Maximum motion, minimum movement — the busiest office in the building still shipped nothing.
1. Scaling Bad Habits
There’s a version of productivity that feels incredible and yet produces nothing.
You know it when you see it.
The new folder structure. The automation that chains three tools together. The prompt library you’ll “definitely use next week.” Every day is full. Every task is demanding. And at the end of the month, nothing has reached the outside world.
This is the productivity porn trap dressed up as deep work. It scratches the same itch — it’s measurable, it’s complex, it requires focus. But it has no audience. Nobody benefits from your fifth workflow automation until you’ve actually run the workflow it supports.
Don’t fall for the trap.
2. Ship First, Sharpen Saturday
AI makes this worse. Harness-based AI tools like Codex and Claude Code are so capable at infrastructure work that you can burn entire days building custom skills, automation chains, and prompt libraries for processes that don’t exist outside your head yet.
The fix isn’t to stop sharpening the saw. It’s to put it on a cadence.
Ship first. Then sharpen at the end of a project, or once a week on a Saturday. Not every day, and never in the middle of delivering something.
3. Agentic AI Without the Jargon
There are four agentic design patterns — reflection, tool use, planning, multi-agent. Most business AI workflows already use at least two of them without anyone realising.
You don’t need to understand what a “reflection loop” is to manage an agentic workflow. You need three questions:
- What does the agent receive?
- What does it produce?
- What happens when it fails?
I cover how to go from a theoretical agentic design pattern to actual workflows in The AI Agents, Automations and Agentic Workflows Guide.
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