I Coded My Way Out of Fighting Google Docs at 6 AM

I was talking to a friend today about productivity and we went down a rabbit hole about our weird, two-sided relationship with it.

When we are feeling good, we adopt productive patterns like we are collecting Pokemon cards. Beefing up to-do lists, filling morning pages, stacking multiple meditations, color-coding our calendars like we are planning a military operation. Who among us has not convinced ourselves that the perfect system is just one more app away.

The annoying part is that this affair follows us into the low periods too. We watch influencers explain their 4 AM routines, listen to podcasts about the importance of sunlight in your eyes, and start incorporating Misogi and Hygge into our lives like they are going to magically fix everything. My friend was on exactly the same page, so we rightly assumed everyone must feel the same way. That is how it works, right.

My guilty productivity pleasure

One of my guilty productivity pleasures is watching Ali Abdaal. I know, I know, but the guy is actually helpful. Over the years I collected some of his tips into a Google doc I use most mornings for reflection and planning.

This is the annoying part. Anyone who has tried to write something meaningful in a Google doc every day knows it is not exactly a joy. Add my large clumsy hands, lack of coffee and groggy 6 AM eyes, and it was becoming genuinely painful. So I did what any reasonable person would do and decided to code my way out of the problem. Maybe reasonable is a stretch.

The process was actually pretty simple

First, I turned my doc into something the AI could work with. I downloaded the Google doc as a PDF rather than taking screenshots. It is the difference between texting someone your grocery list versus sending a blurry photo of your handwritten one. One the computer reads instantly, the other it has to decode first.

Then I asked v0 to turn the PDF into a webapp. The rough prompt was to create a "Morning Manifesto" productivity app with a daily check-in page with gratitude and focus task inputs, a weekly priorities page with work/personal/hustle categories, a calendar review page showing history, a blue color scheme, Supabase integration for data storage, simple authentication, and a mobile-responsive design. There was some back-and-forth tweaking, because AI is not that magical yet, but within around 60 minutes I had something usable.

Then I added a database so my entries do not vanish. This is where it gets slightly technical, but bear with me. When you add something to a webpage it can store that info temporarily, like writing on a whiteboard that gets erased, or permanently in a database, like writing in a notebook you can come back to. Since I wanted to track my morning reflections over time, I needed the notebook version. I used Supabase because it plays nice with v0 and does not make me want to throw my laptop out the window.

And that was it. Total time investment: about an hour.

Where the real value lives

There is a ton of noise about AI revolutionizing everything. It is genuinely wild that I can basically think out loud to a computer and get a working webapp back. But what actually matters to me is that I am not building the next unicorn or reinventing an industry.

I am just making my groggy, pre-coffee mornings slightly less annoying.

That is where the real value lives. Not in grand gestures or the productivity theatre we perform for our future selves, but in the tiny daily frictions AI can actually smooth out. My morning routine is still just me, a cup of coffee, and some quiet reflection. The only difference is my clumsy fingers no longer have to fight Google Docs formatting at 6 AM.

Maybe that is the sweet spot we have been looking for. Not using these tools to optimize ourselves into productivity machines, but just to get out of our own way. So before you reach for the next system, name the one small friction you hit every single day and point AI at that. It will not make you a productivity machine, and that turns out to be the point.