutes Are Not for Working

Okay this is not technically about AI but I have to say it because I used to skip this part and it made everything worse. The first ten minutes of naptime I do not open my laptop. I get a glass of water. I sit somewhere that isn't where I was sitting while managing a toddler. I let my brain switch modes.

This sounds like a waste of productivity time but it actually isn't, because if I jump straight into work from full caregiver mode, the first twenty minutes of "work" are usually me staring at a blank document or clicking around aimlessly. The ten-minute reset means I actually hit the ground running when I do start.

Then I Do a Voice Dump into ChatGPT

By the time naptime starts I've usually had like six half-formed ideas during the morning and no time to develop any of them. So the first thing I actually do for work is open ChatGPT on my phone and just talk. I voice-type everything floating around in my head, content ideas, client stuff I need to handle, things I've been meaning to research, whatever.

Then I ask it to organize what I just said and help me figure out what's actually worth doing today versus what can wait. This takes maybe ten minutes and it's the most important ten minutes of my workday. Without it I spend the whole naptime context-switching between half-finished things and feel terrible at the end.

I've started calling this the "brain dump and triage" step and I do it every single naptime now. It works because I'm not trying to decide what to prioritize while also trying to generate ideas. I separate those two things. ChatGPT helps me do the triage after I've gotten everything out of my head.

Writing Gets AI Help From the Start

A big chunk of what I do is write, blog posts, social content, emails, proposals. Before AI tools, I spent a lot of naptime on the "starting" problem. Staring at a blank page, writing a sentence, deleting it, writing it again slightly differently, deleting it again. Now I use Claude to get past the blank page problem fast.

My process: I tell it what I want to write, who it's for, and what I actually think about the topic. Not a formal brief, just me talking. Like, "I want to write something about why I think most productivity advice is bad for people with young kids, my main point is that it ignores how fragmented attention is when you're caregiving, and I want it to feel honest not preachy." Then I ask for a rough outline or even just a first paragraph to react to.

I don't use what it gives me directly. I use it as something to push against. Seeing a version of the thing, even an imperfect one, kicks my brain into a completely different gear than staring at nothing. I revise heavily and the final thing sounds like me, not AI. But I got there in 20 minutes instead of 45.

Client Emails in Batches

I hate email. I genuinely hate it. I find the performance of professional email, the correct level of warmth, the appropriate amount of follow-up urgency, the diplomatic phrasing when something's gone sideways, exhausting. And I was bad at it because by the time I got to email I was already tired from everything else.

Now I batch all my emails and use Claude to draft them. I describe the situation and what outcome I need and it gives me a draft. Sometimes the draft is almost perfect. Sometimes I change most of it. But having a draft to work from instead of a blank compose window has cut my email time by more than half and reduced the low-level dread I used to feel about it.

Real talk: I also use it for the hard emails. The "we need to talk about scope creep" email. The "I'm raising my rates" email. The "I'm really sorry this deliverable was late" email. I know what I want to say in all of those, I just need help saying it without it coming out wrong. That's exactly what it's good at.

The Last Twenty Minutes Are For Deep Work Only

Whatever the important hard thing is, the thing that requires actual sustained concentration. I save it for the last stretch of naptime. By then I've cleared the organizational noise, done the communications work, and made progress on writing. My brain is warm. I'm in it.

AI doesn't help me here directly. This is the part that's just me working. But it helps indirectly because all the other stuff took less time and mental energy than it would have without it, so I actually have something left for this.

What I've Noticed After Doing This For Eight Months

My output has gone up, obviously, that's the point. But the thing I didn't expect is that I feel less guilty during naptime now. Before, I was always half-working, half-anxious about how little I was getting done, half-wondering if I should be resting instead. Now I have a system that works and I actually trust it, so I'm more present in whatever I'm doing.

The other thing: I've stopped trying to make naptime do more than it can do. Ninety minutes is ninety minutes. AI made those ninety minutes more effective, it didn't magically give me more of them. Keeping that straight in my head has made me a lot less stressed about the whole thing.

Also my son is showing signs of dropping his nap entirely and I'm not ready to talk about it.