Leveraging AI

230 | Unlocking AI’s Full Potential with MCP Connectors (Without a Line of Code) with Matt Martin

• Isar Meitis, Matt Martin • Season 1 • Episode 230

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If you're a business leader, your time is your most expensive resource—and most of us are wasting it. Meetings without agendas, triple bookings, and calendar chaos have become the norm.

In this episode, we explore how AI can reclaim your focus and give you back hours each week—without hiring a new assistant or revamping your tech stack.

Matt Martin, CEO and Co-Founder of Clockwise, joins the show to share exactly how his AI-powered tool and the growing world of MCP connectors can transform the way you manage time. Whether you're leading a startup, scaling a team, or running an enterprise, this is your playbook for making AI your scheduling superpower.

In this session, you'll discover:
00:00 – Introduction: Why time is your only non-renewable resource
04:13 – Claude + Google Calendar: How it actually works
07:45 – What is an MCP Connector? A game-changing AI plugin
12:00 – How to automate agenda creation with Claude
17:00 – Setting up and managing MCP tools in Claude and ChatGPT
24:00 – Live example: Finding time to meet with 3 people using AI
42:00 – Future of agents and automation in time management

Matt Martin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Clockwise https://www.linkedin.com/in/voxmatt/ work without burning out.

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Isar Meitis:

Hello and welcome to the Leveraging AI Podcast, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Metis, your host, and we have a fascinating episode and topic for you today. So I'm gonna start with a question. What is the most important resource you have as. Yourself as a head of a company or a business? Well, some would say money, some other would think human capital. But the reality is there's only one resource that we cannot get more of, and that is time, which basically means the better you are with time management, either for yourself or for other people in your company, you can achieve a lot more without paying for additional resources. Now, there's ample of research showing that most of us people and business managers and CEOs of large companies and what, regardless of our positions are usually pretty bad at time management, which is really sad. We get distracted very easily. We don't necessarily have agendas for things and so on. Now, the good news are is that AI can be an incredible asset, helping us with managing our time better. So if you feel that you can benefit from better. Time management. You will find incredible value in this episode. Now, as always, we're going to show you exactly how to do this from a very practical perspective. So by the end of the episode, you will have the exact tools, prompt steps, processes that you need to use and implement in order to better manage your time with the assistance of AI tools. By the way, if you don't think you need help with time management, please drop me a note and tell me how you do this because you're probably the best time manager in the world. I've never met a person who's been really effective, uh, with managing their time. But now to our topic, our guest today, Matt Martin, is the co-founder and the CEO. Of Clockwise, which is a company that has developed software products to help people better manage their time. Now, this name by itself is brilliant. Calling the company clockwise for a product that actually helps you manage your time. But in addition to coming up with great names, he's also extremely knowledgeable in how to better manage our time using software applications because he has been doing this for nine years now. So clockwise has been around way before the AI craze, and now it's on. Obviously upgraded a lot of what it's doing with AI capabilities in connection with AI tools that we use in our day to day. So in this episode, Matt is going to teach us exactly how to use connectors such as calendar connectors, connectors and email connectors, as well as the clockwise software into large language models such as Claude and chat pt, using either the built-in connectors in them, or using MCP connectors, which by the way, just knowing these things, how to use connectors and how to connect MCP servers are incredibly powerful skills that are worth learning regardless of the time management benefit. But we are also going to go over specific use cases that can dramatically improve your time management using AI in connection with these tools. And since this is. Extremely valuable and I'm sure you would agree. I am really excited to welcome back to the show. Matt, welcome to Leveraging ai.

Matt Martin:

Sorry, what a great intro. Thanks so much for, uh, having me on and um, this is a topic obviously that's near and dear to my heart. Uh, two things off the, off the jump though. So one is if anybody out there is responding to Issa's Prompt to send them an email if you don't need help, time management, shoot that my way too. I'd love to hear. And second is, uh. I wish I were as good at naming as clockwise would indicate. I have to, I have to give thanks to my co-founder for that one. I'm so bad with names. One of the toughest thing in computer science naming things.

Isar Meitis:

Yeah, a hundred percent. But, but anyways, I, I, I'm really glad we're here. I really think it's a very, very important topic, right? I didn't say that in a joke. It's literally the only asset we cannot get more of. Uh, there are multiple books on how to manage our time better. There's different systems, processes, and so on. Uh, but, but if we can connect it to tools that we're using anyway in our day to day, then it's a huge benefit. So now it's the stage is yours. Show us, show us the magic, and show us how we can do this better. Let's do it.

Matt Martin:

And I, I love the format of this where we just kind of get in and get dirty, uh, to show people exactly how to do this stuff. Um, so let me just share my screen for a moment. I've, I've queued up a few things that I want to take. Your audience through, um, so clockwise, as you noted, we've been doing this for a while. Um, and one of the advantages we have is we have a massive corpus of data. Um, so we connect to some of the best companies on the face of the planet, places like Uber, Netflix, Atlassian, and help power their schedules. And we've taken kind of the brain and hooked it up to a model context protocol server so that you can use it instead of cloud, uh, or, or chatt BT as it were. Um, the first thing though that I I'd like to go through is just if you don't connect clockwise, you're gonna be missing out on some power, but there's still tons that you can do in the time management space when it comes to MCP servers, time management, and I'll give a shout out to this How to Geek article. Um, if you just Google Claude Managed Calendar, how to Geek, you'll find this article and, uh. Diba car. I like this article. It's a little click Beatty, but I like it because he's gone so in depth with what you can do, and it, it illustrates both the power of these tools and some of the limitations. So I'm gonna just take this prompt and kind of show you a really in depth usage of Claude and Calendar. Awesome. So, scooting over to Claude here. Uh, I'm gonna run over a couple things with, with everyone if you're not familiar. This is claude.ai. Um, I'm sure your audience is familiar with that much. I, I, I hope so. Yeah. Or else you haven't done your job right as Sarah. Yes, exactly. I, I fail miserably if I don't. Um, and. Under here, you have tools and one of the ones that they have is, so I'm gonna pause you

