Nobody stays at the desk this late unless the work stopped feeling like work.
1. Productivity: Find Your FURK
Years ago a friend and mentor of mine introduced me to a concept called FURK:
Fun + Work.
This is when the work is so enjoyable and so rewarding (monetarily or otherwise, but usually monetarily) that you hit a flow state, peak productivity kicks in naturally, and time flies while value gets created.
It’s been a while since I experienced peak FURK.
But recently as I’ve gotten more into software development, it’s come back. That feeling where you actually look forward to sitting down in front of the computer and building something with your own hands, usually for the purpose of bringing something into the world.
Find your FURK.
2. Ops: Let AI Build Your Asana Projects
If you use Claude or ChatGPT and Asana, grab the MCP.
You can plan a project with milestones and tasks in a markdown file, then tell the AI to create that in a project in your workspace.
Be specific and steer the AI:
- Give it the project ID
- Tell it what are milestones and what are tasks
- Specify dependencies
- Detail what goes in titles, descriptions, due dates, assignees
This used to take project managers a couple of hours after a meeting.
Now it’s done automatically with AI + MCP.
Want to know more about using AI to speed up everyday office work? The Complete Claude, Claude Code & AI for Work Productivity covers this in detail.
3. Tech: Social Media and Smartphones
I’ll say it plainly: social media combined with smartphones is one of the worst things to have happened to society.
We’ve built an entire culture around constant comparison — status-seeking behaviour where fame and likes matter more than substance. Everyone thinks they are the main character who is and finds themselves performing for an audience that mostly doesn’t care.
It’s capitalism’s id — pure ego, quantified and gamified.
The algorithms don’t reward depth. They reward outrage, controversy, and infinite scroll. We’ve handed our attention spans to companies whose entire business model is selling that attention to advertisers.
And yet, here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you run a business, you have to be on social media.
Your customers are there. Your competitors are there. Opting out entirely isn’t an option.
So you have to find your own approach. Use it without letting it use you. Post without doom-scrolling. Build an audience without becoming addicted to the metrics.
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