In a scene familiar to anyone who’s been to New York, the sign in front of a display of canvases said “Spray Art: $60”.

Thousands of people walked by. A few lingered. One buyer haggled her way to a 50 percent discount. Another bought four pieces because he said he needed something for his walls. Over the course of seven hours, three people made purchases for a total of $420.

Sound about right?

Maybe so, except the items on display were original works by the British street artist Banksy — and one of the purchasers later sold her two pieces at auction for $200,000.

Why the disconnect? Passersby experienced Banksy’s art outside its natural habitat. Put the same piece up for auction sale at Sotheby’s, and a different perception rules the day. It must be awesome, and extremely valuable.

We appreciate it, at least in part, because we think we’re supposed to appreciate it.

See the same art displayed on a folding table in Central Park? It blends into the fake Rolex, fake Coach background.

The same is true situations. Like the time virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell played incognito in a D.C. metro station and was basically ignored. Days later the Avery Fisher Prize winner was in the middle of a sold out, headlining tour of Europe.

Granted, it’s natural to add extra weight to advice we receive from people we admire and respect, and to subtract weight and even disregard advice we hear from people we don’t respect, or simply don’t know.

That’s understandable.

At the same time, a real problem.

Say you run into Mark Cuban. You tell him you’re an entrepreneur with an idea and you ask for product/market fit advice. He’s a nice guy, and he gives you some tips. Within minutes you’ve mentally scrapped your idea, and why shouldn’t you? He’s Mark Cuban! He’s forgotten more about startups, and building businesses, than most of us will ever know.

But maybe in this case he isn’t right. He doesn’t know you. He probably doesn’t know your market or your competition. Yes, he’s Mark Cuban, but still, his opinions — like anyone’s — are based on his particular background, experiences, and perspectives.

What’s right for him may be far from right for you.

And keep in mind he’s not always right. No one is. As Charlie Munger said, “If you exclude the great buys, we have a pretty mediocre record. Warren and I got five stocks right in fifty years, and the rest were kind of middling.”

Sure, most of the people you run into won’t be as successful as Cuban. Are you going to automatically hang on their every word? Unlikely.

But you should always listen. Just as you should never reflexively accept a message because you admire the messenger, nor should you reflexively discount a message because you discount the messenger.

Opinions, advice, information: it’s all data, and the more data we have, the better.

Strip away the framing you might apply to the source. Strip away the setting or environment. Consider the advice, the information, and the opinion based solely on its merits.

The quality of the source matters, but ultimately the quality of the information –and its relevance to your unique situation — matters a lot more.

The more you listen, and the more people you are willing to listen to, the more data you will have at your disposal to make smart decisions.

You don’t have to agree, but you should always try to listen.

Because a Banksy is still a Banksy: no matter who displays it, and where it might be displayed.

It has started to get really wintry here in London over the last few days. The mornings are frosty, the wind is biting, and it’s already dark by the time I pick my kids up from school. The darkness in particular has got me thinking about vitamin D, a.k.a. the sunshine vitamin.

At a checkup a few years ago, a doctor told me I was deficient in vitamin D. But he wouldn’t write me a prescription for supplements, simply because, as he put it, everyone in the UK is deficient. Putting the entire population on vitamin D supplements would be too expensive for the country’s national health service, he told me. Related Story Here’s why we don’t have a cold vaccine. Yet.

But supplementation—whether covered by a health-care provider or not—can be important. As those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere spend fewer of our waking hours in sunlight, let’s consider the importance of vitamin D.

Yes, it is important for bone health. But recent research is also uncovering surprising new insights into how the vitamin might influence other parts of our bodies, including our immune systems and heart health.

Vitamin D was discovered just over 100 years ago, when health professionals were looking for ways to treat what was then called “the English disease.” Today, we know that rickets, a weakening of bones in children, is caused by vitamin D deficiency. And vitamin D is best known for its importance in bone health.

That’s because it helps our bodies absorb calcium. Our bones are continually being broken down and rebuilt, and they need calcium for that rebuilding process. Without enough calcium, bones can become weak and brittle. (Depressingly, rickets is still a global health issue, which is why there is global consensus that infants should receive a vitamin D supplement at least until they are one year old.)

In the decades since then, scientists have learned that vitamin D has effects beyond our bones. There’s some evidence to suggest, for example, that being deficient in vitamin D puts people at risk of high blood pressure. Daily or weekly supplements can help those individuals lower their blood pressure. Related Story How healthy am I? My immunome knows the score.