Isar Meitis:

just for one

Matt Martin:

second for

Isar Meitis:

obvious. Those of you who are not watching, uh, we're looking at Claude and at the bottom, at the prompt section of Claude. By the way, it's very similar in all the tools. There's this little, kinda like Tuggle buttons, which is basically, uh, opens a whole menu. And in that menu you have multiple things that you can do. One of the segments there is connectors, which are different things you can actually connect to Claude. It's a very similar setup, uh, in Chate as well, which we may or may not, uh, see afterwards. Uh, and then now I'll let you continue from here. By the way, the other thing that we did is Matt took the prompt from that article that he recommended. We're gonna put a show, uh, a link to that in the show notes so you can jump straight to that from your phone, uh, or your computer or whatever it is that you're listening, uh, to the podcast. Uh, and you'll be able to see the prompt as well. And we're gonna read a short snippet out of it afterwards, but continue now that we're seeing the menu with the different connectors.

Matt Martin:

Great. Yes. And, and good reminder that not everybody's watching this on YouTube, so. Uh, Claude has and Chate does as well, the ability to read from your calendar, so you can connect your Google calendar. Unfortunately, they don't have Outlook yet, um, but you can read from your Google calendar and it'll, it'll be able to suck down that information and give you some insights based off of it. So I have toggled on the Google Calendar connector. Um, you just OAuth into your Google account, and I've copied and paste the prompt, um, that was provided from the article. And there are a few things here that I'll, I'll just run through though, uh, for the audience. So it's gonna, it's asking for, it's a very highly structured prompt. Um, and I like these kinds. When you, when you see people are really into ai, really into MCP, you see people who give the LM a tremendous amount of guidance on what they want out of it. And you really do get better results by doing that.

Isar Meitis:

And I'll pause you just one second before we dive into the prompt. Yeah. Uh, for those of you who are new to the show or hasn't been listening to all the episodes, what is an MCP? Uh, an MCP is basically a USB connector for third party software into AI tools. So about roughly a year ago, uh, maybe a little less, uh, anthropic themselves. So the company behind Claude came up with a new protocol that now everybody's using that basically said, instead of. Every company in the world now developing connectors of different pieces of software into large language models or agents and so on. What if we develop a standard protocol that once one person or the company itself creates the connector, you can plug it in to your AI environment in three minutes, which again, we're gonna see afterwards how to do. So that became an extremely powerful capability to enhance the abilities of, uh, these AI tools, chatbots agents, and so on, because they can now connect either just as a read only or as read and write, depending how the MCP connector was developed with whatever third party software in this particular case, your Google calendar. But this could be as we'll see, many, many other different things. So closing parentheses back to you, Matt, to talk about the prompt.

Matt Martin:

Yeah, no, and it's, it's, uh, a great, uh, thing to explain a little bit because CPS are kind of like. Plugins, um, like you said, they're the USB connector and it, as we'll see, the ecosystem is still kind of developing on how exactly to connect them with the level of support is, but very, very powerful if you want a, to allow the LM access to, you know, third party tools. Um, and so here, uh, the connector is to calendar and it, we're just asking for a few different things here. Um, we're asking for our initial calendar overview, time analysis, schedule, insights, and then we're gonna ask it to help us plan out our, uh, week, uh, with event details and possibly even make modifications. So having entered that, what's amazing about this is that, um, you know, Claude will use that connector to search all of my calendar events and it'll gimme a rundown of the next 30 days of stuff that I have going on. And, you know, look like you can get that sort of stuff out of your calendar in, I would argue a much more consumable fashion than just text. But what it can do next with all that information is to then, uh, identify insights. So some of the patterns that you have, some of the conflicts that you have when you're busier, when you're lighter, time zone considerations, special attributes, and then the real power is next steps. So now that it's analyze all that, it can help, you know, resolve triple bookings, manage time zone challenges, improve work life balance. Now, I, I could dive into this and start to have a conversation with Claude. Um, but one of the limitations about current calendar, uh, connectivity, either in Claude or chat GBT, is that it's read only. Um, so it can't actually, you know, it will tell me things that it thinks it can resolve, but, um, it has some pretty severe limitations. One is that not only is it read only such that it can't write or schedule anything or move anything, but the other, um, severe limitation, which I don't think people appreciate a lot of the time is that. You know, if it's trying to help me resolve a double booking, it cannot see the other attendees calendars. So its insights are gonna be limited to just what it sees on my calendar, which is, you know, it's helpful, but it's not, it's not everything. But, you know, one of the, one of the prompts that I do love, which just one vanilla Claude, is with calendar connected is to send a message to it saying, Hey, could you take a peek at my schedule for the next two weeks and find events that I've organized that don't have an agenda? And what's great about this is that Claude can not only identify that, but then it's very good at helping me construct that agenda if I want to. So it can identify those events. But then, you know, with a little bit of information, um, it can actually help me. Construct that agenda for it.

