The Downside: Rising Task Counts

You’ve probably heard of something called AI. It seems everyone is talking about it. The question is: how will this affect our productivity, and what can we do to ensure we are ready for the likely changes this year? 

That’s what I’m answering this week. 

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Script | 402

Hello, and welcome to episode 402 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

Unless you’ve had the fortune to avoid seeing the news over the last few years, you may have come across something called AI. It seems to be everywhere today. 

Just yesterday, I got a big update to Evernote, and it was all about AI. Todoist, my task manager of choice, is also on board with AI with their dictation tool called “Ramble”. 

All great tools, all giving us the potential to collect and organise more. 

I use AI a lot myself. It helps me brainstorm ideas, create subtitles for my YouTube videos, and write the video descriptions, which I hated doing myself. 

And it is a phenomenal research tool. I can import my analytics from my blog, this podcast or my YouTube videos and ask it to tell me what is resonating with my community. Then that helps me to decide what the next best content will be. 

Yet, with all this, there are some downsides. One of which is that I noticed last year that many of my coaching clients were seeing an increase in the number of tasks they had in their task managers. 

It wasn’t until recently that I realised where many of these tasks were coming from. 

Many companies are rolling out AI-supported meeting summaries. AI is particularly good at this. It listens in to the meeting and, at the end, produces a summary of what was discussed and a list of action steps to be taken following the meeting. Some of the more sophisticated versions of this will break down by who is responsible for which task. 

Superb! Or is it?

What I’ve discovered is that AI is like that annoying new recruit who wants to impress by doing far more work than is necessary. It will turn a 10-bullet-pointed summary into a 20-page report, only for the recipient to return it to a bullet-pointed summary. 

It reminds me of that wonderful quote from Winston Churchill:

“This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.”

Yet, from a productivity perspective, what AI is doing is creating a lot of tasks. So much so that it has now been given its own term:

“AI-generated work bloat”, or a less friendly version: “AI-generated Work slop”.

So, what can we do to “defend” ourselves from this AI-generated work bloat? Well, there are a few things we can do that will allow us to take advantage of AI’s incredible abilities, yet still keep our workloads within limits without it slowly becoming overwhelmed with a lot of “work slop”.

That nicely brings me on to this week’s question, and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:

This week’s question comes from Robert. Robert asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI. Do you have any thoughts on how to get the most out of the new AI tools without them becoming overwhelming?

Hi Robert, thank you for your question. 

AI is certainly causing some issues in the time management and productivity space. Yet, it is also helping many people to get better organised. 

It is like all new technology. There is an initial period in which we try everything to determine where the new technology can help us most. I remember when email became a thing. There was a lot of nervousness about it initially. 

I was working in a law firm at the time, and the legal profession in the UK was reluctant to adopt email, even though its benefits over snail mail were obvious.

There were fears over privacy and client confidentiality. Eventually, we adopted it, and when we did, it rapidly became an instant messaging portal. Clients who sent an email began expecting an instant reply and quickly called us if they did not receive one within a few minutes. 

Fortunately, we had not at that stage entered the smartphone era and were able to explain to clients that when we were out of the office, we were unable to check our emails. 

However, email became the new way of communicating, and it soon created a cascade of stuff for us to process and organise, eating up more valuable time—time we didn’t have then, let alone today. 

I see the same thing happening with AI today. We are trying to adopt AI in so many ways. Some will stick, others will fall by the wayside in time. 

It doesn’t mean we should reject these new ways immediately. We are in the experimentation stage. It’s the fun stage. Testing new ideas, playing with tools and seeing what works for us and what doesn’t. 

However, some fundamentals remain in play. 

The first, and the one that will never go away, is that we only have twenty-four hours a day. We are human. We need to sleep, eat and bathe. All of which takes time out of those 24 hours. 

The second is that we can only focus on one thing at a time. We have the freedom to choose what we focus on, but we can only focus on one thing. 

So the question is, what will you focus on and when? 

We may not be able to stop all this AI-generated work, but we can choose when to work on it. This is where categorising your work helps you choose the right things to work on. 

For example, pretty much all of us will have to deal with communications, and it’s a great example. 

What happens if you don’t respond to your emails and messages for a day? Perhaps you’re travelling, or are caught up in meetings. That’s right, you create a backlog. 

The problem with emails and messages is that they never stop coming in, and unless you have a process and time to deal with them, you will miss deadlines and opportunities, and probably upset a lot of people. There are consequences for ignoring your messages. 

The solution is to set aside time each day to deal with them. How much time will depend on how much time you have and perhaps the volume of messages that require your attention. 

If all you have is twenty minutes between some meetings, take it. You’re not going to get much else done. So take advantage of those twenty minutes and clear some of those messages. You may not be able to clear them all, but one is always greater than zero. 

