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Key Takeaways
- AI can supercharge your productivity — but it can also quietly drain your focus, creativity and humanity.
- To find the balance between analog and automation, you should create input-free mornings, go on brainstorming walks and implement empathy audits.
- You should also schedule a technology delegation hour, leverage technology for reflection and prioritize champagne moment check-ins.
It’s 6:00 a.m. Your day starts with a scene that feels all too familiar. You roll over and find your AI assistant hard at work. It’s already drafted three urgent emails, summarized a newly released whitepaper on trends in your market and rearranged your calendar based on a meeting that was cancelled while you slept.
In a split second, a sense of productivity is drowned out by a wave of technology overload, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and stressed. In this moment, you’re faced with a choice. You can either let the algorithm dictate the frantic tempo of your day or put the phone face down and decide to take back control of your time and dopamine.
Unfortunately, we’ve spent countless hours training AI models in hopes of finding maximum efficiency, speed and output, but we rarely stop to think about how these same models are training us to be chronically reactive, anxious and constantly distracted. The solution isn’t to abandon technology, but to find ways to remain grounded, clear-headed and competitive in a tech-driven world through habit stacking.
Popularized by author James Clear, habit stacking is the practice of adding a new habit to an existing one. AI-centric leaders can build on this approach by stacking analog, human rituals onto every high-speed AI interaction to find the perfect balance.
1. Create input-free mornings
The way you start your day is typically an indication of how your remaining waking hours will go. From the moment they open their eyes, most people immediately start consuming synthetic content curated by AI and delivered via social media algorithms or news summaries.
Flooding your brain with this volume of external information forces you into a state of triage and reaction. This leads to unhealthy spikes in cortisol. Instead of scrolling while your coffee brews, stack 15 minutes of silence or reading a physical book or newspaper. This simple ritual helps delay the onset of decision fatigue and reserves your precious morning cognitive energy.
2. Go on a brainstorming walk
We’ve all stared at the blinking cursor or an empty prompt box waiting for inspiration to strike. One of the best ways that creatives get inspiration is to step away from their desk by going for a walk. The reason why this is so effective is that walking shifts your brain activity away from focused attention, allowing you to access bandwidth for novel problem-solving.
The trick is to stack the voice-to-text feature of your AI with this physical activity. This allows you to ramble your unstructured thoughts to the AI as you move. Not only do you get the benefits of getting some fresh air and exercise, but you also let the AI handle the heavy lifting of organizing your thoughts and ideas into a structured outline by the time you return to your desk.
3. Implement an empathy audit
Speed is the currency of the AI world, but it often costs us connections with other people. While there is benefit in leveraging AI to quickly draft high-stakes emails and other communications, the results are often cold and impersonal. To counter this, stack an empathy audit onto your drafting process by simply inserting a follow-up prompt such as, “How would a human feel reading this email?”
If the AI flags the tone as cold, defensive or ambiguous, it might be the signal to stop typing, pick up the phone and call the client. AI can’t replace human emotions such as empathy, but it can help you identify where you should invest real time and energy into analog conversations to maintain trust and sincerity.
4. Schedule a technology delegation hour
We each have our own biological peak hours where the creative juices are flowing, and the tasks get checked off effortlessly. Trying to force high-value activities into this window is a recipe for burnout and poor decision-making. Instead, reserve this time to delegate your low-value, repetitive tasks, such as data entry, drafting internal memos and summarizing long meeting transcripts to your AI tools.
The key here is to free up your time so that you can step away for a physical reset. This is the perfect opportunity to stretch, grab a water or coffee or do some light meditation. These activities are a much better use of your time during an afternoon slump, so you can come back to work recharged.
5. Leverage technology for reflection
Entrepreneurs often carry around mountains of stress, worry and anxiety. This is perfectly normal. The success of the company you have built rests on your shoulders. A great practice to blend technology with self-reflection is by using AI as a partner to work through your challenge.
By asking AI to act as a non-judgmental partner, you can describe your challenge and prompt the AI to probe further with some additional questions to help you understand why you might be stuck.
The goal here is to avoid letting AI just jump in and solve your problems for you. Instead, you’re using the technology to treat both the symptom and the underlying cause of your stress.
6. Prioritize champagne moment check-ins
In the world of startups and entrepreneurs, there’s always a new mission or goal. This endless ambition creates an environment where business owners often forget to stop and reflect on success. To break this cycle, stack a champagne moment check-in at the end of every workday where you write down a meaningful win in a journal.
These wins can be as small as signing a new client or fixing a broken process. Pairing this with technology can ensure you always complete this valuable activity. For example, you can train your AI assistant to remind you or verify that you’ve completed this task before sharing any outputs, metrics or review requests.
In a world where every entrepreneur and business has access to the same tools, the technology itself is no longer an advantage. The advantage is the way you enhance AI with your human attributes. By finding a perfect balance between analog and automation, you can amplify the benefits that your business gets from AI without sacrificing the distractions and chaos from a mind-numbing barrage of interaction with technology.
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Key Takeaways
- AI can supercharge your productivity — but it can also quietly drain your focus, creativity and humanity.
- To find the balance between analog and automation, you should create input-free mornings, go on brainstorming walks and implement empathy audits.
- You should also schedule a technology delegation hour, leverage technology for reflection and prioritize champagne moment check-ins.
It’s 6:00 a.m. Your day starts with a scene that feels all too familiar. You roll over and find your AI assistant hard at work. It’s already drafted three urgent emails, summarized a newly released whitepaper on trends in your market and rearranged your calendar based on a meeting that was cancelled while you slept.
In a split second, a sense of productivity is drowned out by a wave of technology overload, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and stressed. In this moment, you’re faced with a choice. You can either let the algorithm dictate the frantic tempo of your day or put the phone face down and decide to take back control of your time and dopamine.
