The Robot Assistant Field Guide is Here

I spent the better part of a year experimenting with AI and coming away unimpressed.

The chatbots were fine for generating a quick summary or answering a trivia question. But every time I tried to use them for real work, the same problem showed up. They had no memory. No connection to my actual files. No way to do anything except talk. I’d describe a task, get a wall of text back, and then do all the work myself anyway.

Then Claude Code arrived. Suddenly the AI could read and write files on my computer. That changed things. I could point it at a folder full of notes and say “find every open task and organize them by project.” It would actually do it. But Claude Code ran in the terminal, which meant I had to think like a programmer to get anything done.

When Claude Cowork showed up, the programming barrier disappeared. Same power, but now I could just talk to it. Describe what I needed in plain English and watch it work. That’s when things got interesting.

Add MCPs (connectors that let the AI talk to your calendar, email, Slack, and other apps) and the whole picture comes together. Memory, because it reads your files. Skills, because you can teach it how you work. Reach, because it connects to the tools you already use. That’s the formula.

Once I had all three pieces, I started building. Email processing first. Then daily planning. Then task management. Then customer support, content publication, journaling, sponsor tracking, podcast production, weekly reviews, and a shutdown routine that wraps up my day in fifteen minutes instead of an hour.

At some point I looked up and realized I’d built something. Not a chatbot I ask questions. A system. A persistent assistant that knows my projects, remembers what I told it three weeks ago about that contractor invoice, and handles the tedious stuff I used to spend hours on every day.

I call it my robot assistant.

The biggest difference isn’t even the time saved. It’s that I stay in the zone. I used to break focus a dozen times a day to deal with admin. Email, invoicing, task shuffling, calendar juggling. Every interruption costs more than the minutes it takes. It costs the momentum. The robot handles the donkey work now, and I keep working on the stuff that actually matters.

Today I’m releasing the Robot Assistant Field Guide. It teaches the method behind everything I just described. How to use Claude Cowork and Obsidian to build your own personal AI assistant from scratch.

I want to be clear about what this is and what it isn’t. This is not “let AI write your stuff.” If you want a tool that does your thinking for you, this isn’t it. The Robot Assistant Field Guide teaches you to build an assistant for the donkey work. The email triage, the task management, the scheduling, the data entry, the repetitive admin. So you have more time for your real work.

You get ten foundation videos, about three hours total, that take you from zero to a working robot assistant. Each video builds on the last. By the end you have a functioning system ready for real work.

Then the 10-week live workshop series starts April 2. These aren’t webinars. They’re hands-on working sessions where we build real workflows together. Email processing. Calendar and daily planning. Task management. Personal CRM. Review cadences. All recorded if you can’t make it live.

You also get a Starter Kit with a vault template, sample workflows, and an AI-powered assembler that personalizes everything to your work. You don’t need to be a programmer. You need a Mac and a willingness to try something new.

The price is $199, one-time purchase, no subscription. Use code ROBOTLAUNCH for 10% off through March 30.

Get the Robot Assistant Field Guide

I’ve made a lot of Field Guides over the years. This one feels different. It’s the first time I’ve taught you to build the actual tool. The robot assistant isn’t a demo. It’s how I work now. And I think it can be how you work too.

Here’s the first Foundation Video:

Exploring Bloom, An Interesting Finder Alternative

Bloom is a new Finder alternative that’s been getting a lot of attention in the Labs community. It offers flexible multi-pane layouts, fast search, panel syncing that works like an advanced column view, and more settings than Apple’s Finder could dream of. At $16 for a lifetime license with a free trial, it’s easy to kick the tires.

This is a post for MacSparky Labs Pathfinders and Insiders only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?

Fantastical Meets AI: Your Calendar Just Got Smarter (Sponsor)

This post is sponsored by Flexibits.

I’m delighted to welcome back Flexibits as a MacSparky sponsor. Their premier calendar application, Fantastical, has been my daily driver for years, and they just shipped something that genuinely changes how I manage my schedule.

Fantastical now has a connector for Claude and Claude Cowork using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). If you’ve been following my work with AI assistants, you know I’ve been building workflows where AI tools interact directly with the apps on my Mac. Fantastical’s MCP server lets Claude read your calendar, check your availability, and create events using Fantastical’s natural language parsing — all from within a conversation.

To get started, go to the Claude Desktop App settings on your Mac and install Fantastical under the Connectors. One thing I appreciate is the granular permission controls. You can set it to always allow calendar reading but require approval before writing, updating, or deleting events. You stay in control of exactly what the AI can do.

I’ve been using this in my own workflow and it’s a real improvement. Every morning I have Claude generate a daily brief that pulls my calendar events straight from Fantastical. Having my AI assistant understand my availability before suggesting meeting times eliminates the back-and-forth of scheduling.

This matters because your calendar is one of the most important data sources in your productivity system. When your AI assistant can see your schedule and act on it, the friction of calendar management drops dramatically. Here’s a short video from yours truly.