Isar Meitis:

So I, I wanna add 2 cents to what you said, just to expand on the capabilities of these tools and how these things become a lot more interesting. One of the things that you can build in Claude and in Chachi pt, it doesn't matter, is repetitive information that has background information to it. So in, in Claude it's called Project in Chachi pt, it's called Custom GPTs. And you can create a cloud project in this particular case that will have the way you craft agendas. So here's the template for agendas. We must have all these different topics. Uh, so it needs to say, how long is the meeting? Who's gonna speak, who's attending? What's the goal? Uh, what are the different things we're gonna cover? How much time is for like, whatever it is that you want? That will be the standard agenda. The other thing that you can define is what kind of agendas you want for what types of meetings, depending on the people you're meeting with, like whatever additional information you can provide. And then the kind of answers you're gonna get out of Claude when you ask these kind of questions is gonna be significantly more aligned with what you and your company's expecting to have in those meetings because we'll follow your rules and guidelines because you place them in this project before you started, uh, the conversation. So just another food for thought and another expansion of what you can do with these kind of tools.

Matt Martin:

Killer tip. Killer tip. And I'm not gonna belabor this use case too much, but you know, we see that there are a variety of meetings that don't have agendas that's identified. And I could use, you know, we all know how great LMS are at generating text. I could use them to dynamically create that agenda. Um, with a little bit more work. I could also connect. Uh, you know, either Google Drive or notion, um, using that same MCP connector to pull out any sort of associated agendas or create them in those areas, which is what I love to do. Um, I'm not gonna do that'cause I actually, I'm gonna switch gears here a little bit, uh, and show folks exactly how to connect, uh, external connector, um,'cause that's kind of the next step of the process. So let's pop over to a new tab here. And so I have just a fresh Claude instance, cla.ai, anthropics, uh, chat model. And here under that same toggle where you have search and tools, which is right underneath the prompt. You can open that. And then there's a, a little plus button at the bottom to add connectors, and this opens up Claudes, well, rather anthropics, um, kind of list of pre-approved connectors and it's growing all the time. Um, there are some really, really cool things you can do here with things like Canva or Databricks or fireflies, you know, pull in your recordings. I'm of course going to go to clockwise, um, and connect clockwise. And so we're featured here alphabetically. Um, you can connect to clockwise and I'll just, it'll pop open a new window, sign me into clockwise, and then I'm good to go. Um, and actually this is a prompt from a different window, so we'll close. We will, we'll reset this for a second. And so now if I open up that same dropdown menu, and this is gonna be the case for any, uh, connector that you add. And by the way, connectors are. Philanthropics friendlier word for an MCP server, um, MCP server, and

Isar Meitis:

I'll say, I'll say 2 cents. You can connect. So there's, I dunno how many Anthropic already have approved. So there's 20, 30 of them I think ish, uh, that are tools that you use, that most of us use all the time. But you can connect literally any MCP server that is out there by going to the MCP server. Getting the code that it needs in order to connect and dropping it into Claude's backend. It sounds really complex. Watching a YouTube video for about three minutes, you can literally do the process yourself. Uh, and if you don't know how to do this, which I'm one of the people to not know how to do this, I ask Claude to do it for me. I literally drop the code in cla in Claude. I said, this is what I, what I put in your config file. Uh, write the code for me. It will write the code. I will paste it back into the config file. Uh, and then it will add another one of these connectors, even if, even if it's not showing up by default in that plus button of approved connectors. So even you have a connector that is not approved, uh, you can still add it in the back and do really, really magical things with this. But again, closing parentheses again, back to this. So now we're looking at the clockwise connector.

Matt Martin:

Yes. And, uh, I, I, uh, I love the digression there because there are so many great tools that aren't featured in their connector list. Um, if you, as you're adding tools, you'll see that you can kind of dive one level deeper in this dropdown and you can see all the tools that a specific connector has given you access to. So, um, in MCP world, what a, uh, MCP server exposes are a set of tools that give specific abilities to the lm. Um, and so the clockwise MCP server, for example, uh, one of the tools that it has is to create a meeting proposal that's one of 16 tools. If you connect, um, notion, one of the tools is going to be create Notion page, um, or read Notion Doc. And these specific tools are what give the underlying LLM the ability to add additional power as additional functionality. A tip that I'll give folks, especially as you're playing in MCP world, um, as you add additional connectors slash CP servers, um, it's, it's best to start playing actively with these toggles for better or worse, as you add a lot of them, the LM can start to get a little bit bogged down in which tool to call into and get a little bit confused. Um, especially as you're playing and getting confident with these, it's best to say, you know, if you're using clockwise to switch off calendar search,'cause those, those can conflict. Um, if you're, you know, if you both use Asana and Jira, um, you know, flip off Asana and use Jira, or flip off Jira and use Asana.'cause these, they can kind of collide and they can also make the LM trip up.

Isar Meitis:

Yeah. So to explain two seconds, and it's a great point. Uh, you don't call the tool as you're writing the prompt, you're literally writing the prompt in regular English. So if I'll use your Asana and Jira example, if you ask it, oh, look for all the tasks that X it knows on its own that it has an MCP connector, and then it will use the connector to find the tasks that are assigned to a specific person in a specific date range. And if there's two tools that do that, it will potentially get confused or get some of it from one, one, some of it from the other. So it's just, uh, you, you're basically opening yourself to more errors. And I agree with you a hundred percent if you have things that might be contradicting, uh, just turn the toggle button off on one, work on the other or vice versa.

Matt Martin:

I've also found, uh, in, sorry if you found something differently, uh, definitely corrects me here. But I've also found that even when you, it definitely when you have overlap in domains, it's good to flip them off because as you said, they can collide. But even if you have non-overlapping domains, I find that it's helpful just to select the tools that I'm working with. And I don't, I don't always remember this, but it, I find that, um, Claude, she, pt, other LMS can get bogged down just the more tools that has access to, even if they don't conflict.

