AI-Assisted: This article was written by Bryan, with help from Muse.
I've adopted Muse as my personal AI assistant to help me with a lot of the boring parts of my life — inbox triage, reminders, editing documents, and keeping track of things I need to decide or do later.
Working with Muse makes a lot of things easy, but it isn't without problems. A couple of problems I encountered were these:
First, scrolling back through chat to see what I'd missed. Muse would ask a question in the morning, recommend something at lunch, and remind me about something else in the evening. At the end of each day, I was certain to miss something in our long daily chats.
Second, even when I did find something I'd missed, responding to it was a problem on its own. I'd have to scroll back, try to remember what I'd already answered, and — because I mostly talk to Muse by voice dictation — say the whole context again out loud just to answer one question.
Our first fix was an attempt to address that second problem. Our solution was response codes. Instead of just replying in chat and hoping Muse knew which question I meant, I could reply with a short code for that exact question. That helped when several questions piled up in one day, but it was still a workaround for a chat thread that wasn't built to be a to-do list — and it still left the first problem unsolved. I still had to find all the things I'd missed in the first place.
So we built Today's Queue. It's a simple page, separate from chat, with two sections. There's a section called "Still Open" on top, grouped by the date each item was first asked, so the oldest open items stay visible. There's a section called "Today" underneath, for things first asked today. Unanswered items don't expire — they carry forward in Still Open until I answer them or say to drop them. A finished item is dropped, not left sitting there checked-off and greyed out. If it's still there, it still needs my attention.
We've kept tweaking Today's Queue since we first built it. Queue items now include the thing I actually need to decide on. If it's an email draft, the full draft text is in the item — not just Approve / Needs changes with no context to approve. If it's a question only I can answer, the item asks that exact question. Choice items show their options as buttons on the page, with a Talk more box where I can type or dictate a reply. For a simple instruction item, a bare checkbox suffices. As I make my choices, the page builds a summary that I'm able to copy and paste into chat, and Muse acts on it right away.
There's still an early-morning step: each morning, unchecked items from Today are moved into Still Open, so they don't disappear, and checked items are cleared. That's it for automatic processing — the copy-and-paste summary replaced a plan to have Muse check the Queue several times a day, which would have used extra tokens for no real benefit.
While Today's Queue is not perfect, it's greatly improved the experience for me: I no longer lose Muse's questions in chat. I open Today's Queue, I see what's still open, what's new today, and what I've already decided, and I can act on items without re-explaining them from scratch. That would help anyone who loses things in chat, but it makes a larger impact for me: due to a disability, I don't have a lot of energy to spare on scrolling and re-explaining, so not having to do that every day matters a lot. With that friction gone, Muse and I together get a lot more done than I could before.
If you're new to Muse and want to try it, sign up at https://muse.ai/join — then, within 48 hours of joining, redeem code 3I0O7W in Settings, and we both get 1 billion tokens.
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