What I started doing without AI

I have never written an email with AI.

Or rather, I have never generated an email with AI.

Never.

I have never written a prompt asking it for an email.

I have never asked it for a prompt so I could later ask it for an email.

I have never asked it to improve an email prompt so I could later ask it for a better email.

No, never.

I have asked it to analyze an absurd amount of information. So much information that it would have taken me hours to read, days to summarize, process, digest, and understand. Doing in 3 minutes what, humanly speaking, would have been impossible for me.

I have also asked it for accounting advice, or for very basic calculations that only prove numbers have never been my strength. Nor history. Nor biology. Nor much of what many people call “general knowledge.” No, general knowledge is not my strength.

My conversations with AI range from prompt engineering to landing page design, and other things that are probably too private to reveal here; the kind of things you ask once and then delete because you don’t want them to become part of your “identity.” Or at least, part of the identity that AI builds from the things you ask it.

I have asked it for a lot. A lot. I have even had long interactions about purely human topics. I have. Several times.

What I have never done is ask it to write an email for me.

It is not an act of rebellion either. It’s not like I hold some political stance on email writing, or that I feel that by writing my own emails I am supporting some human-vs-artificial-intelligence cause.

No. That’s not it.

I write emails because I want to.

Because I feel like doing it, spontaneously, naturally. Because for me, writing my own emails is easier than asking AI to write them for me. Because if there is one thing I know how to do well, it is writing.

If there is one thing I enjoy most in the world, it is writing.

So why would I stop doing it?

Recently, I also stopped asking it for ideas. I stopped asking it to come up with ad copy, or video scripts. Because I was wasting too much time explaining why what it gave me was not authentic enough, creative enough, extraordinary enough.

For me, I mean. What feels extraordinary to me.

I also stopped asking it for content topic suggestions. Because it made me doubt my own interests, my own path. It made me doubt what felt true to me; what actually made sense to me.

I stopped delegating to AI the things I did best. And I started delegating the things I probably did much worse. Which, btw, is a lot.

Because what is the point of being productive if the time you gain is spent being even more productive?

I don’t know.

At least I, thanks to AI, can afford the luxury of pausing for 3 minutes in the middle of a client meeting to ask about the cat that just walked across their screen.

Or having time to meet with that user who left a great NPS score, simply to get to know them.

Or having the capacity to remember to wish a happy birthday to that champion we discovered shares our same sense of humor.

Or giving myself a few extra minutes to write emails.

I can do more of what I enjoy doing, and less of what I don’t enjoy doing.

And to me, that is evolution.

That is the real future.

One where we all know what we are good at, and that is what we do most, and that is what we do best, all the time.

The rest is a job for an AI like diio.