Sandhya Unravels AI

Sandhya Simhan is a senior product marketing and operations leader with 12+ years of experience across consumer goods, edtech, venture capital, B2C and enterprise software. She currently serves as a chief of staff at Workday, having previously worked at Meta, DeepLearning.AI, Intuit and Unilever.

Sandhya is the head of editorial at Moms in Tech, a Facebook network for 14k working moms in the tech industry. She's also the admin for Little Brown Diary, a Facebook network of 40k millennial South Asian Americans and 127 subgroups. She holds a Bachelor’s in Psychology from the University of Michigan and lives in the Bay Area with her husband and two daughters. 

I met Sandhya through WomenDefiningAI and have been incredibly impressed by her AI-first approach to life and work. 

About Sandhya

Name: Sandhya Simhan

Pronouns:  she/her

Occupation: Chief of Staff, Workday

Industry: Tech

Location: Bay Area

AI Tools: 

• Todoist, Notion AI, ChatGPT Plus, Claude, Gemini, Otter.AI, Bardeen, Reclaim.ai

How would you rate your AI knowledge?

7 - I’d like to think I’m on the leading edge of what you can do without coding skills

What sparked your interest in AI? 

I’m married to a Machine Learning Engineer, so I’ve been hearing about AI as “what you do with all the big data we collect” for over a decade. The real shift happened when I joined DeepLearning.AI, an edtech company founded by Andrew Ng. Andrew’s most well known for founding Coursera and his life’s work is enabling humanity on the power of machine learning. He’s obviously well versed on the technical side of things, but he’s also a phenomenal teacher. He would spend time in each of our 1:1s teaching me new concepts to grow my knowledge base. I’m very lucky because you can’t get a better intro than that. 

What are you most excited about when it comes to AI?

As a mom and a marketer, I’m excited to see how AI can free up time for human creativity. My life thesis is helping people utilize technology (education, automations, memory, processes, etc) to free up mental bandwidth so that they can spend their creativity on more challenging or interesting problems - whether that’s spending higher quality time with their kids or growing businesses. 

Sandhya’s 24 hours with AI 

FOUNDATIONS:

I fundamentally organize my life and thoughts using a combination of AI tools that each serve specific functions. Notion acts as my central repository or 'second brain,' where I store and categorize notes, links and information relevant to various aspects of my life, from career development to personal relationships. Each item is added ad-hoc to the inbox, gets tagged with detailed metadata (sometimes automated, mostly by hand) and then gets sent to a “ready to read” pile. I subscribe to Notion AI so the recall on anything in the database is much faster. Example prompt: “maven lighting talk about productivity”

For automating tasks and managing workflows, I use Bardeen, which I prefer over Zapier due to its stronger personal application focus and its capabilities in web scraping. Bardeen helps me automate repetitive online tasks like saving down recipes in a particular format. I’m also trying to experiment more with Make.com but haven’t quite gotten around to it. Todoist is my short term memory, it puts all the tasks I have to do across work and home in one place. My folders follow the same taxonomy structure as Notion to make it easier. And when I have a larger task that I’m procrastinating on, I use the Todoist AI integration with ChatGPT (part of the Premium subscription) to break it down into more manageable items.

This is the foundational tool infrastructure I have set up that lets me do all the other things I want. It took a little time and iteration, but it's pretty adaptable to pretty much anything I want to make time for. It’s loosely based on the PARA method from Tiago Forte. 

WEEKDAYS:

Most weekday mornings I’m up by 530 - either to exercise, take a few calls with my European teammates or for a study session. To prevent wasting my valuable “fresh slate” time, I will go straight to Notion for the section that is already tagged with metadata and pick 2-3 items to review, taking notes as I read or listen. This helps me effectively chip away at my never ending reading list and gives me the first win of the day, creating a productivity avalanche. 

At work, I’m part of our AI tools pilot where I get to test out lots of new enterprise grade tools and provide feedback on implementation. So far, my favorite thing we’ve tested is Slack AI’s recap feature. It’s a boon for anyone non-technical that needs regular updates on extremely technical products or issues. Instead of having to wait for my PMs to have time to create something from scratch, I can send a draft to them to vet for accuracy. 

In the evenings, I try (and usually fail) at staying away from my phone while I’m around the kids. My kindergartener loves opening up the Gemini app on my phone and asking questions. I appreciate that I can view her question history, especially when she’s asking things like “do kids have to listen to grownups” and “why do we have to eat broccoli”. My two year old is already proficient at asking Google hub to show Cocomelon or pictures of herself. I think we underestimate how much AI or machine learning is already baked into our lives, and watching my kids interact with these devices or interfaces is a good reminder that AI is truly multi-modal. 

Before bed, I review my Todoist and allocate time for tomorrow’s tasks. This is a piece of mental bandwidth I would love to automate but my favorite app (Reclaim.AI) doesn’t have an Outlook integration and I run my life on my work calendar. But whenever they launch, I’ll definitely be the first in line! It’s like having a junior EA across home and work.

WEEKENDS:

During the week, I’m pretty busy and sometimes don’t get time to do deeper learning. So on the weekends, I usually keep one of the early morning slots  before the kids get up to do longer study sessions. I might have an idea I have been wanting to noodle on, so I’ll talk stream of consciousness into my Otter AI app and have it summarize and provide action items that I add to my Todoist. Sometimes I have a learning I want to share more broadly, so in that case I take my Notion notes and Otter AI monologue transcript, dump it into ChatGPT to create distinct themes. Then I copy that over to Claude (as it's much better at sounding like a human) and have it draft a few LinkedIn posts. Then I’ll spend some time tweaking before sharing it more broadly. 

Usually though I use this time to catch up on Todoist tasks or dig into longer videos or articles in my Notion database. Picking the first thing to do is getting hard though, so this might be something to automate (have a workflow that picks two items for me based on the time I have). 

ALSO - I really dislike cooking but am the primary cook at home, so this is the first place I actually started using AI in my personal life. I use an app called Paprika that stores my recipes, but doesn’t have a built-in meal planning tool. So I’ll review IG recipes I’ve saved, convert them to text using Bardeen and ChatGPT and then use a custom GPT I’ve built to pick meals and snacks for the next few weeks. 

I also help lead two very large Facebook networks but that might be a whole other article. 

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I'm Amanda Halle, author of Unraveling AI. You can call me Amanda, Mands, or AJ (my middle name is Jane). I've been in and around the HR/people space my entire career and started my solopreneur journey 3 years ago. I focus on fractional people support, advisory in HR and AI, and project-based work primarily in the L&D niche from my years in leadership consulting and change management.