A vitamin D deficiency has also been linked to a greater risk of “cardiovascular events” like heart attacks, although it’s not clear whether supplements can reduce this risk; the evidence is pretty mixed.

Vitamin D appears to influence our immune health, too. Studies have found a link between low vitamin D levels and incidence of the common cold, for example. And other research has shown that vitamin D supplements can influence the way our genes make proteins that play important roles in the way our immune systems work.

We don’t yet know exactly how these relationships work, however. And, unfortunately, a recent study that assessed the results of 37 clinical trials found that overall, vitamin D supplements aren’t likely to stop you from getting an “acute respiratory infection.”

Other studies have linked vitamin D levels to mental health, pregnancy outcomes, and even how long people survive after a cancer diagnosis. It’s tantalizing to imagine that a cheap supplement could benefit so many aspects of our health.

But, as you might have gathered if you’ve got this far, we’re not quite there yet. The evidence on the effects of vitamin D supplementation for those various conditions is mixed at best. Related Story Microplastics are everywhere. What does that mean for our immune systems?

In fairness to researchers, it can be difficult to run a randomized clinical trial for vitamin D supplements. That’s because most of us get the bulk of our vitamin D from sunlight. Our skin converts UVB rays into a form of the vitamin that our bodies can use. We get it in our diets, too, but not much. (The main sources are oily fish, egg yolks, mushrooms, and some fortified cereals and milk alternatives.)

The standard way to measure a person’s vitamin D status is to look at blood levels of 25-hydroxycholecalciferol (25(OH)D), which is formed when the liver metabolizes vitamin D. But not everyone can agree on what the “ideal” level is.

Even if everyone did agree on a figure, it isn’t obvious how much vitamin D a person would need to consume to reach this target, or how much sunlight exposure it would take. One complicating factor is that people respond to UV rays in different ways—a lot of that can depend on how much melanin is in your skin. Similarly, if you’re sitting down to a meal of oily fish and mushrooms and washing it down with a glass of fortified milk, it’s hard to know how much more you might need.

There is more consensus on the definition of vitamin D deficiency, though. (It’s a blood level below 30 nanomoles per liter, in case you were wondering.) And until we know more about what vitamin D is doing in our bodies, our focus should be on avoiding that.

For me, that means topping up with a supplement. The UK government advises everyone in the country to take a 10-microgram vitamin D supplement over autumn and winter. That advice doesn’t factor in my age, my blood levels, or the amount of melanin in my skin. But it’s all I’ve got for now.

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I’ve been able to spot AI generated content for over a decade. And now that ChatGPT has been so widespread for so long, almost everyone else can spot it too.

Especially if it contains a few chatbot-generated “human touch” tricks.

Look. I helped create this machine-mad-libs-monstrosity over 15 years ago when I co-invented a platform that wrote everything from millions of funny Yahoo Fantasy Football recaps every week to thousands of super-serious Associated Press financial articles every quarter.

I’ve been doing it so long, I can’t unsee it.

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Now, you probably already know at least a few of these tricks, which I’m going to lay out from most obvious to least obvious. My goal here is to let you know that these are things that everyone can spot.

Oh, and if you’re like me and you happen to still be brain-thinking and hand-writing everything like a fool, here’s some stuff you’re gonna want to start avoiding. First, My Take On Using ChatGPT

Go for it.

Yeah, I hate AI slop as much as you do, if not more. But I’m not going to judge someone for wanting to make their communications a little easier to generate.

I’ve already laid out a list of situations when using generative AI to write for you is problematic (eg. don’t use it to professionally describe an experience you didn’t have), but those scenarios are all outliers. And I’ve already advised that you should not be AI’s editor, but you should instead use it to spot check your original thoughts.

I’m also not someone who will correct someone’s grammar or phrasing or even spelling. First of all, my own isn’t perfect, sometimes on purpose.

More importantly, the writer might not be communicating in their first language, they may have a learning disability, or they might find communication stressful in general. Hell, they may not care enough about hurting my feelings in a comment section to take the time to re-read what they wrote before they hit send.

Like I said, no judgment. I’m just here to keep you from getting called out. ChatGPT Loves Quotes and Bullets and Em Dashes

Let’s start with the most obvious mistakes. This is the only one where I’m going to blame the writer and not the chatbot.

