Same canyon, same cliff — one of them just brought a rocket.
1. The Grey Zone
Half-working. Half-resting. Doing neither well.
That’s the grey zone. You’re scrolling your phone while “thinking about work.” You’re at your desk but watching YouTube. You’re technically available but not actually engaged.
The grey zone produces low output and poor recovery. It’s the worst of both worlds.
The fix is simple but requires discipline: either go full focus or fully switch off.
Quality work or quality rest. Never both at once.
This gets confusing with AI, by the way. AI can produce high-quality output while you’re not really paying attention. You fire off a prompt, it churns away, and you drift into half-checking your phone. But you still need to review what it produces. And if your brain is in grey-zone mode, you’ll miss things.
Even with AI, it’s all about focusing on one task at a time — or hypertasking if you know how.
If you catch yourself in the grey zone, consciously pick one mode. Work or rest. Commit fully. Then switch cleanly.
2. The AI Elite vs AI Laggards
New research from Writer surveyed 2,400 executives and employees on AI usage patterns. The gap is getting wider.
AI super-users save 9 hours per week. Laggards save 2 hours. That’s a 4.5x productivity gap between people with access to the same tools.
Super-users are 5x more productive and 3x more likely to be promoted.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: 92% of C-suite executives are actively cultivating this elite class. And 60% plan layoffs for non-adopters.
What separates a super-user from a laggard isn’t the tools they have access to. It’s the investment in learning how to use them properly. The prompting. The context engineering. The workflow integration.
If you’re still casually chatting with ChatGPT instead of building real AI workflows, you’re falling behind.
3. You Must Pay the Price Somewhere
Every productivity gain has a cost somewhere else in the system.
AI doesn’t eliminate work — it shifts it. You save time on drafting but spend more on prompting and reviewing. You automate research but now need to verify hallucinations. You generate code faster but debugging takes longer because you didn’t write it yourself.
The “free lunch” narrative is misleading.
This doesn’t mean AI isn’t worth it. The trades are usually favourable. But before you celebrate the gain, ask: what’s the new cost I’m now paying?
Time saved on output often becomes time spent on input and quality control.
The AI elite from Section 2? They’ve learned to pay those costs efficiently. They have systems for prompting, reviewing, and verifying. They don’t treat AI as magic — they treat it as a tool with known trade-offs.
Know the price. Pay it deliberately.
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