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- #244: These 4 Perplexity Comet automations save me more time than any extension
#244: These 4 Perplexity Comet automations save me more time than any extension
How evidence-based marketing works
Jenae Spry
December 19, 2025
Productivity Stacks Newsletter
(Formerly Productivity Express)
Issue No. 244
The Best in Evidence-Based Productivity
for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders
Helping You Work Smarter and Live More
The Rundown
A Hidden Brain State Before Sleep May Be The Key to Human Genius
How evidence-based marketing works—and why Byron Sharp says reach matters more than loyalty tactics
'Dopamine Anchoring' Is A Genius Hack For Actually Getting Things Done
These 4 Perplexity Comet automations save me more time than any extension
How People Use AI Agents
👉Did you miss an issue? Check out previous Productivity Stacks issues anytime here
🔥Quote/Prompt
Renew your passion daily.
Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.
A bit from mine:
(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)
Question for you: Do you check in with yourself every day and ask yourself if you're being intentional with what you're doing (that day, week, month, in life)? Or...do you just let the momentum of all the decisions you made before today […]
Did someone forward this to you?
📈 Performance
What if you could harness those precious moments when your brain actually solves problems you've been wrestling with all day? They're not random luck – they're happening in a specific brain state that most of us rush right past every single night. This research reveals why some of history's biggest breakthroughs happened in bed.
"Research has shown that the hypnagogic state is a creative 'sweet spot.' For example, in a 2021 study, participants in a hypnagogic state were three times more likely to discover the 'hidden rule' that could solve a mathematical problem... According to Myers, ideas and insights come as a sudden 'uprush' from a subliminal mind. As Myers saw it, our conscious mind is just a small segment of our overall mind, including not only what Sigmund Freud called the unconscious, but also wider and higher levels of consciousness. Ideas may gestate unconsciously for a long time before they emerge into conscious awareness."
Key Insights:
The hypnagogic state – that drowsy twilight between sleep and wakefulness -- is three times more effective for problem-solving than full consciousness, which explains why Paul McCartney woke up with "Yesterday" fully formed in his head.
Your conscious mind needs to quiet down for creative insights to break through. For example, Thomas Edison would deliberately nap while holding a metal ball that would drop and wake him when he drifted off, capturing ideas at that precise moment.
Training yourself to capture these insights requires keeping a recording device literally within arm's reach of your bed, since the ideas feel so vivid in the moment but vanish completely once you fully wake up.
Read the full article for practical techniques to extend your hypnagogic state and build the habit of capturing breakthrough ideas before they disappear.
⚙️ Optimization
Running a business means making strategic choices about where to invest your limited marketing dollars. Most conventional wisdom says focus on your loyal customers, personalize everything, and hyper-target your best prospects. This research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute reveals why that approach might be costing you growth.
"The research clearly shows that your growth is going to come from very light, infrequent customers buying a little bit more often... And then the other thing you do is to build mental availability, which is where you're reaching people who—using the 95-5 rule—95% aren't in the market at the moment. Some of them haven't even purchased the category yet, but they will in the future."
Key Insights:
Your growth comes from light customers buying slightly more often, not from squeezing more out of your loyalists. For example, Wells Fargo's famous cross-selling strategy that claimed twice the loyalty of competitors turned out to be literally impossible and cost them $7 billion in fines when employees started creating fake accounts to hit targets.
You need to separate purchase availability (catching people ready to buy now through things like search ads and store hours) from mental availability (reaching the 95% who aren't buying today but will eventually). Mixing these up leads to wasted spend and disappointing results that make marketing look ineffective.
Media companies won't tell you this, but they're exceptionally good at delivering frequency -- you quickly hit the same people repeatedly. To maximize mental availability, spend consistently at lower levels rather than clustering your advertising, which just hits the same audience over and over.
Read the full article for insights on retail media optimization, why creative awards can hurt your branding, and how to avoid the targeting traps that feel intuitive but kill growth.
⏲️ Time Management
Those tasks you keep putting off aren't piling up because you're lazy -- your brain is just doing what it's wired to do, which is seek out pleasurable activities over boring ones. This technique from therapists and productivity experts uses your brain's natural reward system against itself to actually get things done.
"Dopamine anchoring is the idea of pairing a nonpreferred task with something you enjoy, hopefully making the boring or annoying task less aversive and maybe even something you seek out because the positive activity is more salient... Over time, your brain learns to associate the task itself with positive reinforcement. This can improve consistency, motivation and even mood regulation."