Folks, you’re getting lazy with the copy and paste out of your chatbot and into whatever you’re working on. I’m starting to see a lot of this in emails and in comments on my posts.

First up, sentences or even entire paragraphs that aren’t being quoted from elsewhere but are nonetheless embedded in quotation marks.

“This is not how you communicate an original thought.”

I know Claude does this a lot. It uses quotes for no good reason when making suggestions.

It also loves to shove items into an outline that don’t belong in an outline. Now, here’s where I start to get more upset at the chatbots. I love outlines. I have entire documents that are just 12-page outlines:

Bulleted items are always a useful crutch for communicating multiple ideas quickly
But not every idea needs to be broken out into a bulleted list 
And when you do it for no good reason, it’s obvious to the reader

And then the final obvious trick really gets my rage up—I love the em dash.

I think in meta, and I’m constantly using commas, em dashes, and short paragraphs to try to compress my active brain into something the reader can follow along with. Em dashes are for addressing adjacent thoughts—not continuous thoughts, that’s where you use a comma.

Note to my editor: That last sentence is written that way on purpose. It might even be grammatically correct. I don’t even know anymore. It’s Not Just This, It’s That

Before mobile maps, my Dad used to give me driving directions and always slip in advice like, “If you get to the 7-Eleven, you’ve gone too far.”

And I was always like, “Yo Dad, can you just give me the right directions?”

ChatGPT and the other chatbots love to tell you what things are not, for no other reason than to, ironically, sound less like ChatGPT.

“It’s not just a football game, it’s a battle to determine which team has spent their money the most efficiently.”

“She doesn’t just paint pictures, she infuses the canvas with love.”

“You’re not reading this post, you’re being educated and entertained.”

Whatever. So quick check. If the left side is unnecessary, or the right side is silly, or both, that’s a pretty solid giveaway.

But, like, three or four times over the last two weeks, I’ve felt compelled to change something I’ve written, not because it was unnecessary or silly, I do plenty of that, but because what I needed to say came off sounding like “not this but that.”

Shoot. Here’s one from yesterday. “I’m not upset about this. This isn’t a rant. It’s just simple economics.”

It’s an easy trap to fall into, and it’s irritating that it’s bumping up against actual technique. But I’m not going to change what I write. To me that’s the worst part about generative AI—in my book—not that humans won’t be able to recognize ChatGPT, but that they will recognize it and they’ll accept it.

There. I think I just did it again. The Rule of Threes

This is where I really start to get furious. Man, I invented the rule of threes. And also exaggerated claims. Like I also invented the question mark.

The rule of threes is when you use three items to make a point in a sentence, or when you use three bulleted items in a list, or when you use three sentences in a paragraph.

Like that.

I love the rule of threes, especially comedically, because it gives me room for setup, then I can hit a timing beat, then I can subvert the reader’s expectations in a way that might make them laugh.

I’m not taking this out of my toolkit and you shouldn’t either. Like all of these tricks, it’s what the chatbots use to try to be more human. Just make sure your text isn’t overusing the rule. No Chaos

A good way to make sure your writing isn’t mistaken for ChatGPT is banana clown hot pot throw pillow.

Look, a lot of people will tell you that a good way to spot ChatGPT is if there is nothing personal in the text (Dad, directions, 7-Eleven) but I hope I’m not the first to tell you that all the chatbots are happy to make up some personal shit without you even asking for it.

But… all human writing has some butterfly effect to it. If there is no personality, no chaos in the writing—and if you read enough you can sense even the slightest hint of randomness that occurs when the synapses are firing in the actual human brain—then you’ve got yourself a chatbot author there, my friend.

In fact, the sterility of the writing is the trick that’s probably the least obvious, because generative AI is great, perfect even, for getting information across efficiently. It’s what it’s good at, and what it most often should be used for, no matter how many “human touches” it can muster up. It Doesn’t… Say Anything

This column was written to expose the five most obvious “human touch” tricks ChatGPT uses that most humans have mostly figured out. And I wanted to add my own experience and opinion—as someone who stands on both sides of the AI battle line—to give you a sense of why this is important, for both proponents and opponents of AI-assisted communication.

I hope I’ve done that. And I hope I’ve pushed the argument forward.

A bot-written post would have skipped that second part, for the most part. Because it has no experience and opinion. It has chunks and embeddings of what’s already been said.