Isar Meitis:

Yeah, it makes sense. Think about it. They gotta kind of go through the list of all the different functions in each and every one of the tools with every prompt that you write, uh, you, you wanna minimize that just to, uh, let it run smoother.

Matt Martin:

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's one of the areas that they're still kind of developing the underlying systems. So I'm, now that we've done Claude, I'm actually gonna switch to chat. Gcpt. I know, you know, Che, GBDA, uh, just from a pure numbers perspective, is much more widely used. Unfortunately, Chatt B t's support for MCP servers is a little bit lagging behind Anthropics. Um, that's being very gentle with open ai. Well, I, you know, look, I know they'll get there. They're obviously building into it more, and it was Anthropics spec. Um, but yeah, it's a little bit, it's a, it's a little bit disappointing that they're, they don't have it full featured yet. Um, so this is kind of funky. I'm gonna, I'm gonna walk people how to through how to do this and, um, oh, my, my annotate button for Zoom is actually in the place that I'm trying to click here. It's annoying. Um, so if you're in chatt PT in the bottom left, you'll see your profile, and that's where you get to settings. Um, so you're gonna go into settings, and I, and you do need for this in Chatt PT, you need either a, a Chatt PT, uh, I forget what they call their business accounts, either business or enterprise. But you need a business. Yeah. There's,

Isar Meitis:

there's a thing. Plus then teams, then enterprise. Yeah. And I think all three of them will have access to

Matt Martin:

that. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that for, on the individual side, you just need plus. Yeah. Plus or

Isar Meitis:

what's the, uh, plus or pro. And then on the, on the business side, you need either teams or enterprise. Yep. Yep. It's, and, and I think

Matt Martin:

that, you know, their pricing rubrics are getting more and more complicated, but I think that's basically everything except free. If you're on the free tier, you won't see this. Yeah. Um, but otherwise you should see it. So you go into settings, you go into connectors, so they're also calling MCP servers, connectors, and you'll see under the connectors tab. So I'm in settings if you're not following along visually, I'm in settings and there's a list of connectors that are available. Now the thing about chat CBTS connectors is their search only. Um. And, and they, they can't really do much. And we ran into this when we were developing clockwise. They really don't have multiple tools right now. They just have search. So, you know, if I connect Google Drive, it can search through MRI documents and access them, which is really helpful. But it can't create one. It can't, you know, add an update. Um, it's just search. They're obviously moving towards full MCP support, uh, because under this, it's so buried. You go into connectors and you have to scroll to the bottom, make sure you scroll all the way down. It's hidden. You go to advanced settings, and then you enable developer mode, which is, says this in beta, and this is how you get access to adding a full MCP server. Now if I go back to that same connectors page and I click create, um, I can create a custom tool. And, uh, as, as Sarah mentioned earlier, there are so many great MP servers out. You will have to go find the URL for this. Um, but if you search, you know, for example, clockwise, MCP, linear, MCP, Atlassian, MCP, you'll find the instructions pretty quickly. And so you fill in a few few terms, uh, here. Um, and what you really need is the M-C-P-U-R-L, uh, and you need to know how to authenticate. Ours happens to be OAuth, not everybody's is, and then you create it. And, uh, this is now going to enable the same MCP server access that I had on quad side, except that it's in chat GPT. Now, I will also note that chat GT still has some limitations even in this mode. First and somewhat annoyingly, you're gonna see a red box to indicate that you're in dev mode. It always freaks me out. I'm like, what did I do wrong? It's just like, I, I have to remember that I'm in dev mode. Um, the second is that

Isar Meitis:

when, when, just a second, when, when Matt's saying a red box, the, the. Prompt box just has a red outline instead of the regular black slash gray outline that it has usually.

Matt Martin:

That's right, that's right. And the other, the other thing to note about chat t's uh, implementation is right now memory is disabled when you're using dev mode and memory is what stores, uh, kind of the past information about your chats in chat chippie, I find it to be just insanely, insanely useful. And so this is kind of a blocker for me. I, I often have to go toggle off dev mode because memory is so helpful in of itself. So I will cop to the fact that. I, I wanna show people how to use MCP servers in chat GBT, but I use it almost exclusively in Claude right now just because chat GT's implementation is so constrained and we

Isar Meitis:

are on the same page. Yeah. It's extremely annoying that chat memory is not working, and I don't understand if this is a technical limitation, which doesn't make any sense to me or a security limitation, which also doesn't make much sense to me. Uh, but, but that's the situation right now, as you said, like the memory's not working, like the red circle, whatever. No, I don't care.

Matt Martin:

Yeah.

