You use AI every day. Why are you busier?

This week, a seller I coach almost canceled our standing session. He hadn't done any of what we'd planned the week before, and he'd spent most of the week at a conference. Then he changed his mind and decided it would be more useful to show me how messy his week was.

He walked me through his calendar. One internal meeting had 30 people on the invite, and about a dozen usually show up. It’s a deal review, so he feels like he’s up against a wall, facing a firing squad with a hundred bullets coming at him at once.

I told him I've been in many of those. After the hard ones, he loses half an hour just getting his mind right. He also has a recurring block for weekly reviewing and planning, but in his words, it "gets swallowed up by other stuff."

One afternoon, after a long day at the conference, he had enough energy left for one important email. It was long, it came from someone inside his company, and he knew it needed a thoughtful reply. He pasted it into Claude and asked it to help him respond.

"We're in this sort of crazy, crazy world where, you know, you're reading AI messages and responding with AI messages," he said.

He quickly added that the reply was not bad. "It's still on point." Then he said: "I probably wouldn't have done it otherwise."

AI helped him keep up, but it didn't give him any time back.

In July 2024, the Upwork Research Institute surveyed 2,500 executives, employees, and freelancers in four countries. 96% of the executives expected AI to raise productivity. Among employees who used AI, 77% said it had added to their workload, and 47% said they didn't know how to get the gains their bosses expected.

The tools are much better now, but the workload problem remains. In February, two Berkeley researchers published their observations after eight months inside a tech company of about 200 people. Once AI made tasks easier, people took on more. They sent prompts at lunch, before meetings, and in the evening. Looking back, they said they felt busier and less able to disconnect.

AI saves time on each task, but the new dilemma is that the saved time fills up with more tasks. It’s the same trend that happened when the computer became mobile and work and life boundaries blurred. Now, with even more addictive apps, capabilities, and the feeling of wanting/needing to do “more,” the problem is acute.

I feel the pull too. In a voice memo to myself last month, I said AI "gets better and better at a lightning pace every single day." Then I said: "If I don't have structure in my day, it's easy to just give it away."

Speaking of voice memos, I’ve been obsessed with using Wispr Flow. Instead of typing, I just hit the function button and speak away. It’s accurate, understands my messups, and feels like a more modern way to work.

You think 4x faster than you type. So why are you typing prompts? Wispr Flow turns your voice into ready-to-paste text inside any AI tool. Speak naturally, tangents and all, and Flow cleans it up. Available on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android.

Try Wispr Flow Free

When I was at LivePerson, a group of high-level Amazonians joined us, and we adopted their famous writing culture. This meant the meeting leader crafted a six-page memo that all attendees read in silence at the start of the meeting. No slides, presenting, or pitching.

They were really hard to write—and that was the point. It forced you to think critically and strategically so you could let the artifact you wrote do the talking.

That approach earned me millions in commissions in my strategic sales role.

This week, Steve Huynh, who spent almost twenty years at Amazon, wrote that the culture is dying. He describes a recent review meeting where a senior product manager (L7) started presenting his six-pager. Two minutes in, everyone in the room could tell he was reading it for the first time because he outsourced the writing to AI. A senior engineer in Steve's community now tags documents "AI;DR," short for "AI; didn't read." His reasoning: "If a model wrote it, a model can summarize it."

"A document used to be proof of thought." That’s no longer the case. The value of the exercise and the memo's output is weakening.

Plus, it adds more time and wasted effort. Perhaps it saved the project manager some time, but in Steve’s words it cost so much more: "I don’t know how the situation ended, but there are only two ways it could have gone. Either the plan got reworked, and a room full of senior engineers lost time to a meeting that should never have been scheduled, or it didn’t get reworked, and that team executed a plan nobody had thought through.”

During my coaching call, I told my client what Amazon taught us: use the writing to force yourself to think clearly. It’s like paying a "craft tax” that makes you better. Write the page first. Then let AI fill it in from your notes.

