Full throttle Monday, slow Sunday.
1. Inbox Zero for DMs
Almost everyone I know has some version of an inbox zero system for their email.
Yet almost nobody has one for Slack, WhatsApp, Teams or LinkedIn DMs.
Which is strange, because that’s where we get most of our messages now.
Simple solution:
Treat your DMs exactly the way you treat email.
First, set fixed check-in times. Two or three a day is plenty for most people — late morning, after lunch, end of day. Outside those windows, notifications off.
Or if you have a hyperactive manager/colleagues/clients, make it an hourly check.
Second, when you do check in, triage every message with a simple rule:
- Takes under two minutes? Reply now.
- Needs actual work? Put it on your task list and tell the person when to expect it.
- Neither? Move on.
Clear the channel to zero, then close it.
But what about genuinely urgent things?
People who genuinely need you message you again. Or call.
2. Slow Productivity vs Hustle Culture
Have you noticed that hustle culture is quietly dying?
The trend for 2026 is “slow productivity”. This is meaningful work over maximised volume, “Bare Minimum Mondays”, and guarding your evenings like they’re billable hours.
So what happened to rise-and-grind?
Well… turns out we can’t have nice things.
Hustle culture started as something perfectly reasonable: the idea that there’s nothing wrong with hard work and not being lazy.
Then social media got hold of it, and “work hard at things that matter” became “hustle for Lambos and flying private” and 4am gym selfies.
And then the reaction to that came in the form of mental health awareness, quiet quitting and laying down culture.
That’s what social media does — it exaggerates, conflates and eventually turns toxic every nice thing it touches.
The interesting part is the timing, because slow productivity is arriving right as AI adoption pushes the exact opposite: do more, faster, with every minute AI hands back to you.
I believe that the backlash to hustle culture was long-coming with or without today’s AI fatigue.
So what can a productive AI-powered business person do?
Honestly, whatever you want. Just make sure you choose consciously.
If you want to hustle, there’s still nothing wrong with that — and the AI-era version is hypertasking: running multiple AI work streams in parallel and orchestrating them instead of grinding through tasks one at a time.
If you need to slow down, then slow down. There’s nothing wrong with an AI-free day spent working on things you enjoy at a slower pace.
For me that’s usually planning the week ahead and syncing up with my better half on what we’re doing.
Could we do that with fancy automations and AI pulling together our calendars, task lists and journals and working it all out for us?
Sure.
But why would we?
It’s not hard to do, it’s reflective, and the slower pace is actually kind of nice.
3. Stop Building a Public Paper Trail With Your AI Chats
Here’s something to check: thousands of shared ChatGPT and Claude conversations are showing up in plain Google search results.
A simple Google search turns up shared chats full of names, salaries, business plans and medical questions.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: this isn’t a hack.
Every time you click “Share” on a conversation, you create a public webpage. And public webpages get indexed by Google.
Talk about a major oversight on the part of Anthropic and OpenAI.
The fix is a five-minute audit:
- In Claude: Settings → Privacy → Shared chats. Review the list and delete anything that shouldn’t be there.
- In ChatGPT: Settings → Data Controls → Shared Links. Same drill.
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 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.
3. 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.
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