Starting a new game, yet again.
1. The World’s Most Productive Procrastination Tool
AI is the best procrastination tool ever invented.
Not because it wastes your time — because it lets you start things you were always going to abandon. New app idea at 11pm? Prototype running by midnight. Side project you’ve been “meaning to get to”? Scaffolded in an hour.
Everyone hardcore into AI right now has a graveyard of half-built apps and dashboards that all started with AI-assisted excitement and stalled once the work stopped being novel.
The barrier to starting has collapsed. The barrier to finishing hasn’t moved an inch.
Before you spin up the next AI-assisted project, define the finish line. Not “build an app”, but what does done actually look like, specifically? If you can’t answer that in one sentence, don’t start the project.
2. The Process Nobody Wants to Do
Here’s a stat worth sitting with: 79% of enterprises face AI adoption challenges despite investing over $1M annually. Only 29% report significant ROI.
Why?
Because most companies are bolting AI onto broken manual processes. Automating a 10-step workflow that should be 3 steps just gives you a faster broken workflow.
The fix isn’t more AI. It’s re-engineering first. From The AI Playbook, the framework is four decisions applied to every step: eliminate, simplify, standardise, automate — in that order. You ask “is this step necessary at all?” before you ever ask “can AI do this step?”
The CEO’s (or COO’s) job is that second step — the strategic decision-making. Not doing the re-engineering themselves, and not skipping it entirely. AI handles the mapping and documentation. The human decides what goes, what stays, and what gets automated.
3. Before and After
My newsletter production process used to take roughly 10 hours end to end. Research, outline, draft, edit, format, schedule, distribute.
After running the eliminate-simplify-standardise-automate framework across each step, it now takes about an hour. Not because AI can write newsletters, but because I eliminated steps that didn’t need to exist, simplified the ones that did, standardised the repeatable parts, and only then automated what was left.
That’s a 90% reduction, and the output quality is better.
Most businesses never get there because they jump straight to “automate” without doing the uncomfortable work of eliminating first.
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