But Fantastical isn’t just about AI. The app continues to excel at the fundamentals: best-in-class natural language event creation, Calendar Sets that let you switch between work and personal views with a click, and seamless integration with Zoom, Google Meet, and other conferencing tools. Fantastical works across Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, and Windows.

If you’re looking for a calendar app that keeps pushing the boundaries, especially if you’re curious about how AI fits into your productivity workflow, give Fantastical a try.

David Pogue’s Book on Apple’s First 50 Years

David Pogue has a new book out called Apple: The First 50 Years. We interviewed David about it on Mac Power Users, and I got an early copy.

I’ve read the whole thing, and I really enjoyed it.

There are a lot of Apple books that focus on the personalities. The backstabbing, the drama, the Steve Jobs mythology.

Those books have their place, but Pogue took a different angle. This one focuses on the products. The Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and everything in between. It traces the full arc of the company through the things it actually made.

That framing works. It gives you a nice, clean overview of Apple’s entire run without getting lost in boardroom politics. You come away with a better understanding of why certain products mattered and how they connected to what came next.

The photography is beautiful too. It’s a big, full-color book with images that do justice to the hardware. If you’ve ever been the kind of person who appreciated the design of an Apple product (and if you’re reading this blog, you probably are), you’ll enjoy just flipping through it.

The Now Page Update

My goal with the Now Page is to update it weekly. If I could do that, updates would not be newsworthy. But, alas, the last few months have been nuts and I finally got it updated today after a two month hiatus. Hopefully, this is the first in a long streak of weekly updates.

Mac Power Users 840: Finder and File Mgmt

On this episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and David take on the Finder. They compare their wildly different file management philosophies, dig into Finder toolbar customization, extensions, Quick Actions, and the apps that make file management actually enjoyable (or at least less painful). Stephen also reveals that he’s written what may be the shortest AppleScript in history, and David’s screen apparently grew a right ear. Plus, there’s a new Apple hardware roundup because they announced a lot last week. Of course, money was spent.

Episode Links

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • Ecamm: Powerful live streaming platform for Mac.
  • 1Password: Never forget a password again.

Half Your Day Isn’t Your Job

How much of your day is spent on your actual work?

Not the email triage. Not the task shuffling. Not the calendar juggling, the filing, the follow-ups, the status tracking, the scheduling, the data entry. The real work. The creative stuff. The thinking. The making.

For most of us, the honest answer is painful. We sit down intending to do meaningful work and spend the first hour sorting email. We open our task manager and burn twenty minutes reorganizing instead of doing. We have systems. Maybe several. None of them talk to each other, and all of them need feeding.

It’s not the work. It’s the work around the work. I call it the donkey work.

I’ve been building something to fix this. It’s a method for using AI to handle the donkey work so you have more time for everything else. I’ll tell you all about it Tuesday.

Apple Should Buy Anthropic (But Likely Won’t)

MG Siegler recently wrote a piece arguing that Apple should acquire Anthropic (paywall). It’s a fun thought experiment, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

The more time I spend working with AI tools like Claude, the more I’m convinced the future isn’t about applications. It’s going to be an AI agent sitting on top of all your data, managing the tedium while you focus on the work that matters.

Apple is in the perfect position to do this right. They control the hardware, the operating system, and the privacy infrastructure. What they don’t have is a world-class model.

Apple has been struggling with AI for years now. The Google Gemini deal brings hope, but it still isn’t their technology, and it seems like they are bleeding AI talent. Meanwhile, Apple just posted a $42 billion profit last quarter. They have the resources. The question is whether they have the will.

Acquiring Anthropic would change the game overnight. It would take Apple from playing catch-up to leading the conversation. Imagine Claude’s capabilities woven into every Apple device with the kind of deep integration only Apple can pull off. We’d be talking about something way beyond a better Siri.

There’s also an ideological alignment. Anthropic has taken a principled stance on AI safety and responsible development. Apple has always positioned itself as the company that cares about how technology affects people. Those values aren’t identical, but they rhyme.

But stepping back into reality, this is certainly a pipe dream. Anthropic’s current valuation sits around $380 billion. Apple just doesn’t make moves like this. But if there was ever a time to start …

Setapp Single App Subscriptions

Setapp just launched something I’ve been hoping they’d do for a while: single app subscriptions. Instead of committing to the full Setapp bundle, you can now subscribe to individual apps directly through the Setapp ecosystem.

This makes a lot of sense. Not everyone wants a bundle. Sometimes you just need one tool. And now you can get it inside Setapp’s trusted ecosystem without paying for the whole catalog.

The list of eligible apps includes many tools I’ve recommended over the years. If there’s a Setapp app you’ve been eyeing but didn’t want to subscribe to the full service for, this is worth a look.

Setapp Single App Subscriptions are available now under the Marketplace menu.