Quick note: I’m hosting small meetups for fractionals and operators in Toronto, and we’re starting to bring them to other cities too.
Toronto, March 26 waitlist: sign up here
Future events + Slack: join here
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This morning I used AI to solve the hardest workflow problem in my house: getting my kids out the door.
Mornings had been a slog, so in about five minutes, on my phone, I asked AI to make my kids a little checklist with emojis and computer game sounds.
It completely changed the mood.
Everyone left smiling.
That’s obviously not client work.
But it’s why I’ve been so into AI lately.
A lot of people talk about AI like the whole story is job replacement.
What it keeps doing for me is something else.
It brings back the part of work I actually enjoy.
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TLDR
AI is most useful when it shortens the gap between idea and execution.
For me, that has meant:
getting up to speed faster
turning rough ideas into something real
cleaning up work that used to pile up
moving faster in design, product, and workflows
taking on a wider range of problems than I could before
The main thing I would say is this:
AI has raised the floor.
That makes taste, judgment, and restraint more important, not less.
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The biggest change
The biggest change for me is not speed.
It is that the loop got shorter.
I can have an idea, make something, react to it, change it, and see it again right away.
That didn’t used to be true.
Before, there was a lot more distance between what was in my head and what I could actually put in front of someone.
More waiting.
More handoffs.
More time spent on things I did not really want to be doing in the first place.
Now the distance between the idea and the thing is much smaller.
I try more things.
I learn faster.
I stay in the fun part longer.
Honestly, it is the first time in a long time that work has felt like a video game again.
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How I actually use AI
I do not use AI in one neat, official way.
I jam it into the work wherever it helps.
A big one is research.
Before a client call, I can use it to get up to speed on the company, look at competitors, spot patterns, and find obvious gaps faster. That means I show up with better questions and better instincts.
I use it for thinking too.
Sometimes I need help working through something.
Sometimes I need help figuring out what I think.
Sometimes I want to test a direction before I show it to anyone.
If a brief is not great, I will paste it in and ask what problem is actually being described, what is still vague, and what questions need answering first.
I use it for making things.
This is probably the biggest change.
I can take a product idea, a screen, a flow, a brand direction, or some annoying internal problem and turn it into something real much faster than I could before.
Sometimes rough.
Sometimes finished.
Sometimes good enough to ship.
But always real enough to react to.
I can move across everything from 0 to 1 startup work to more advanced AI workflows with clients, and do it with a lot more range than I thought possible.
I’m also building a tool for myself called Juggle.
It helps me keep track of clients, meetings, follow-ups, and the stuff that usually falls through the cracks. A big reason I’ve been able to move on it so quickly is AI.
I use AI for cleanup too.
Transcripts. Notes. Copy. Action items. Loose thoughts. Pulling signal out of conversations. Figuring out what different people need.
That stuff used to take a lot of time.
Now it takes a lot less.
It gives me more energy for the part I actually get paid for.
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How I’m really learning this stuff
One thing I have noticed is that I am mostly not learning this from YouTube.
Honestly, I think most of the content there is trash.
Too much of it is generic, performative, or made by people teaching tools instead of doing real work.
What has been more useful for me is talking to friends and founders who have actually figured parts of this out, seeing what they are doing, and then applying it to my own work right away.
The loop for me has basically been:
see something useful
try it on a real problem
keep the part that works
drop the rest
That has been true in my own workflows and in client work too.
I do not think you learn this stuff best by watching endless tutorials.
I think you learn it by trying things on real problems.
Your own workflows.
Your own bottlenecks.
Your own client work.
That is where it’s at.
Granted, this has also meant I have been up until 2 a.m. messing around with tools.
But the last couple of weeks especially have felt different.
My world has changed a lot.
Being able to create almost anything I want, then fine tune it until it does not look like slop and actually feels really good, is a pretty great feeling.
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The design side is the most fun
This is probably the part I am most into right now.
I have spent a lot of my life knowing what I wanted something to feel like, but having to go through slow loops to get there.
Make the thing.
Wait.
Review it.
Explain it.
Wait again.
Do another round.
That cycle used to eat so much time.
Now I can have an idea, turn it into something real, react to it, fix it, and keep going.
I can work through copy, structure, flow, and hierarchy much faster than I could before.
That means I can test more angles before settling too early.
Not because this stuff is some magic design machine.
It is not.
I can usually tell right away when something was done lazily.
That is the worst part.
Not that it looks polished.
That it feels inauthentic.
A lot of it has the same look.