"Five minutes each week that might change your life."

A lot of people think that AI is like a magic wand that can suddenly make them insanely productive. But it's not.

In fact, I think AI is quickly becoming the most sophisticated form of procrastination.

Tell me if this sounds familiar to you:

You sit down to write a memo. But instead of writing it, you spend 45 minutes crafting the perfect prompt, tweaking it, regenerating it, tweaking it again.

And then you end up with 2,000 words that are fine… but have some issues.

So then you spend the next two hours revising and editing all the errors out of the AI output.

And the next thing you know, you've ended up with a so-so memo that kind of sounds like you.

But now you've spent as much time generating and fixing it as if you had just written it from scratch yourself.

But you felt like you were saving time because the AI was doing things.

I recently went through this with Claude Code.

I was staying up until midnight and working through the weekends building agents that I thought were going to automate half of my business.

What I ended up with was a bunch of clunky software that I was spending more time fixing than if I had just done the work myself to begin with.

So AI is genuinely powerful.

But only if you've already done the hard cognitive work of knowing what you're making.

If you haven't done that work, then AI doesn't help you skip it.

It just helps you hide from it more comfortably.

See you Monday,
Mark

P.S. AI is only as useful as the thinking you put in first. But once you've done that thinking, the next question is which tools are actually worth your time. The Rundown AI can answer that for you. It's a free daily newsletter that breaks down what matters in AI, and how to use it, in just five minutes. After you sign up, a 60-second quiz gives you personalized recommendations for the thing you're actually trying to build. Two million people read it, including me. Sign up for free.​