A few months ago I had to email roughly 250 strangers to ask them for free stuff.

This was for my kids’ co-op school auction — we don’t pay much in tuition, which means we make it up by working at the school and shaking down our community for donations once a year. My specific assignment: 250 vendors, one Google Doc, no template that worked, and a deadline that was, as deadlines tend to be, yesterday.

I will tell you exactly what happened next: I opened Notion, set up a database with the vendor info, wrote one outreach email, built one automation that fired the email when I changed a status field, and sent all 250 in approximately five minutes. Then I built another automation for the follow-up. Then I sat there staring at my screen feeling like I had committed a small white-collar crime.

This was not AI. This was Notion.

I’m telling you this because we are currently being marketed AI agents for everything — chief of staff agents who read your calendar back to you, agents who decide which emails matter, agents who book your appointments and send your DMs and probably tuck your children in at night. I’m sure some of those tools are useful, depending on your life and your needs. Some of them are also a $400/month subscription to have a robot tell you that you have a 10am meeting when you probably could’ve just… opened your calendar app?

What I want to give you today is a permission slip to ask one question before you reach for an agent: could a Notion automation do this instead?...