Use Cases - What People Run Them For

Each job below started with a few plain-language instructions on a local machine.

Studies

The semester, compressed

Took 38 lecture PDFs and turned each into a reading-points sheet, not a blurb.
Generated practice problems from the week's slides, so the test set never repeated itself.
Built an Anki deck every night from the parts marked "exam relevant" in the professor's own handouts.
Three days before the paper, printed a single sheet of the formulas that actually appear on past exams.

Outcome: He sat the paper with a printed sheet and a pen. The screen stayed closed.

Law

The clause on page 14

Read a vendor's 34-page contract and pulled every clause about renewal - including the auto-renewal on page 14 that the covering email did not mention.
Compared two competitor drafts side by side and listed, per clause, where the liability caps and deletion windows differed.
Drafted a one-page risk memo for the partner with the three points worth negotiating.
The working files never left the laptop, so the analysis stayed inside the firm.

Outcome: The client got a line-item change instead of a surprise invoice.

The collector

A 1990 Walkman, right price

Built a spec table of the 1990 line: which models took the flat 6V adapter, which ran on the gum-stick battery, which had Dolby B and which did not.
Cross-referenced sold listings and put a price band on each model by condition grade.
Spotted a "refurbished" unit that was an original shell with replacement guts, and passed on it.
Set the bid ceiling from data, not from feels, the night of the auction.

Outcome: Ninety minutes after the hammer, the Walkman was back on his shelf at 60% of the first asking price.

newsletter drafts invoice triage recipe scaling backup reminders packing lists