🤖 Build your first personal assistant with n8n [Workshop]

Hey there.

Successfully leveraging AI means finding a way to not do the same repetitive tasks every week.

While most AI tools can accelerate workflows, many are either too simple to handle real-world complexity or too expensive for every part of a sophisticated process.

Inside The Rundown AI University, we’re helping members build personal assistants (with a different approach) to automate some of their most time-draining tasks.

Here are some of the automation systems we're creating together:

The Intelligent Email Manager

For many professionals, the morning starts with an overwhelming inbox that can often derail the entire day. Twenty minutes of quickly checking your email can easily turn into an hour of reactive responses, moving your planned work deeper into the afternoon and forcing important projects into evening catch-up sessions.

You can now build an assistant that:

1. Monitors your Gmail continuously and categorizes incoming emails by urgency and sender importance

2. Applies smart labels automatically based on content analysis and your response patterns

3. Drafts contextual replies using AI that understands your communication style

4. Flags emails requiring immediate attention and routes routine items to designated times

5. Learns your preferences and improves accuracy over time

What this means for you: Your mornings can become productive work time instead of inbox triage, urgent items get immediate attention even when you're offline, and your work week stays within business hours.

• Sales managers can build an assistant that monitors their inbox, categorizes emails by lead priority, drafts personalized follow-ups using AI, and automatically logs interactions to a CRM

• Marketing directors can route campaign feedback by urgency, auto-escalate collaboration requests, and maintain consistent client response times while focusing on strategy

• Finance professionals can automatically sort vendor communications, flag urgent payment requests, and route compliance inquiries to appropriate teams, ensuring nothing falls through cracks during month-end closes.

The Proactive Calendar Assistant

Only 11% of workplace meetings are actually considered productive, with 71% of professionals wasting time each week due to unnecessary or cancelled meetings. Right now, calendar chaos creates a ripple effect that destroys your productivity and extends your work week into personal time. Double-bookings force urgent rescheduling that eats up otherwise useful time slots, while poor meeting coordination can push project deadlines into the weekend.

You can now build an assistant that:

1. Analyzes your calendar patterns and automatically blocks optimal focus time for deep work

2. Coordinates meeting scheduling by checking all participants' availability and suggesting best times

3. Sends intelligent reminders with pre-meeting context and relevant background information

4. Generates weekly productivity summaries showing where your time actually goes

5. Protects your schedule from non-essential meetings during your most productive hours

What this means for you: Once your assistant understands you, deep work sessions are more likely to stay uninterrupted, meetings will feel more purposeful and well-timed, and you’ll have more confidence that your schedule serves your goals.

• ​​Project managers can coordinate team availability across time zones, block project deadlines in calendars, and send stakeholder updates based on milestone completion

• Legal professionals can align case deadlines with court schedules, automatically schedule client check-ins based on matter urgency, and coordinate filing requirements without manual tracking. 

• Healthcare administrators can schedule patient follow-ups based on care protocols, coordinate with specialists automatically, and ensure compliance with appointment documentation requirements.

The Context-Aware Follow-Up System

Constantly context-switching and multitasking costs the average professional 6 hours each week. The mental overhead of tracking who needs what, and when, can create the kind of anxiety that bleeds into your evenings and weekends. Important follow-ups slip through the cracks during busy periods, damaging professional relationships and forcing panicked catch-up work that extends well beyond business hours.

You can now build an assistant that:

1. Analyzes your email threads and calendar history to identify follow-up requirements automatically

2. Schedules contextual reminders based on conversation importance and recipient preferences

3. Tracks response patterns and escalates items that need immediate attention

4. Maintains comprehensive relationship histories without manual documentation

What this means for you: An AI-powered system for putting people first develops into professional relationships that strengthen over time, a reputation for reliable follow-through, and the mental freedom that comes from knowing your systems handle the details.

• Business development professionals can build an assistant that analyzes conversation history, schedules contextual follow-ups based on deal stage, and maintains comprehensive relationship records without manual data entry

• Consultants can track proposal submissions, monitor client project discussions, and maintain prospect relationships across long sales cycles.

• Operations managers can follow up on vendor negotiations, track procurement timelines, and ensure contract renewals happen automatically without last-minute scrambles.

The options for automation are endless.

Successfully implementing these systems requires a deeper understanding of the technology, including knowledge about credential configuration, intelligent workflow logic, and integration architectures that scale with your requirements.

Fortunately, this week’s workshop covers exactly how you can build these systems correctly from day one…

On Friday at 4 PM ET, Dr. Alvaro Cintas is teaching our members:

• The basics of n8n and its key features for building powerful automations

• How to create your first automation workflow using n8n's visual interface

• Step-by-step directions to connect tools like Gmail or Google Calendar and build a custom personal assistant

By the end of the workshop, you'll be able to confidently build and run your own automation agents to reclaim your evenings and weekends.

Join this workshop to actually automate your most time-consuming tasks with a reliable AI assistant by grabbing a 14-day trial at The Rundown AI University.

See you in class,

The Rundown Team

P.S. The professionals building these systems now won't just have cleaner inboxes. Learning how to automate large parts of their role will set them up for fundamentally different careers. Identify all the ways you can stop spending evenings catching up on admin work by starting a 14-day trial here.