Key Insights:
The concept works like Pavlovian conditioning -- pair a dreaded task with something pleasurable and your brain eventually links the two together. For example, fold laundry while watching your favorite show, or tackle emails while sipping a special coffee drink you only allow yourself during admin time.
Keep your anchors simple and time-bounded to avoid creating elaborate rituals that become another form of procrastination. A 30-minute morning routine before starting work defeats the purpose, while playing one energizing song or eating exactly three blueberries creates just enough reward without derailing you.
Watch out for "reward inflation" where your brain stops responding to the same dopamine boost and you need bigger rewards to feel motivated. Also avoid anchors that create harmful habits, like needing to scroll social media or eat junk food to complete basic tasks.
Read the full article for specific examples of effective dopamine anchors, how to avoid becoming over-reliant on external rewards, and why this technique works especially well for remote workers and people with ADHD.
💻 Tools & Technology
Running a business means dealing with the same repetitive tasks over and over -- scanning emails for what actually matters, filling out forms, evaluating whether content is worth your time. What if your browser could just handle that stuff automatically while you focus on work that actually moves the needle?
"Comet lets you create automated actions or routines that run at specific times or under certain conditions, called Tasks. With this feature, you can simply type a prompt to describe exactly what you want... Comet, like many AI browsers, has agentic AI capabilities that essentially allow it to act on your behalf... Its AI agents can automatically pull up the transcript of the video, and then you can ask it any questions you might have about the content."
Key Insights:
Set up a morning briefing that scans your inbox for only important emails and combines them with your calendar events, delivering one clean summary instead of forcing you to parse through dozens of messages while half-asleep.
Create shortcuts for repetitive forms by describing the exact steps once, like which options to select and checkboxes to tick. For example, the author uses /fill-my-form to automatically complete and submit evaluation forms that require the same inputs every time.
Use AI to determine if YouTube videos, webinars, or tutorials are worth your time by pulling transcripts and asking targeted questions about whether they cover the specific examples or concepts you need, rather than watching 20 minutes to find out.
Read the full article for details on automating subscription comparisons to find better deals, why Comet beats other AI browsers despite similar features, and specific prompts you can use to set up these workflows yourself.
🤖 AI
First, I wish Perplexity would sponsor me but they haven’t, this issue is just a little Perpelxity heavy and to be fair, I am a little bit obsessed with this tool because it’s phenomenal. But let’s get to why this article matters: If you're still thinking AI agents are just for booking hotels or setting reminders, you're missing what's actually happening. This first large-scale study from Perplexity and Harvard researchers analyzed hundreds of millions of real-world interactions to reveal how people are actually using AI agents - and the results challenge pretty much every assumption about this technology.
"When we classified millions of user interactions, we found that 57% of all agent activity focuses on cognitive work. Thirty-six percent of the most common tasks are classified as productivity and workflow tasks, with another 21% classified as learning and research... People aren't using Comet Assistant to avoid work, they're using it to do better work."
Key Insights:
AI agents function as thinking partners rather than digital butlers - users deploy them for hard cognitive work like analyzing customer case studies before vendor meetings or filtering investment options before making decisions, not just handling mundane tasks.
User behavior evolves dramatically from Day 1 to Day 100, starting with low-stakes queries like travel recommendations but gravitating toward productivity tasks. Once someone uses an agent to debug code or summarize financial reports, they rarely return to simple queries, with productivity categories showing the highest retention rates.
Six core occupations drive 70% of all agent activity, but adoption rates don't tell the full story - knowledge workers in marketing, sales, and entrepreneurship show the highest "stickiness," meaning their usage intensity outpaces their adoption numbers as agents become integrated into daily workflows rather than occasional novelties.
Read the full article for detailed breakdowns of how different industries use AI agents, why finance professionals allocate 47% of queries to productivity while students focus 43% on learning, and what this shift toward "hybrid intelligence" means for the future of work.
🎉 Celebration Corner
Every week Doers Inner Circle members do a weekly review & get help when they need it — check out the progress they made this week!
Happy with the extra revenue from this project I just accepted.
Finalized onboarding with new copywriter and set clear expectations around timelines.
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I hope you found this valuable!
Wishing you much productivity!
- Jenae :)
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