My Morning Before the Trucks Roll

Most "how I use AI" posts are written by people who don't run anything. They'll tell you about prompt frameworks and productivity systems and the future of work. I run a towing company. My day starts before the sun and I've got drivers waiting on me. So here's the unglamorous version: the four things I actually do with AI before the trucks roll, in the order I do them.

None of this is advanced. That's the point. If it required a degree, it wouldn't help you.

06:10 — Clear the inbox in one pass

Overnight the inbox fills up — motor club emails, a customer complaint, an invoice question, three things that don't matter. I don't read them one at a time anymore. I dump the list in and let AI sort it.

Here are my unread emails: [paste subjects + senders].
Sort into: (1) Reply now (2) This week (3) Delegate (4) Archive.
For each "Reply now," draft a 2-sentence response I can approve.

Five minutes and I've got a triaged list and rough replies waiting. I read them, fix what's wrong, send. The trap here is thinking the draft has to be perfect on the first try. It doesn't. It just has to be faster to fix than to write from scratch. It always is.

06:18 — Handle the one ugly customer

There's almost always one. Somebody who got towed off a private lot at 2am and is furious, or thinks we scratched a bumper. Early in the day my patience is thin and that's exactly when I shouldn't be writing that reply myself.

The angrier the customer, the less I should be the one typing.

So I hand it off. I paste what they said and ask for a reply that acknowledges the frustration, states the facts, admits nothing, and offers one next step. What comes back is calmer and more professional than what I'd have fired off with a coffee in me. I read it, make it sound like me, send it. The situation gets smaller instead of bigger.

06:24 — Write the driver briefing

My drivers get a short text every morning: road conditions, a safety reminder, what today's priority is. Used to skip it when I was slammed. Now it takes ninety seconds.

Write a short morning briefing text for my drivers, [date].
Weather + road conditions in [city], one safety reminder,
today's priority ([contract coverage / heavy volume]), quick close.
Under 100 words. Sound like a boss who's been in the seat, not a memo.

That last line matters. If you don't tell it the voice you want, it'll hand you corporate mush. Tell it to sound like you, and it will.

06:28 — Turn yesterday's mess into tomorrow's system

This is the one that compounds. Every day something happens that should've been written down already — a weird billing situation, a step a new driver got wrong, a winch-out that went sideways. Instead of letting it evaporate, I spend two minutes turning it into an SOP.

Turn this into a clean SOP a day-one driver could follow:
[describe what happened and how it should be handled].
Purpose, numbered steps, safety notes, what to do if it goes wrong.

Do that a few times a week and after a couple months you've got an operations manual you never sat down to "write." It built itself out of your actual problems. That's the whole trick — you're not adding work, you're capturing work you already did.

The part that matters more than the prompts

You could copy these four things tomorrow and get value. But the real shift isn't the prompts — it's the habit underneath them. I stopped asking "can I find time to deal with this later" and started asking "can AI take the first 80% of this right now." Almost always, yes.

The owners who win with this aren't the technical ones. They're the ones who build the reflex: before I do a thinking-or-writing task by hand, I check if I should hand the first draft to my coworker. Thirty days of that and it's automatic.