Freelance Capacity Agentic Workflow

*Video includes example content for confidentiality reasons

Context

My husband Michael is a Senior Art Director in tech who also has a freelance business. With his busy professional and personal schedule, it was very tough for him to confirm if he had enough bandwidth to take on new freelance requests.

Goal

  • Build an agentic workflow that lets Michael field freelance inquiries and decide with confidence, spending less time sifting through calendars and more time on the work he chooses to take on.

Role

  • Agentic Workflow Design & Architecture

  • AI Tooling, Automation & Prompt Engineering

Approach

I designed and built the workflow end to end, following a Hypothesis, Build, Test, Results, Revise process. The premise: an AI agent gathers the context (calendar, capacity, scope), applies Michael's own judgment criteria, drafts a reply in his voice, and lets him approve and send.

  • Created an "Inbound Freelance" label and filter in Gmail so the workflow triggers only on the right inquiries.

  • Built an "Art Director Michael" skill that encodes his judgment criteria, capacity thresholds, and tone of voice, so every email draft sounds like him.

  • Connected Gmail, Claude, and Asana through an automation layer, using Claude to write custom code where the integrations needed it.

  • Worked through real build failures (calendar connection issues, an automation that looped, duplicate email sends) and pivoted the approval layer from Google Chat to Slack for a cleaner approve-and-send experience.

  • Rebuilt the workflow in Claude Cowork after launch, consolidating the connectors and the skill into a single agent.

Outcome / Impact

The workflow now runs Michael's freelance intake for him. He assesses each inquiry against his real schedule, responds in a fraction of the time, and sends every client email himself. Rebuilding it in Claude Cowork post-launch made execution far more seamless, collapsing the original multi-tool stack into one agent.

  • Reduced response time by 75%.

  • Increased freelance projects Michael takes on.

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