You're paying for AI you barely use

You're paying for AI tools you've barely touched, because nobody ever decided which problem they were meant to solve.

Underneath that is usually a business with no plan written down. Without one, every new tool looks useful, so you sign up and forget about it until the renewal email arrives.

Researchers once asked the planning question head on. Their paper is called "Should entrepreneurs plan or just storm the castle?", and it pulled together 46 studies covering more than 11,000 small firms.

Planning won. And it helped businesses that were already trading more than it helped start-ups.

So if you've run your business for years without writing a plan down, you have the most to gain.

The plan doesn't need to be long. One page: where you want the business in five years, what has to be true in three, and two or three goals for the next twelve months. Keep it short enough to read in two minutes, and pin it where you'll see it.

"Set up an AI assistant" is a task, and it only earns a place on that page if it serves a goal. A goal is a result you can check, like getting paid within thirty days.

When your page is written, paste it into Claude or ChatGPT and ask one question: which of these goals are really tasks? Expect to be told about more than one. Rewrite each one as a result you can check, then see which AI tools still earn their subscription.

Storm the castle if you want, but write down which castle you're attacking first.