Isar Meitis:

But not having memory available on both sides, so it doesn't know what happened and he doesn't remember anything new is really annoying. So a little

Matt Martin:

bit of a nerdy digression here. I don't know if you have any insights, but I, I've been wondering why they're a little bit behind and they have these limitations as well. And I think part of the reason has to be that. Tool calling has to be part of the model. And so Anthropic developed the spec. And so when they were developing Claude and 4.5 sauna just came out today. But, but these models are very good at tool calling, whereas I've seen that Chet PT five isn't quite as good at tool calling and when you go back into later models, like anything trained off of four, four, oh, they're just not very good at tool calling. Yeah. So I wonder if it's model training that they're behind on potentially. Okay. Let's get into the fun stuff. So we, we went through setup, which, you know, isn't super fun, but if you can't set it up, you can't do anything. Uh, so I wanted to make sure to run that through, run through that with everyone. So I'm gonna pull up a new, um, uh, a new window for cloud ai. Again, this is what I prefer for any time that I'm working with, um, connectors or MCP servers. I'm gonna check that clockwise connected. So again, opening up that little toggle underneath the, the search prompt, uh, clockwise is connected. Uh, calendar searches disconnected, so the full power clockwise will be in here. And I'm just gonna paste in a very simple prompt. Um, can you find me a time to meet with June, June, Mike and Casey next week. And these are just three folks that I work with. Um, I'm just using them plain names, just like I would with an assistant. And I'm gonna fire this off and I'm gonna note a couple things that, yes, to brag a little bit, this is about clockwise, but, uh, it really showcases the advances in MCP server. And what tool calling enables is that, you know, Claude by itself wouldn't know who Juju, Mike and Casey are, but it can use clockwise to search people that I attend meetings with, disambiguate that to find the right people. Then it can create in kind of one shot. A proposal for times that I might meet with them. And so what we're seeing in the chat here is that it's using a tool to find who Juju and Mike and KC are. Then it's using that information to create a meeting proposal. Um, and then it's coming back to me to say, uh, what some limitations are on finding the time with them. Because again, it knows those specific individuals. So it's saying, you know, Hey, I, I didn't find any times'cause it looks like everybody's busy. Um, somebody might be outta office. Can we have a conversation about how to extend this? And then so I'm gonna say, uh, you know, go ahead and extend the time range to find something that works. With my typos. Um, hopefully it'll understand what I'm saying. And it, again, part of the virtue of using a system like Claude to engage with this is you might be on the go using this on mobile and it, you can be confident in the conversation that you're having with it because it's actually giving you the information about, you know, your colleagues availability, what works, what's not working, and explaining it to you as you go. Um, and I'd also note that, you know, one of the things that using MCP servers often enables is that instead of relying on kind of a generic system like. Claude or chat GBT. Um, we're using a more specialized system that's enabled by clockwise to find those right times. And so it found with that conversation of, you know, okay, we need to extend the time range. It found some, uh, I found a top pick on Monday, October 6th, 4:00 PM Um, it's noting that that loses, uh, five hours of focus time, but there's another good time on Tuesday. Or if I want the soonest time, I could do it at 10 30 at October. It's also helpfully provided me with a link where I can view, um, all the details about that request if I'd like to, including the times that are available. Um, visualize nicely on my calendar. Um, so I'm just gonna say, you know, uh, the top pick looks great. Let's schedule that and so. Right there. I've, these are three people who it's actually quite difficult to find time with. And, uh, using Claude with some tools connected, uh, I'm able to get that schedule right away. Um, you know, reading the calendars, seeing attendees, seeing their availability, seeing their preferences, seeing their time zones, and then actually scheduling the meeting. So that kind of completes a full loop. Um, I'd love to show a couple other use cases unless, sorry, you have any questions?

Isar Meitis:

No, this is awesome. I would love to see additional use cases and I have like four or five questions, but they might, you might already answer them in the other use cases. So let's go into these use cases. Let's do it and then we'll see, uh, if my questions are still relevant,

Matt Martin:

let's do it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna fire off maybe a couple in parallel and then we can, um, go through. So one that I love here is I, so my kids are just, um. Uh, going back to school. Um, and I got a newsletter, uh, from the school, um, that is helpfully at least posted on a public URL here. So we can look at this. This is a real world use case. This is actually, it's cute. Um, but it varies A bunch of information in here about schedules, um, and, and important events. And so what I'm asking is for Claude to take a look at this, uh, newsletter, Claude can, you know, go crawl that URL, uh, and then schedule'em on my calendar. So I'm gonna, I'm just gonna fire that off and I'm gonna go to the next use case and we'll come back to see the results. The next one here is, um, I sometimes like just, I don't have time to think about it. I just want help fixing my week. Um, like, just make it better. Like, I don't care. Like take a look at it. You do the work. Just make it better. So I'm gonna ask Claude, Hey, can you look at my week next week? And ask clockwise to optimize it. Um, so I'm just gonna say, Hey, look at my week next week. Ask clockwise to optimize it and we'll see what it does. This one's super cool. Um, so here I'm actually gonna have to take folks through one more step, which is, again, you can, you know, connect multiple connectors. So here I'm actually going to take you through the flow of connecting a custom MCP server, which we were talking about earlier. CP is linear is not on this list. And so when I add a custom one, there's a handy link up here. When I open the toggle that we mentioned before, add connector, I want linear. Linear is not on this list. Um, it's nice, nicely, oh, it is on the list. I'm sorry, I thought I was gonna take you through a custom connector right now, but linear has already been added to this list as an actual connector, so. Let's take the easy route. I'm just gonna connect it through here. Um, again, if you do want to do a custom connection, just Google that. It's really easy to find. So here I'm gonna paste in, look at the top priority linear tasks for Scott and Nikita, and then look at their focus on the clockwise and see if they can complete everything this week. So my engineering team, uh, you know, we're developing software all the time, improving it. Uh, we work off of linear for our tickets about what's what we need to do. I do a fair bit of project management here. We have a project manager who actually does that, but I just wanna look to see if, you know, this team has the capacity to do that. And so now it's gonna be using not just clockwise, but a couple tools. Alright, I fired those off. And I, that's a pattern that isn't unusual for me. Sometimes when I have multiple thoughts, I'll let these all go at once. I'm realizing immediately what one of the problems is with firing these all off at once is that it's probably gonna have asked me. Um, for permissions as I go.