We’re building a workflow that lets him do the hard, upfront work of writing his first strategic account narrative business case, so he understands what it’s for, why it matters, and how it works. From there, he can train AI to fill gaps from his meeting-recording transcripts or research new accounts so he can start building the bones for new ones.

→ Pro tip: Train your AI to interview you at the beginning of any new project, artifact, or account plan, rather than just blindly outsourcing the work. It can still do the work, but you'll get better in the process and actually understand what it’s building and why.

Separately this week, Mike Rosenberg, who teaches professionals to write LinkedIn posts without AI, wrote about AI taking work from writers, musicians, and other creative people. I left a comment: "And another take is that if you stay true to the human-crafted side of creation, your work becomes more valuable."

He replied: "I'd argue it's the only thing with value now that anyone can produce infinite AI copy in 2 seconds."

I use AI every day, including on this essay. But here’s the line I draw. Remember, that voice memo I mentioned earlier? I also said: "I want it to force me to become a more critical thinker and enhance my creativity, not replace my creativity."

I measure craft on a continuum that moves left to right one tier at a time:

Deficient → Baseline → Pro → Elite → World-Class

If you can move a skill from the left side to the right side of the spectrum and repeat it, especially in moments of change and stress, it becomes a capability. If you stack enough elite capabilities on your side, you become unique and valuable—the kind of value that allows you to write your own ticket in life.

Go deep in one area you genuinely care about and have real expertise in, and you move along that line. Stay scattered, and you remain stuck in the mud.

AI can move your work along that line faster. It can also let you skip the parts that matter. That’s the trap to avoid. If you use AI for everything, you miss what makes you worth paying attention to.

Last week, Harvard Business Review published a study of sales teams at companies that adopted AI early. The biggest gains went to people who were already top performers. What set them apart was AI literacy: using the tools they have, learning new ones, judging what comes back, catching errors, and knowing when a person should stay in control.

Sales reps rated their AI literacy from 1 to 5 and how much AI had helped them. Each 1-point increase in literacy was associated with a 0.71-point increase in benefit. How much people trusted AI had almost no effect.

Bottom line: You have to get comfortable working with AI, but top performance goes to those who know what to feed it, and how. As I told my client, "That quality of work adds up. That's what compounds."

Learning Path 6 is built on the promise I made back in August:

Purposeful leverage means an advantage you own, not one you lease from your employer.

Every install runs the same loop. You first make something from your own experience. Then you write a high-standard spec the work has to meet. Then AI does the work from your material, and you check it until you'd feel comfortable putting your name behind it.

How it fits your week. Your employer pays for your calendar, and your manager and customers fill most of it. One block a week is a piece you take back. Each Wednesday, you get one install from me. It takes about 50 minutes, and you run it on work already due that week. It changes how you do that work, without adding a task.

The 50 minutes follow the loop: about 10 minutes away from the screen, 20 minutes writing your standard, 15 minutes with AI, and 5 minutes checking the result. By Install 8, the system lives on your calendar as one part of your weekly review: What did my system get wrong this week? Then you use it on real work for about five weeks before day 90.

It works with any model. Every install works in a plain chat window in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever you use (or your company allows). When the tools change (and they will), you'll know how to learn the next one faster without missing a beat.

Being AI fluent with high-quality human taste and judgment is how you increase your value, not being tool- or model-dependent.

You'll point it at one skill. Install 1 helps you pick the skill that matters most over the next 90 days and place it on the continuum. For a seller, that might be an account plan, executive outreach, or a strategic artifact that keeps a big deal moving. If you're not in sales, think interview preps, project plans, or a pitch to a decision-maker. Your Autonomy Assessment results can help you choose.

I'll always share first. Each week, I'll show my own build: turning my book and seven years of writing into an AI twin that works from my frameworks. I'm building it on Uare.ai.

The primer goes out Wednesday, October 21.

Stay human, friends.