Thirty days to stop wasting your time

Let's begin with a true story

Twelve invoices in a folder. Four suppliers, five months. The kind of pile you put off until Friday evening and end up copying into a spreadsheet by hand, one at a time, taking care over it.

While this handbook was being prepared, that pile was handed to an AI tool, with a request written in plain language. In a few seconds the table was done. And it came with this remark:

One thousand four hundred and sixteen euros counted twice, in a folder of twelve invoices. Ask yourself honestly: copying the amounts by hand, would you have seen it? The two files carry different names. To the eye, they are two lines out of twelve. It is the contents that give them away, and nobody compares contents.

This story is told in full in chapter 4.4, with the exact request, the screen it produced and the corrected figures. It is here because it says in one page what this handbook promises: not to dazzle anyone, but to give you back hours and spare you the kind of mistakes that tiredness does not forgive.

What you will be able to do after thirty days

• Have writing, correcting and summarising done for you where you used to write it yourself: notes, minutes, letters, reports.
• Make your own images, illustrations, cover visuals, retouching: without knowing how to draw or opening a graphics program.
• Lay out a document so that it looks as though someone did it for a living.
• Have your file chores done for you: sorting, renaming, comparing, converting, summarising: on your own folders.
• Chain all four together to produce a complete deliverable: a welcome booklet, a quote, a grant application, a mail merge.

The heart of the handbook: the thirty-day programme

This handbook is not made to be read in one go. It is made to be followed, at a rate of about 28 minutes a day for thirty days. Each day tells you two things, and only two: what you read, and what you do.

The six stages of the path:

1. Days 1 to 3, The foundations. Part 0
2. Days 4 to 9, Claude, the centre of everything. Part I
3. Days 10 to 15, The visual studio. Part II
4. Days 16 to 21, Finished documents. Part III
5. Days 22 to 27, Your files. Part IV
6. Days 28 to 30, A recipe of your own. Part V

What it costs, and what it does not

This handbook is a one-off purchase. The tools themselves are paid for every month, and those subscriptions are not included in its price. Better said here than on page forty.

Do not take out any subscription today. Start with the free account. By the end of Part I you will know whether the tool gives you back enough time to justify $20 a month. That is the only honest way to decide, and chapter 0.0 sets out the three paths line by line. Prices recorded on 31 July 2026.

What this handbook is not

• It is not a computing course. You learn to drive, not to build the engine. Not one line of code is required of you, Part IV is done entirely with the mouse.
• It is not a list of tricks to copy. Every chapter has you do something on your documents, and gives you the means to check that it worked.
• It is not reworded documentation. Every step described was carried out before it was written, every price measured on a real account, every snag told where it happened. The method, and its limits, are in appendix C.
• It is not sponsored. No publisher named here has reviewed, funded or approved these pages. Appendix F says exactly where the links stand.

What you get with the handbook

• The handbook itself, eight parts, seven appendices, to read on screen or to print.
• The thirty-day logbook, tickable, which keeps your progress.
• The troubleshooting page, searchable: problems filed by symptom, a library of ready-to-copy requests, and the glossary.
• The demonstration folder for Part IV, including the twelve invoices from the story above, duplicate and all.
• The deliverables of the eleven recipes from Part V, including five tools that work: quote, defence sheet, mail merge, grant budget, quiz.

Edition, updates and contact

A mistake, a screen that no longer looks like anything, a question left unanswered? Write to contact@atelieriacomplet.com. Reports feed directly into the next edition.