AI and productivity.
AI is taking over the world. Not using it, would be like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Stupid, not to mention dangerous. Using it to support your efforts and increase your productivity is a must. It will help you start quicker, create better deliverables, give you more options when needed, show you patterns you could never find out, and automate some activities that you hated and that took too much of your time.
So where is the problem you might ask?
Get better.
None, if you are willing to follow the path I call “it doesn’t get easier; you just get better”. It is the path known in training, where you should strive to do harder tasks, not do the same tasks with ease. It is the only road to a better self. I know that in today’s world, this approach will be criticized, since balance, burnout avoidance, … and other “politically correct” initiatives are taking over. I don’t believe humans are that fragile, I believe in our ability to use the mind to push our body forward, to the lands of enormous potential.
Where does AI fit in this discourse? In its ability to serve our “attention deficit” issue. Issue created by digital technology that increases our productivity, so that we are now surrounded by digital assets, that are fighting for our attention 24×7.
How to use it properly?
Using AI is a must, the world will belong to people capable of augmenting their performance with AI usage. But the way of using it will make a difference. Only people who will still be capable of putting the effort to analyze AI outputs and reuse them in a way that will create the most benefit will take the main prize in the “winner takes all world”.
Don’t let AI steal your critical thinking ability.
AI will change business models and business practices. If you only use it, to make your existing work easier, so that you will feel better, you will lose by default. If you are not able to read, comprehend, analyze, understand, compare, search for additional proof, connect it to additional data sources, create better prompts based on initial inputs, ask better research questions, define better AI tasks, prioritize AI use cases, …, you will lose by default.
Create resilience.
To do that, you need to create resilience. The only way to create resilience is to get better. To get better you need to increase effort. Life is a gift that gives you the choice to improve yourself. It is about a growth mindset, that uses AI to improve productivity, which will offer you more time, to put additional effort into critical thinking, which will occupy your time (if you choose it over leisure), but will bring better results.
