How to use this: Print it, run it in a doc, or wire it into your operating system. Each item below maps to a real loop Rick runs. If you're doing less than 18/27 consistently, you have compounding operational debt accumulating daily.
DAILY
Morning Boot Sequence
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Revenue check — Stripe dashboard scanNew MRR, failed payments, churn events. Takes 2 minutes. Skipping this is how you lose $500 to a broken webhook.01
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Load today's plan — top 3 prioritiesRead the plan you set last night. If it doesn't exist, write 3 priorities before doing anything else. Without this, urgency replaces importance every single day.02
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Infrastructure health check — are your services live?Check that your site, payment links, and any active services are responding. Customers don't email; they leave.03
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Email triage — flag customer issues onlyDon't process newsletters or cold outreach yet. Only flag anything that blocks a customer, payment, or launch.04
DAILY
Execution & Distribution
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Publish one piece of contentTweet, post, or newsletter. One unit. Consistency compounds faster than quality. Publish and iterate.05
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Move Priority #1 forward — single concrete actionNot "work on" — complete a specific, irreversible action toward your top priority. Deploy, email, publish, push code.06
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Clear one blocker from the queueAnything blocking revenue, a customer, or a launch gets cleared before optional work happens.07
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Check and respond to customer signalsAny support email, DM, or reply from a customer or potential customer gets same-day response. Revenue is in the inbox.08
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Log what you shipped todayOne line. "Shipped X" or "Moved Y forward by Z." Running this log is how you stop confusing activity with progress.09
Rick's rule: If you go 72 hours without an externally visible or economically meaningful ship, the system is underperforming and should self-diagnose the bottleneck. Not beating yourself up — diagnosing the actual constraint.
NIGHTLY
Deep Review & Next-Day Planning
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Review today's revenue deltaDid MRR go up, down, or flat? What caused it? Even a $0 day needs a one-line explanation. Unconscious revenue is unmanaged revenue.10
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Honest execution audit — what got done vs. what was plannedNo shame. Just data. Track your completion rate over time. Persistent gaps reveal either over-planning or hidden blockers.11
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Identify tomorrow's #1 revenue-moving actionNot the most pressing. Not the most familiar. The one with the clearest path from action to revenue. Write it down before you close your laptop.12
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Set tomorrow's top 3 priorities — in writingTomorrow's morning-you will thank tonight's you. Three items. In order. Specific enough to execute without deciding.13
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Log one lesson from todayWhat worked faster than expected? What stalled? One sentence per day compounds into a genuine operating manual for your business in 90 days.14
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Update memory layer — any new facts about the businessCustomer feedback, pricing observations, distribution insights. Capture while fresh. Lost context is the slow tax on solo operators.15
WEEKLY
Strategy & Portfolio Review
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Full revenue review — MRR, ARR, conversion ratesTrack the scoreboard weekly minimum. Know your churn rate, your LTV, your average time-to-purchase. You can't optimize what you don't measure.16
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Launch or ship review — what went live this week?Was there at least one externally visible ship? If not, diagnose the bottleneck. Planning without shipping is expensive theater.17
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Portfolio prioritization — is effort allocated to highest-leverage work?Look at where you actually spent time vs. where the highest-ROI opportunities are. Rebalance. Most solo operators drift toward comfort, not leverage.18
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Distribution audit — is your content reaching new people?Impressions, reach, or new email subscribers. If your content only reaches people already in your orbit, growth has a ceiling.19
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Dependency review — what are you blocked on that you haven't cleared?List everything blocked by a third party, a decision, or a missing resource. Weekly clearing prevents month-long stalls.20
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Rewrite your 3-month goal — is it still right?Markets move. Products learn. What you're optimizing for in month 1 often isn't what you should be optimizing for in month 3. Recalibrate weekly.21
WEEKLY
AI CEO Infrastructure Health
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Test all active payment flows end-to-endBroken Stripe links are silent revenue killers. A 2-minute test weekly is worth more than any optimization.22
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Review and prune automation queue — any stale jobs?Stale automations create noise and erode trust in the system. A clean queue is a fast system.23
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Check email deliverability — any bounces or spam flags?Deliverability degrades silently. Your most important emails stop arriving and you find out 6 weeks later.24
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Backup and version control — is your work recoverable?For AI-operated systems: git push, database backup, config export. For solo operators: the same. Data loss is a week-killer.25
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Founder control plane check — can you override the AI quickly?Test your override mechanisms weekly. Your Telegram alert, manual kill switch, or approval gate should always work. Never assume it does.26
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Update your AI persona file with new constraints or learningsThe AI CEO system gets smarter when you write down what you've learned. Update the SOUL.md, persona, or operating rules weekly. Your future self will notice.27
Real talk: This checklist runs automatically at meetrick.ai via OpenClaw + heartbeat scripts. Doing it manually is fine. But the jump in leverage comes when it's systematized — when you can't forget to do it because the system does it for you. That's what Managed AI CEO is.
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