The apprentice blames the chisel. The master sharpens it.
1. AI Amplifies What You Already Are
AI doesn’t make you productive. It makes you more of whatever you already are.
If your systems are solid, AI is the ultimate force multiplier. Work that took a week now takes a day. Three hours become one. You compound your output at a rate that would have been impossible two years ago.
But if your systems are messy?
AI makes them messier, at scale, faster than ever before.
I laugh when people say “AI helped me organise my day.”
Like… how?
The AI doesn’t know your Hero Mode hours, your peaks, your troughs. It doesn’t know when you actually get things done versus when you just feel busy.
And before you say “but my AI has memory and it learns” — yes. It learns your bad habits.
2. Scaling Bad Habits
Here’s what this looks like in practice.
I know a number of people who are very enthusiastic about AI. They all believe it’s turned them into some sort of modern-day business superman.
They use AI as a black box. They don’t really know how it works. They weren’t particularly productive to begin with. But now they feel more productive because the AI is doing things, and even outsourced intelligence feels like progress.
But they still have the same bad habits — they wake up late, or inconsistently. They have very slow starts. No real work gets done until 4pm. But now AI lets them chase “just one more thing” — and before they know it, it’s 9pm and they’re still at their desk. Still haven’t hit the gym. Still haven’t eaten dinner. Still haven’t done the work that actually matters… but they did spend 2 hours setting up that new AI tool.
For them AI is simply the new rabbit hole.
3. Scaling Good Habits
Now compare that to someone who had good systems before AI arrived.
They know when to focus. They know when to use AI. They know when to hypertask. If the AI breaks, they can still do the work manually — or how to fix the AI themselves.
The result? They knock out work in 3-5x less time. A week’s work in a day. Three hours compressed to one. They finish earlier, not later.
AI is the ultimate force multiplier — but only if there’s something worth multiplying.
This is exactly the thinking behind my Next Level Productivity course. Get your systems right first. Then layer AI on top. The order matters.
4. Courses
I have a range of online courses that teach business people what they need to know about productivity and AI:
1. Next Level Productivity
A practical, straightforward course that teaches you how to achieve elite-level personal productivity in today’s constantly interrupted world.
2. The AI Agents, Automations and Agentic Workflows Guide
This non-technical course shows business people and non-coders how they can build and use AI agents in ChatGPT and Zapier.
3. The Complete Claude, Claude Code & AI for Work Productivity
A comprehensive course taking you from beginner AI concepts like prompt and context engineering, to cutting-edge AI productivity using terminal-based AI tools like Claude Code for non-coding office work. Usable with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other current LLMs.
4. The AI Playbook
This is my longer premium course on how businesses can deploy AI tools and technology across their processes and teams.
5. ChatGPT for Managers
See how AI can solve complex management challenges in less than 30 seconds. Full prompt library and examples included.
That’s it for this week!
— Aaron