There are plenty of times in this chaotic and busy world when using ChatGPT to get some communication slapped together makes perfect sense. But unless you’re comfortable with the receiver of said communication hearing “Hey. I put zero thought into this,” then you’re going to want to take some care to at least cover your tracks.

And it’s only going to get harder to do that. This was a difficult text for me to write, because I constantly had to check myself to make sure I wasn’t leaning too hard into my own habits—which can be just as lazy as firing up ChatGPT. And in that, I probably took away a little something from how this column hits you.

AI is an evolution of existing technology and processing, and as I’ve said many times, it’s a lot like spreadsheets. Being totally against generative AI to do communication is like being totally against spreadsheets to do math.

And while I’ll always commit to never use it for a column like this (or any of the other reasons I put forth in the column I linked at the top), I’m not going to judge, or ban, or boycott the technology. That would be shortsighted, and I’m still like 20 years away from telling all technology to eff off.

I just implore you, be human. Always use as much care as you can whenever you communicate. You’ll be better off for it, and so will the humans you’re communicating with.

Someone needs to say it. Someone has to speak up in defense of being mid. I am a mid runner. Most of us are, as that is the definition of being mid. I work out every day, but I have a full-time job, two kids, a dog, and a spouse. I volunteer, and I have dinner with my parents. I’m aging. I’m not going to knock anyone’s socks off with a crazy 100-miler anytime soon.

So what do you do if you don’t want to collapse into a bag of dust, but you have no time or incentive to work with a personal trainer? One option is to do what Atlantic CEO and incredibly fast runner Nicholas Thompson does, and use a custom GPT. Or, you can use Google's new AI health Coach in the Fitbit app, which is a part of the $10/month Fitbit Premium service.

Per Google's instructions, I used Coach (which is in public preview—a beta, of sorts) for three weeks. I'm a coach for Girls on the Run at my daughter's school, where she has become running friends with a kid competing in the Junior Olympics. I made it my mission to beat two children in the November 5K—so, a 7:30 mile pace. I was feeling pretty good about it, actually, until multiple people told me that I should stop talking to a computer and that I need to talk to people in real life. First Things First

You can access Fitbit's Public Preview if you meet a few requirements—you have to be an active Fitbit Premium subscriber, have an Android phone running Android 11 or higher, be located in the US, and use English for both the Fitbit app and your phone. (You can check the full list of requirements here.)

You can also switch back and forth between Public Preview and the regular app version, which you might want to do because several important features are currently missing from the app version with Coach. For example, menstrual health logging and blood glucose logging are unavailable, as are Cardio Fitness scores and advanced running metrics for Pixel Watch 3 and 4 users.

I used the service with the Pixel Watch 4 on a Pixel 9. (Fitbit wants to make the experience available for iOS users soon.) I had a so-so experience with the Running Coach that Fitbit launched last year, but I was more optimistic about the health coach because it promises to be both more comprehensive and more flexible.

Many runners who are much smarter and more experienced than I am (please see the mid comment above) have noted that running requires being able to answer a lot of binary yes/no questions correctly. Can I do my long run on Saturday if I'm busy on Sunday? Should I run with a sniffle, or wait until I’m well? A little more guidance is always helpful. I answered a 10-minute questionnaire about my goals and what equipment I had available (Fitbit hopes to eventually be able to incorporate multimodal actions, like taking a video of gym equipment, and use AI to offer suggestions) and waited for results.

My first impressions were not promising. Coach seemed to think that I was at a work conference, which I was not, and I told it so. I didn’t mind, though, as it was easy enough to adjust treadmill runs and hotel room workouts to outdoor runs and easy weight-lifting sessions in front of the TV.

You can track live metrics via the Fitbit app, or you can just use your watch to track your workout and sync the completed workout to your program later. I really like this feature. A lot of people like live-tracking workouts; I find it stressful and not terribly accurate, especially since I do not run on a track and find getting exact time/distance intervals to be difficult while running around my neighborhood.

Also, Fitbit’s running workouts appear to loosely follow Zone 2 training, where you improve your cardio fitness by staying within 60 to 70 percent of your max heart rate for most of your training. God bless these people, but I’m a foot shorter than everyone who loves zone training, and I can spike my heart rate out of Zone 2 just by listening to Rihanna.

