AI has absolutely skyrocketed my productivity
I had a strange moment of clarity working in the office yesterday - AI has absolutely skyrocketed my productivity, it's actually a bit scary.
I kid you not I had all of this running concurrently:
- My enterprise chatGPT helping with an important email first draft
- My enterprise Claude doing some deep research on customer sentiment related to a project I'm working on
- My personal chatGPT working on Chapters 9 & 10 of my AI-written PhD thesis - set to 6.1 Sol Max
- ...and I was having a conversation/argument with Gemini on enterprise agentic capabilities
I was like this sort of master orchestrator - effectively context switching between multiple different chat prompts whenever an AI had finished its assigned task. Reviewing the output, re-prompting, packaging up and using etc etc.
My next moment of clarity was that I noticed the limiting factor to my speed was literally the rate at which I could type. I'm not making this up. For the whole day I was limited by how fast I could type back re-prompts, new prompts etc.
I'm a fast typer as it is (thank god) but wow the limiting factor to how fast I can go is now my typing speed. Over the course of yesterday I probably typed on the order of 30-40,000 words.
By the end of the day, I'd achieved probably about 5x more than I've ever achieved in a single day before. I definitely had my weetabix for breakfast.
I think this is going to become the new normal...
AI has made me (much) faster, but I haven't got any less busy. I think that's because I'm effectively filling the void with... more work. Is that my own choice? Partially - although parts of what I fill it with I wouldn't consider work, they're fun (like writing this blog & doing my experiments). But it's certainly a common theme/paradox voiced across many people I speak to.
I also think being able to prompt well and interpret results such that you can amend them & re-prompt is a new & critical skill. It's not easy. You need to be able to critically evaluate, spot hallucinations & guide the AI to where you need it to get to.
So maybe I'll dig the ol' Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing back out of the loft. Forget learning more about AI, we've got to get faster fingers!!