If the AI tools you use include suggestions for responses, take advantage of them for the shorter replies. 

But, be careful of the longer replies that require your knowledgeable input. AI can respond to some of these, but its responses often sound a little inhuman or, worse, give the wrong information. 

Always check the AI-generated responses. 

AI can also organise your calendar for you. Personally, I’ve not had much luck with this, as it doesn’t have enough variable information about me to be accurate. What I find AI does is look at what I like to do at certain times of the day and suggests I do that every day, and then fills in everything else around that. 

The last time I played with this AI, it recommended I get up at 6:00 am and do my workout. Pu ha ha! I am not going to get up at 6:00 to do any exercise. I hate exercising in the morning. 

To get my AI calendar to be reasonably useful, I had to spend far too much time telling it what I wanted, and I realised in the end the fastest way was for me to do it manually. 

Going back to the categorisation of your work, if you categorise it by the types of work you do, you can then match your calendar to your categories. 

For instance, if you were a doctor, seeing patients would largely take up most of your workday. But you will also need time to complete your prescriptions, update patient notes, respond to messages, deal with any health insurance claims, and so on. 

If you don’t want to be working late into the night, you will need to be disciplined with your calendar and protect time for the admin and communication tasks. 

If you find AI is recommending a lot of tasks for you, from, say, meeting summaries, I recommend you first audit the list, then allocate a category to the work suggested. 

Why audit the list? 

Well, as I mentioned, AI is like that new recruit trying impress the boss by suggesting more work than is necessary. It will create a lot of tasks. 

Your experience will tell you that a lot of those tasks will not need to be done. It’s these that need to be removed. 

I recently did an experiment. I asked Google’s Gemini to give me a list of tasks, spread over four weeks, to start a blog. 

This prompt resulted in 29 tasks! And the task of actually writing a first draft was not suggested until the start of week four. 

While many of the tasks listed, such as choosing a domain to host the blog and your niche, do need to be done, in the real world, most people who want to start a blog will already know this. It’s part of the thought processes that lead to deciding to start a blog.

When I audited the list, I reduced it from 29 tasks down to 12. I also found I needed to move some tasks around because they weren’t in a logical sequence. 

I’m sure over time, AI will get better at this, but always remember that your experience about doing your job will still be better at predicting what needs to be done than AI will. 

If you’re using the Time Sector System, you will find that your processing naturally fits with AI’s method of breaking tasks down into when you “should” be doing them. 

My blog experiment allowed me, once I’d audited the list, to quickly move the tasks into the correct sector. Tasks that should be done in the first week were moved to my This Week folder; those for the second week were moved to my Next Week folder; and everything else was moved to my This Month folder. 

One of the benefits of using the Time Sector System with AI-generated tasks is that as you are simultaneously deciding when you will do the tasks. You retain the all-important human agency, deciding what is done and when. 

But there’s one more benefit of the Time Sector System that will help you. That is your weekly limit. 

If you have taken the course, you may remember the lesson on capping your weekly tasks to your known limit. 

This is where you find the maximum number of tasks you can realistically do in any one week. This number does not include your routines or other recurring low-value tasks. Just the important ones. But we all have a limit. 

For me, that number is thirty. If my This Week folder is higher than 30 at the start of the week, I know I am going to struggle to complete my tasks that week. I either need to go back into my This Week folder and remove some of the less urgent tasks or cancel some of my meetings. 

This teaches you the vital skills of auditing and prioritisation. Skills you will need in the AI world. It is what will separate us from the AI tools being used. 

However, one good thing about AI-generated meeting summaries is that you have a record of the meeting that can be placed inside your meeting notes for projects and teams without any editing. 

The workflow I use with these is to use Todoist’s brilliant copy/paste feature. Here you can copy a list of tasks and paste them all into your inbox in a single click. 

However, if there are a lot of them, I create a temporary project folder for them first, and then, before I move the tasks to their rightful place, I audit the list. Remove tasks that are not relevant, or that I don’t need to do, and then move them to the right time sector. 

If you don’t use Todoist, you can do this with the original meeting summary. Audit, remove and then move the tasks you need to do into the correct time sector. 

(A quick heads-up, I have a YouTube video coming out next week that demonstrates this.)

So there you go, Robert. It’s still early days, and we are very much in the experimentation period with AI. We’re testing ways to see how it can help us with our work. This is consequently creating a lot of tasks. 

As long as you are auditing these tasks, following the principles of COD, and using the Time Sector System to manage your work, you will be fine. Things will remain manageable and exciting at the same time. 

We don’t know what the future holds, but your experience and skills will see you through, I can promise you. 

Thank you, Robert, for your question.

And if you haven’t taken the Time Sector System course yet, the all-new edition is now available and can be taken in less than two hours. Look at taking that course as your antidote to the AI-generated work bloat we are all beginning to experience. 

Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.