Again, I consulted Running Evolution coach Beth Baker, who suggested using other metrics like whether I can talk while running, looking at my VO2 Max, and tracking my recovery time after runs to see if my workouts were hard or easy enough. “I mean, I’m not a doctor, but that’s just common sense,” she said.

In my first week of training, I made the mistake of telling Coach that I was sick; it offered helpful advice that if my symptoms were above my neck, then I could keep working out. (I parroted this to my daughter when she tried to get out of going to school.) It also adjusted my workouts down to annoyingly slow 1.5-mile or 2-mile workouts and wouldn’t stop, even when I told Coach I wasn’t sick anymore.

The Fitbit team noted over email that in “the iterative Public Preview, we expect the coach to experience some trouble with memory expiration and persistence, which might cause some unexpected workout adjustments, and we are actively working on improving this.” I had to go back into the Coach Notes—where there’s a record of everything that I asked Coach—to delete any statements where I said I was not feeling well and restore my old fitness settings.

After several weeks of tinkering with Coach, I finally started to see results. Coach saw a pattern in that I like to go to a yoga class on Sundays and rock climbing on Wednesdays, and it seamlessly incorporated other types of workouts into my weekly plan.

As far as my lifting goes, I get recommended kettlebell swings and glute bridges a lot, which is great, since those are invaluable exercises for runners. That seems like a promising indication that Coach is drawing upon reliable information sources for recommendations. Google has partnered with NBA star Stephen Curry and other outside experts to keep Coach’s advice grounded in reality.

I did notice something strange, though. Coach asked me what had happened during my day to affect my sleep, and it was hard not to tell Coach about the different problems that might be affecting my health and willingness to work out. While Google does not use Fitbit data for advertising, I would still be wary of disclosing too much sensitive health information to a corporate entity that is not a doctor and not bound by HIPAA regulations.

My spouse and IRL friends started edging away when I mentioned conversations with Coach. I told my husband that I was asking Coach what I should eat for breakfast, and he looked at me askance. “Doesn't everyone know that you're supposed to eat carbs before and protein after?” he said, tentatively. When I told another friend that I’d asked Coach to help me work on my macros, he said, “Maybe you need to … start talking to more people.”

I discussed my AI-generated training plans with Baker, who had another suggestion. “There’s a sneaky way of getting faster, and that’s by running with people who are faster than you,” she said. “There’s a whole, weird feeling of barely hanging on when you’re running with somebody. You’re uncomfortable for the first month or so, but it works every time.”

A lot of people like running because you don’t have to make plans or schedule dates or tee times with anyone. You can just put on shoes and shorts, sprint out the door, and squeeze in a workout whenever you have a spare hour. But a big part of what motivates us to stick with exercise—of any kind—is being with each other. I started this project because I wanted to be able to keep up with my daughter and her friend. The faster I get, the more appealing it is to run with other people than with a computer program.

As satisfying as it is to link up those daily exercises and check in with Coach every day, I started to get the sensation that the real people in my life—the ones that I actually did yoga, rock climbing, and running with—were beginning to stage an intervention.

Other people might feel differently, especially if you’re super busy and just trying to squeeze a workout in. But there’s still value in getting real-time feedback from real people. Unlike a large language model, a friend can tell when you’re sick, or if you’re running at an easy conversational pace, or when you’re sucking wind. A real person can also tell you, gently, when you’re getting kind of weird because you’re mostly talking to a chatbot and you need to stop.

AI is often sold as the ultimate productivity hack. Just imagine: the report you dreaded writing, drafted in seconds. The spreadsheet you didn’t want to touch, analyzed instantly. The code that once took you days, generated before lunch. For professionals who already struggle with overwhelm and the daily battle to manage their time, AI feels like salvation.

At Lifehack Method, where we help clients master time management and build systems for living fulfilling, balanced lives, we see this every day. People are desperate for tools that promise to take the weight off their shoulders. AI seems like the next logical step in that search. There’s no denying the dopamine hit of a blank page suddenly filling with words or lines of code. AI gives the illusion of acceleration, and in the moment, that feels like productivity. You’re doing something, and the grind of starting from scratch is gone.

But there’s a problem: faster doesn’t always mean more productive, and saved time doesn’t always translate into better outcomes. The real test of productivity isn’t how quickly you start, but whether you finish with work that’s accurate, useful, and aligned with your goals. That’s where cracks begin to show. AI can make you feel productive without actually being productive

A recent MIT study found that 95 percent of generative AI pilots in companies produced little to no measurable impact on profit and loss, despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment, because “most GenAI systems do not retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time.” In other words, the time people think they’re saving isn’t translating into organizational productivity.