Isar Meitis:

So, let me explain this as we're looking for it. Yeah. When you're running any MCP server, uh, on Claude, every one of the functions, so we talked about this, that there's different tools within that MCP connector for each and every one of the tools. It's gonna ask you, are we, are you allowing it to use it? And you can say yes once or yes, always. And if you click yes once, then. Every, every time you're on the tool, you'll have to do the same thing and it won't finish doing its thing because it may need to use three or four different things in order to complete the request that you gave it to do. Because every one of those, what we call tools is, is a small function. So one of them could be search, one of them could be fetch, one of them could be update, one of them could be, uh, right one. Like whatever the case. So if it needs to do all these things to complete what you requested, it needs to make all these calls and it's gonna stop at each one unless you told that, yes, you're allowed to do this. Always. Uh, one thing that I don't, it's actually a good question to you. Maybe you'd know, can I allow all of them kinda like carte blanche as I install the MCP, you're allowed to do anything, or it's always gonna ask you the first time it's doing the function and then you have to approve it.

Matt Martin:

I, to my knowledge, um, let's take a peek at our connectors here for a second, uh, to see if we can. Find that. Oh, actually, yes. Okay. So if you go in, this is new, I'm glad I checked. So if you go in that same toggle that we've been talking about, um, at the very top there, underneath the toggle, there is a managed connectors link. You can open this up and I believe, I'd have to check this, apologize, apologies to the audience. This managed connectors may only be available if you are the admin of the team or enterprise account. So I'm using this in a business context and I admin, if you're on a personal context and you have a pro plan, you're gonna have access to this. But if you're in a work environment, you may not have access, but if you do, you can go to this connectors management, you can click configure and it you can allow on supervised, you have to do this tool by tool, which is kind of annoying.

Isar Meitis:

Um, yeah, there, there's no select all, but at least you can do this once and then every time you use this, it's gonna run for everybody and you don't have to wait to actually run this function in order to allow it. That's

Matt Martin:

right. And now I'll say this, uh, even though we went through this process, I'm kind of glad that we discovered this. Um, I, I kind of appreciate that that anthropic is asking tool by tool. It's annoying for a power user when I'm using these again and again. But for everybody in the audience, this gives you the opportunity to play. You don't have to worry. You're, a tool is never gonna be enabled to be called by Claude without your express permission at least the first time. So if you're a little bit worried and it's, you know, frankly reasonable to be worried, like, what's this gonna do? How's it gonna access my data? How's it gonna connect? Um, you can still play and know with confidence that at least the first time it's called, you're gonna get asked whether or not to grant permission. Um, okay. Going back to our workflows here a little bit. So as I mentioned, uh, with this back to school example, I have my kids' newsletter. Uh, Claude went and it crawled that newsletter. It found all the events and then it used clockwise to create a meeting proposal. And what's great about using clockwise is again, clockwise can actually write to my calendar, um, and it can write in bulk. And the way that we've architected clockwise is it always returns a proposal that I explicitly have to approve. So it's not gonna go and modify my calendar unless I say yes, but it's found to all those events, it's added them to my schedule and I can just go ahead and save it. And then I have all of these back to school events on my calendar in one quick pass.

Isar Meitis:

I love this. So I literally did this manual work. A few weeks ago, uh, because I was tasked by my boss, hence, in other words, my wife and say, Hey, go and check all the kids' activities that are coming this coming year based on the school's calendar and add them to both our calendars. So I went manually and did this work and then had to invite her to all the meetings. This would've saved me about an hour of my life that I had to do this thing. So this is absolutely awesome.

Matt Martin:

Yeah, and you can, I mean, and the great thing too is like you can run this and rerun it, you know, if you have it, um, you know, you can create a project as you mentioned earlier, and save the chat, and then when you get the next newsletter, drop it in and just let it go again.

Isar Meitis:

But I, I'll say something that it pops into my head, uh, of how. Broad, this can be used not for school stuff. So I do a lot of public speaking. Uh, I get invited to speak on conferences about ai and most of the conferences I speak on are not AI conferences, but just regular conferences. And they bring me in as an AI speaker. And so I'm always looking for different relevant conferences, different locations, and being able to do something like this, go and search for conferences that might be relevant, find them, look at my calendar, see that I'm not traveling at that time for a different conference, or I don't have any other big conflict. Uh, and then list those and suggest what is absolutely amazing. Like it's again, just gonna save hours and hours and hours of work for myself and or my assistant, uh, lo looking for these kind of things. And the same thing is true for any other third party data that AI is really good at crawling, but then that needs to be verified against your actual availability.

Matt Martin:

Yeah, it, there was, uh, a fun one internally where somebody was, one of, one of our employees was playing with this and said, you know, was using Claude and said, Hey, can you, uh, check for when the next time Bona Air or Taylor Swift or Beyonce is in town, and if so, just add it to my calendar. Um, and, you know, it searched the web, it did it, found it, and then used clockwise at the calendar.

Isar Meitis:

Yeah.

