Organizing my life with Grok Bot

0:00Each morning when I wake up, there's a piece of paper on my printer, and that piece of paper has my daily schedule. It has the physical things and mental things I'm going to do to take care of my health. It has some interesting things to think about, both from my X bookmarks and other conversations I've been having online.

0:15And it also has spaces for me to do my daily journaling practice. And the amazing thing is this report is generated entirely by Grok Bot and sent to me every morning. So let's talk a little bit about how I built it. First, I got to give a shout out because I was really inspired by Karen Chang, who built something similar with her morning times, her morning newspaper, um, that she's sharing here.

0:39Now, I like this idea a lot, but I actually wanted to simplify it a bit and move it closer to what my mornings usually look like. And my mornings usually look like sitting down and thinking, thinking about the content that I want to create, thinking about the things that are on my mind or that I have to do that day.

0:55And as much as possible, I want to eliminate sort of digital interactions first thing in the morning. And so it's kind of tough because all of my planning details, life events live on the internet, right? And so what I did was build some flows into Grok Bot to take those digital things and bring them into the physical world.

1:15So I want to talk about how I did it. The first thing I did was I sat down with Grok Bot And I actually prototyped this daily brief. I took inspiration from some Apple designs and like bento boxes, and I really wanted this to be minimalist. And I thought about the things that were important to me, the events that I had planned, interesting things to think about, you know, maybe physical health, um, aspects that I'm always trying to maintain.

1:40I might tweak this a bit to be more habit focused. I haven't thought about that just yet. Um, and then spots for my affirmations and some journaling, uh, practices that I like to, to work through in the morning. Now from there. I made a list, a list of how I was going to map the technologies to make this happen.

1:58And I actually accomplished most of this by chatting with my engineering bot. So the thing is, I already had a printer connected to my local internet, a Brother printer. And the really interesting thing about this is it's one hop away from being connected to the global internet, right? So like my computer can communicate with my printer, but You can't communicate with my printer on the internet.

2:21And that's actually a good thing. Now, the neat thing is that Grok Bot can execute commands on your computer. So even if you're using Grok Bot on your phone, if you have a computer that's awake, Grok Bot could run like a command line command on it or route traffic through that machine. And this is really important because it means Grok Bot can access your local network as long as there's a machine awake.

2:42Now, that also means that this is a great use for a Raspberry Pi or an extra Mac Mini if you have one. If there's a device that's always on and connected to your local network, Grok Bot can control those devices. So what I did was sit down and really think about the pieces that I need to connect here one by one.

3:00I need some way to communicate with my printer. Now Grok Bot can do that through my Mac as long as it's awake. I need some way to generate this diagram. As I just showed you, I chatted with my engineering bot to come up with this minimalist design. And then typically the hardest part actually is I need some way to pull these calendar events some way to pull these sources of information and some way to, you know, get my daily workouts or my activities in.

3:28Now, the amazing thing, I'm biased, is that I actually do all of these things in Grok Bot already. I have my workout bot, I have my, um, getting things done bot, and some of these other bots that already have access to my Google Calendar, that have access to my X account and my bookmarks, and that have access to my workouts.

3:46So all the pieces of the puzzle are already there, and I brought them together in this Daily Brief bot. And this Brief bot basically has all of the different, um, all of the different pieces along with a little repo that I wrote up to own some of these designs and whatnot. And it's able to fire on an automation every morning at 6:45 AM and connect to my printer and print this page out.

4:11Now, caveat, I haven't set up a dedicated remote workstation just yet. I have to go out and buy a Mac Mini. You know, it's expensive. They're out of stock. We don't have time to be dropping, dropping dough on Mac Minis. But once I have that server set up, this automation will more reliably fire every single day.

4:29For now, it's only going to fire when my laptop's awake. So that's the TL;DR. That's how I built a pretty cool automation. Shout out Karen Chang, shout out some of the folks on X that inspired me to do this. And hopefully you take this as an example of how you can bring all those things that you're interested in digitally to a more physical form and then interact with those things maybe offline so that you can create and take a step back and disconnect every once in a while.

4:56Uh, but I'm Matt with SpaceX AI. This is how I made my daily brief using Grok Bot. Until next time, peace.