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Workflows

Author/Source: Chris Blattman, claudeblattman.com

Key Ideas

  • Workflows are systems built from skills, integrations, and habits that improve with use -- not individual tools.
  • Five workflows are presented in order of increasing complexity and setup time: Prompt/Plan/Review/Revise (Day 1, 5 min), Executive Assistant (1-3 weeks), Noise Canceling (< 1 hour), Project Management (3+ weeks), and Tax Season (2-3 hours one-time).
  • The Prompt/Plan/Review/Revise loop requires no integrations and works immediately; other workflows require MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations for email, calendar, and documents.
  • The Executive Assistant workflow handles email triage, morning briefings, calendar queries, and communication drafting -- taking the author from 5,000 unread emails to inbox zero.
  • The Project Management workflow builds living project dashboards with weekly reviews and on-demand proposals, layered on top of inbox triage and meeting capture.
  • The workflows are designed to layer: project management works best when inbox triage and meeting capture are already running.
  • Users should start wherever their biggest pain point is rather than trying to implement all workflows at once.

Summary

This article serves as an overview and navigation page for the five major AI workflows described on the claudeblattman.com site. Each workflow is presented as a system that combines multiple components and improves through iteration, rather than a single tool or prompt. The workflows range from immediately usable (the Prompt/Plan/Review/Revise loop, which needs only Claude Code) to ones requiring weeks of calibration (Project Management, which builds on the Executive Assistant foundation).

The article emphasizes the layered nature of these workflows. The simplest workflow -- the four-step loop -- requires no configuration. The Executive Assistant and Noise Canceling workflows require MCP integrations to connect Claude Code to email and calendar. Project Management sits on top of the Executive Assistant, adding multi-project oversight. The Tax Season workflow is a standalone case study demonstrating document collection, compilation, and verification patterns. A comparison table shows setup time and prerequisites for each, helping users prioritize based on their current capabilities and pain points.

Relevance to Economics Research

The layered workflow approach maps onto how researchers might incrementally adopt AI tools. Starting with the Prompt/Plan/Review/Revise loop for structuring research ideas and reviewing plans requires no setup. Adding email triage could help manage referee reports, co-author communications, and conference invitations. The Project Management workflow with living dashboards and weekly reviews could coordinate multiple concurrent research projects -- a common challenge for active researchers juggling papers at different stages. The key insight is that workflows compound: each layer makes subsequent layers more effective, just as a well-organized research pipeline makes each new project easier to manage.