Matt Martin:

Um, okay. So one of the other use cases that I, uh, wanted clockwise help with is to help optimize my week, um, uh, in the coming weeks. And so again, we're going through the tool calls and I do have to approve these, but it's looking at my calendar events and then it's going to call a tool called Optimize Calendar Schedule. And that tool is actually a pretty robust one. It's using all of clockwise intelligence, all of clockwise. Power of its scheduling engine to look across all my events of that week and identify based on my availability, the attendee's availability, my schedule, my preferences, their preferences, what are some possible ways that clockwise can help clean up that week to make it better for me and for all of the attendees. And it's, um, you know, it is a fair amount of compute on our side, but the brilliant thing about it is that, you know, we're not relying on the underlying LLM to understand all of the attendees data, which it doesn't have access to. But also, um, as we've found in developing a lot of these systems, uh, even the cutting edge LMS right now are, they can get tripped up pretty badly when they have intersecting calendar math, um, time zones trip them up. Time zone math is quite tricky. And so it's come back with a couple suggestions on how I could clean up my week. Um, it's found that. Um, moving my meeting with Claire would be very helpful. And moving my, uh, meeting with Aaron is very helpful and that doing that actually adds a tremendous amount of heads down time for each individual. And just like all other clockwise requests I can pop in. It gives me a link that helps visualize these changes. I can see those changes, writing context of my calendar and I can approve them or decline them as I see fit. Um, but just a nice way to clean everything up, um, especially on a week when I'm traveling.

Isar Meitis:

All right. Now quick, quick question about the optimization. Yeah. Are there backend rules that you set up on how to optimize? Like what are the things you prioritize? What are the things that other people are pro? Like, I want at least two hours of deep thinking time on my calendar, uh, every day. I do not want to touch that time regardless of anything. I have a board meeting that cannot be like, stuff like that. Can you set your own rules of what does optimize means, what's acceptable and not acceptable as far as optimization?

Matt Martin:

Yes. The, the short answer is absolutely yes. The, the slightly longer answer is that, um, when you, so you do have to create a clockwise account with Google Calendar, um, and it, it's using just the same login as Google Calendar. Very simple, very straightforward. When you onboard, what we're doing is we're crawling your calendar to understand a little bit of your calendar preferences by inference. But then we'll also ask you a variety of questions about which events are flexible, which aren't. Um, what, what are your working hours? When do you prefer to have lunch? When do you prefer to go heads down? How much heads down time do you want? Um, kind of basic stuff. And, uh, will you sane defaults? And then you can go deeper and deeper down that rabbit hole as you see fit. Um, the, the other thing that I'll note is that this has been one of the delightful surprises about working in MCP land and working with lms is that because these are conversational in nature, um, you know, we used to, when we were first developing this, kind of try to just shoot back to the lm the answer. Um, but what we're doing now is we're sending the LM a bunch of information about what we think could happen and other options. So you can have that conversation if you're seeing something that you're like, oh, I actually don't really want to move that one. You can go back and forth on it.

Isar Meitis:

Cool.

Matt Martin:

So in, in this, uh, use case, I did get a little bit delayed by approving the tool requests here. Um, but what we're doing here is that it's hitting, you'll see it, uh, for those who can't see this visually. Um, Claude is looking for the top priority linear tasks for two of my colleagues. And it's using the linear MCP to list all those issues for those individuals. And then it's using clockwise to cross reference what not just their availability. Um, you can actually do availability with Google Calendar for yourself. You wanna be able to do with colleagues'cause doesn't have access to colleagues. But if you're looking for yourself, you look at peer availability. Here I'm looking for colleagues and um, I'm using clockwise and uh. Our calendar analytics tool to uncover, you know, how much deep work time do they have, how much, uh, fragmented time do they have, um, you know, what are their preferences or out of offices, et cetera. So I'm getting a much richer view into their overall availability. And then, uh, Claude can use that information to stitch together and analyze, you know, what, what is the availability for these folks? Can they accomplish all the tasks that have been assigned to'em? And I love this one. It, it takes a little, as you'll notice, um, whether you're watching this on YouTube or you're listening, um, this one takes a while because it has to hit multiple tools and it, so this is one that I like to run in the morning. On Mondays, I'll just shoot in the background and then wait for it to run. But it's a really great way to have an understanding of my team's capacity and whether anything needs to adjust, because at the end of the day, it'll give a overall assessment. And it said yes, you know. Uh, both Scott and Nikita have solved the amount of time to accomplish her tasks and I, I, having run this one, you know, dozens and dozens of time, um, it's pretty good. I mean, they'll come back to me and say, Hey, warning, you know, this person is actually out of office for the back half of the week. Um, they're not gonna have as much time. You might want to adjust some things really helpful for kind of managing and coordinating a team.

Isar Meitis:

Yeah, I think, I think the, the interesting thing here and now, now I'm thinking a little bit into the future, right? When these tools will not conflict and they will be able to run 20 of these tools at the same time and just run as a centralized brain. Think about how incredibly powerful this thing is. It can look into all the data across. In theory, your entire tech stack, and make logical suggestions based on a set of rules that you have pre-assigned, either in the tools themselves or just by speaking to Claude Chachi, pt, whatever tool you are using to run this. And so you can have a. Strategic level assistant or a very tactical assistant, assigning tasks to the relevant people who have time on the calendar to actually complete the tasks that are relevant and have the skills, like there's so many, think about the HR tool, the hr, uh, system combined with a scheduling system combined with a task system. And now across all of these with a few sentences or as you're driving the car, just having a conversation with it and being able to literally make dramatic, significant, important changes to how operation is going to run in the next few hours, few days, few weeks, depending on how deep you want to go. And I find this absolutely magical. I do very basic stuff like this already and it blows my mind when I do these kind of things. Like, oh my God. Like, go and find. And again, just a simple example. I talk to these ais all the time and I go and say, okay, go and check, uh, my meetings today, later on, because I'm driving back from the gym and I know I have several meetings this morning. I say, okay, well you have a meeting with this so and so, so and so, and so like, okay, can you research so and so and tell me. Who they are, which company they work for, and a little bit about the company and about the person. And it will go and it will come back, invoice and will tell you these kind of things. Yep, yep. And, and this is without fancy connectors. Think about once it can actually dig into all the data in your company, uh, the amount of things you'll be able to achieve with a predefined amount of time just amplifies dramatically.

