The short version
Don’t try to keep up to AI’s warp speed.
Polarize with AI instead: slow down and think deeper.
The more precise your direction, the better a job it can do.
AI is limitless but also limited
It can be as much a way to waste time as to save it.
If you don’t use it mindfully, AI solves certain problems while creating a host of others.
When writing is instant → reading becomes the bottleneck
AI is instantly productive → you can create a lot of work that doesn’t matter (the BS economy)
AI works on many things at once → you scatter your human attention and make worse decisions
Two important lessons:
If you try to keep pace with AI, it just fries your human skills.
Just because AI can do something for you doesn’t mean you should automatically let it.
Polarizing with AI works much better
As AI works at lightspeed, your job is to slow down and go deeper. (Interestingly, the process we’ve been teaching for years is also the best way to work with AI: think, write, edit.)
Spend more time thinking and working in a flexible, strategic, analytical way before you write. That means when you’re ready to build—and AI makes this speedy—you have a really precise target.
It can feel counterintuitive (and even uncomfortable) at first because not producing can feel like you’re not being productive. But that’s an illusion.
Instant documents just create slop that needs a lot of editing or causes problems because it never gets edited.
The ‘invisible’ work of getting clear first not only leads to higher quality, it’s also—when you add up the hours—much, much faster.
Try these two prompts as an experiment
The next time you write an email, try this prompt first:
Prompt 1:
Fix this email so I can send it.
Then try this one with some thinking baked in (dictating this is much faster):
Prompt 2:
I need to send an email to [state the action you want it to accomplish]. It’s going to [describe your audience and what you know about them]. Please read this and tell me if you, as the reader, would be able to act on this information without questions. If not, give me a list of questions to answer and suggestions for fixes.
We’ve spent the last few years studying the best ways to combine human and artificial intelligence. We built an AI tool as our answer. It helps you build this solid thinking into every email you write. Try it for free as part of our beta testing.