Hi Friends,
When I published Free Time in March 2022 to help creative business owners set their time free through smarter systems, I had no idea that, a year and a half later, AI would explode onto the scene.
While the systems-thinking principles in the 27 chapters are evergreen (check out the Chapter Summaries PDF), every single one could be rewritten with agentic AI in mind to automate even more, taking ever more pressure off of you—the business owner—to remove any bottlenecks getting in the way of your highest and best work.
I’m inspired by systems superstar Monica Rysavy, Ph.D., Ed.D., who built a whole AI Chief of Staff last week!
🤖 What is an AI Agent? How is it different from AI chat?
During yesterday’s Free Time Operations Dashboard quarterly office hours call, Notion superstar and our resident tech expert Alex Sherwood walked us through Notion’s brand new AI Agents feature release earlier this week; it’s free to experiment with until May 4, when Notion will start charging on a credit-based system for usage.
While chats with AI can help you handle one-off tasks, Custom Agents run automatically on schedules or triggers, automating recurring work.
You design a workflow—what data to pull, how to format it, and where to post it—then set a trigger or schedule, and the agent handles it from there, whether you’re online or not.
All Notion users get Notion Agent. Business and Enterprise customers get Custom Agents, priced under the Notion credit system. JB Note: I’m on the Business plan at $20 per person per month, and it is well worth it since Notion powers my entire business!
👉 Here’s how to build your first Custom Agent, and . . .
✅ Here are 5 starting Notion AI Agent ideas to try:
Style Guide: Create a style guide for my writing voice based on the content of this page: {@-reply the page with writing samples; I included the entire Free Time manuscript}
Weekly Status Update: create a weekly update for my business every Friday at 5 a.m. by searching across Slack {add connection so Notion can access} and these databases: {i.e. Tasks, Meeting Notes, and Speaking Clients CRM.}
Chosen Slack emoji reaction creates new tasks: {Connect the agent to Slack} Automatically turn something into a task based on a specific emoji reaction.
Morning Brief: Create a summary of my agenda for the day with calendar events, the tasks database, and unread emails in my inbox.
Idea Collection: Automatically summarize saves into my collection bucket each week (or month); note key themes and possible related pages elsewhere in Notion.
And many more ideas in Notion’s AI Agent marketplace . . .
💬 Have you experimented with AI agents at all? Let us know in the comments!👇
📆 Hosting: Join our Next Free Time Hang
Register to join our next Free Time Community Call on March 19 at 12:30 ET! We’ll meet for 45 minutes with a new format: a short reading from Free Time, followed by optional 2-3 minute shares and optional hot-seats for getting group input on a question or challenge in your business.
🎙 Check out this related episode from the archives:
🎧 Listening
With thanks to Alexandra Franzen and her fabulous taste in music, I’ve got this Spotify playlist queued for the recent Lunar New Year transition from the snake to the fire horse: 🐎
🎉 Thank you for reading, and here’s to setting even more time free through automated systems!
👉 Did you get this from a friend?
If so, sign up below to get these curated twice-monthly Time Well Spent round-ups, and check out the 📘 Free Time book & 🎧 Free Time podcast.
I love that you’re talking about this. So helpful. ty!
The distinction between AI chat and agentic AI is the part most practical users miss -- one-off prompting still requires you to show up, but agents actually remove the task from your cognitive queue entirely. The 'style guide' idea is particularly clever since it forces the LLM to infer from actual output rather than rely on vague decsriptions like 'sound like me.' I've been experimenting with similar setups in n8n and the biggest unlock is connecting calendar and task data so the morning brief has actualy context to work with.