A similar story shows up among software developers in a recent controlled study. After trying AI coding assistants, developers estimated they experienced 10–30 percent productivity gains. But in actuality, experienced coders took 19 percent longer when using AI tools on codebases they knew well. They not only lost time in practice—they walked away convinced they’d saved it. That’s a dangerous mismatch.

McKinsey’s research adds nuance: AI can indeed help with repetitive or “shallow work” tasks like painstakingly referencing large documents or analyzing invoices. But the productivity boost shrinks when tasks are complex or require deep, sustained attention. In other words, AI may help you clear the easy stuff off your plate, but it’s harder to get it to do the work that really moves the needle.

Why is that? The 90 percent mirage

Here’s the paradox of AI: it often gets you 90 percent of the way there, which feels like a huge time savings. But that last 10 percent—checking for errors, refining details, making sure it actually works—can eat up as much time as you saved. The most common mistake is assuming 90 percent is good enough and shipping it.

Jeff Escalante is an engineering director at Clerk, puts it bluntly: “Anything that you ask it to do, it will more than likely end up making one or more mistakes in what it puts out. Whether that’s fabricating statistics, or making up things that are not real . . . or writing code that just doesn’t work,” he says. “It’s something that is really cool and really interesting to use, but also is something that you have to know you can’t trust and can’t rely on. It needs to be reviewed by an expert before you take what it puts out and deliver it, [especially if] it’s sensitive or important.”

His advice? Treat AI like an intern: great for low-level work, occasionally useful when given training, but absolutely not someone you’d send into a client meeting unsupervised. And if you’re hoping eventually it’ll be foolproof, think again.

Jeff Smith, PhD is the founder of QuantumIOT and a serial technology entrepreneur. He says it’s important to think of the AI as an assistant because “it still makes mistakes and it will make mistakes for a long time. It’s probabilistic, not deterministic.”

If you’re a domain expert, you can spot and fix that last 10 percent. If you’re not, you risk handing off work that looks polished but is quietly broken. That means wasted time correcting mistakes—or worse, reputational damage. Many ambitious employees eager to “level up” with AI end up doing the opposite: walking into client pitches with beautiful decks full of hallucinated insights and an action plan that doesn’t match the Statement of Work.

So should we throw AI out the window? Not exactly. But definitely stop treating it like a self-driving car and more like a stick shift: powerful, but only if you actually know how to drive. How to use AI without losing control of your time

The most productive people don’t hand over the keys to AI. They stay in the driver’s seat. Here are a few rules emerging from early research and expert guidance:

Be the subject matter expert. If you don’t know what “excellent” looks like, AI can lead you astray. The time you save drafting could vanish in endless rounds of corrections.
Use AI as a draft partner, not a finisher. The sweet spot is breaking inertia—helping you brainstorm, sketch a structure, or generate a starting point. Iterative prompting is the key to better AI outputs, but the final say will always belong to you.
Automate the shallow, protect the deep. Let AI knock out routine, low-value work—summaries, boilerplate, admin, certain emails. Guard your deep-work hours for the kind of thinking that actually moves the needle. Real productivity isn’t about speed; it’s about aligning time with your top priorities.
Track actual outcomes. Don’t confuse the feeling of speed with actual results. Measure it. Did the AI really shave an hour off your workflow—or just generate more drafts to wade through?

And keep some perspective: we’re still in the early-adopter stage. As Smith puts it, “It’ll be a bit of a rocky road [but] there’s tons of great tools that are going to come your way.” Productivity is still human business

At its best, AI helps remove the drudge work that crowds our days, giving us more room to think, plan, and focus on what matters. At its worst, it tricks us into mistaking busywork for progress.

AI won’t manage your time for you. It won’t choose your priorities or tell you which meetings to skip. That discipline—of mastering your schedule, focusing on high-leverage work, and knowing where your energy should go—still rests on human shoulders. Once that foundation is in place, AI can be a powerful ally. Without it, AI risks amplifying the chaos.

AI is a fast, powerful, occasionally unreliable tool. But like any tool, it only works if you wield it with intention. You’re still the driver. AI can help you go faster, but only if you know where you want to go.

By Carey Bentley