Matt Martin:

No, I, I, uh, just a riff on that.'cause I, I, it, it, you completely nerd sny me. I mean, I think that where this heads, you know, for us that are kinda living on the cutting edge, and I think anybody who's listening to your podcast is, you know, well ahead of the pack. Um, just, you know, a, forgetting these tips, but b, just'cause you've self-selected into interest in this, um, you know, we're seeing what the possibilities. A lot of this is just not readily accessible to the average person because, you know, connecting a, you have to know to use these tools to start, which, um, it's, it's. A lot of people are using chat, GPT. A lot of people are using CLA ai, but I'm still surprised how few people are digging deep. But then connecting MCP servers and all this tool connecting, it's kind of fiddly. I mean, it just is. Um, and then knowing how to stitch it together is even more complex. And it's kind of slow. But like, I think that this will get to a place where it's so seamless that it's easy for the average person to ram into it. And then to your point, are when it starts to get proactive, man, that's where some of the real magic is gonna be involved.'cause like, I have to think about how to connect this, how to do all of it, how to plug it in, when to run it. But like imagine, you know, it knows I'm a product manager at a mid-size software company and it just runs that for me on Monday morning and sends it my direction. Um, I I just think there's so much on the horizon here.

Isar Meitis:

A hundred percent. I'll say one thing about the time it takes, because I, I was thinking about it and asked about it a lot, and my answer is that it doesn't matter. And the reason it doesn't matter is I don't have to do this. So let's say, and I see this now a lot, I, I do more and more vibe coding and my favorite platform as of right now, this may change next Monday, but as of right now, it's Repli and Repli. Now with the new tools, they have introduced agent three, which is amazing. It really does like crazy stuff when it comes to writing code, testing its own code. Like it does really amazing things. It takes significantly longer than the other tools. Like if I run the same prompt in Rept and in lovable, lovable will finish, and rep will still work on it sometimes for 40 minutes and people, and I'm like, is this worth it? And the answer is, I don't care because I didn't have to do that 40 minute minutes of work. I can at the same time do email or have a meeting with somebody or play with my kids or play my bass, guitar, whatever it is that I wanna do, because this thing is running on its own. So whether it could have been more efficient in doing the thing. Yes, I would love it to gimme an answer in five seconds instead of in 30 minutes. But if I can do other stuff in those 30 minutes and it dings, it actually dings the, the, the, the chrome browser goes ding. And I'm like, oh, it finished the thing and I can go back and look at it. Um, then, then I don't care how long it takes. I mean, again, I care, but a lot less because it doesn't take any of my time while it's doing the work. And so going back to what you said before, if we are each gonna have 5, 10, 50, a hundred of these agents running in the background doing stuff for us, and they're just gonna notify us when it's done and just think about it as another employee. As soon as this thing connects to your notion or Clickup or Jira or Asana or whatever it is that you're using, and it's gonna report just like any other employee, their progress and what they're doing and doing the handoffs and it's gonna go to a different agent to complete the step. And then the task is gonna move between the different steps of the task on your Jira or Asana, whatever. There's full transparency of what's actually happening. You're managing it just like you're managing today. Nothing changed. Only you have other employees that are cost$20 a month that can actually do the work. And so this is where it's all going and it's just mind blowing. You know, both you and me are at the cutting edge of this and we are just scratching the surface Yeah. With the possibilities of what's happening.

Matt Martin:

Well, and and, and I'll note something that you said, which we've noticed as we've been developing software in this ecosystem, which is that as you, the leverage that you can get outta the systems. Goes up dramatically, the more confidence you can have in the output. You know, you take your rep example and if, if it were spending extra 40 minutes and it wasn't any better than lovable, well that would be a problem. You know, then, then, then, you know, it's taking up time and it's, I code quite a bit as well. And the difference between, you know, having what is effectively like a junior intern that you have to sit and pair code with, which is a huge productivity boost. I mean, like, I don't wanna undersell that like, you know, can do a bunch of stuff for me versus being able to say, Hey, just run at it for an hour and I'll check back in, is dramatically different. But the, but you have to have confidence in the output of that agent and it has to be good enough that you can let it run. And there's a big, there's a big gap right now in, in overall in terms of what's available and the confidence that you can get out of it.

Isar Meitis:

I agree a hundred percent, but I think the jumps in the past year and definitely two years have been incredibly impressive. Astronomical. The trajectory is very clear. Yeah, it's crazy. Matt, this was. Really fascinating, really well explained. I'm sure people will learn a lot from this episode across multiple aspects, not just time management. Uh, with ai, if people want to follow you, use your product, work with you, connect with you, what are the best ways to do that?

Matt Martin:

So the, the first and most important plug is clockwise ai. Um, that's clockwise.ai. Um, you can go there, you can start with clockwise in 30 seconds. It doesn't take long at all. Um, you can also start in Cloud Connect. Use the connector, we will get you hooked up. Um, it's very easy if you wanna connect with me. Best play, best place to do that is LinkedIn. Um, I'm LinkedIn uh, dot com. Search for Matt Martin or slash in slash vox. Mat, uh, V-O-X-M-A-T-T is my handle. Most places you can find me on Mastodon. I occasionally am still on x, I'm not on there as much. But, um, would, would love to continue the conversation in any forum you find me. So reach on out. Awesome. Thank you so much. This was absolutely great. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

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