I appreciate how you built short term, long term, and awareness of the difference between the two into your system. I think that's what's been missing from mine. I did my first scheduling experiment with Gemini today and I have to say it was somewhat liberating.
I realised very quickly that if I wanted AI to help then my old way of planning (keeping everything in my head) wouldn’t work. So the weekly/daily seems to be working really well.
I also have a quarterly plan that it has access to with more direction & goals.
Two skills is smart and I should have started there honestly. I built a much bigger system instead (full autonomous agent running over 3,000 tasks, product creation, analytics, the works) and the lesson was identical: simpler setups produce better outcomes every time.
The cognitive burden of managing the management system becomes its own productivity tax that nobody accounts for. There's an optimal complexity level for these things and I overshot it dramatically before figuring out I needed to scale back. Less really is more with AI tooling.
This really resonates. The part that lands most for me is the admission that the “hard part” of productivity isn’t goals or motivation, it’s the constant, low-grade orchestration of calendars, priorities, and nagging loose ends.
Reading this makes me think less about “AI as a better todo list” and more about AI as a way to separate two different jobs we’ve been forcing into one brain: deciding what matters versus actually running the system that keeps us honest. Once those split, you can keep your judgment and taste on the hook, but finally offload the relentless Sunday-night project manager that most of us are terrible at anyway.
That's a pretty cool thing you did. I'm glad it's working out for you. If you ever feel like trying something new, you could give https://kanbantool.com/ a shot. It's easy to use and can really improve productivity.
Simplicity wins. The best productivity systems for professional service firms are the ones people actually use. I've seen accounting teams adopt 5 different tools and use none of them consistently. The better approach: one AI tool (ChatGPT) + 3-4 saved prompts for your most repeated tasks. That's the whole system. Everything else is optimization.
I appreciate how you built short term, long term, and awareness of the difference between the two into your system. I think that's what's been missing from mine. I did my first scheduling experiment with Gemini today and I have to say it was somewhat liberating.
I realised very quickly that if I wanted AI to help then my old way of planning (keeping everything in my head) wouldn’t work. So the weekly/daily seems to be working really well.
I also have a quarterly plan that it has access to with more direction & goals.
Two skills is smart and I should have started there honestly. I built a much bigger system instead (full autonomous agent running over 3,000 tasks, product creation, analytics, the works) and the lesson was identical: simpler setups produce better outcomes every time.
The cognitive burden of managing the management system becomes its own productivity tax that nobody accounts for. There's an optimal complexity level for these things and I overshot it dramatically before figuring out I needed to scale back. Less really is more with AI tooling.
This really resonates. The part that lands most for me is the admission that the “hard part” of productivity isn’t goals or motivation, it’s the constant, low-grade orchestration of calendars, priorities, and nagging loose ends.
Reading this makes me think less about “AI as a better todo list” and more about AI as a way to separate two different jobs we’ve been forcing into one brain: deciding what matters versus actually running the system that keeps us honest. Once those split, you can keep your judgment and taste on the hook, but finally offload the relentless Sunday-night project manager that most of us are terrible at anyway.
That's a pretty cool thing you did. I'm glad it's working out for you. If you ever feel like trying something new, you could give https://kanbantool.com/ a shot. It's easy to use and can really improve productivity.
Simplicity wins. The best productivity systems for professional service firms are the ones people actually use. I've seen accounting teams adopt 5 different tools and use none of them consistently. The better approach: one AI tool (ChatGPT) + 3-4 saved prompts for your most repeated tasks. That's the whole system. Everything else is optimization.