it's the opposite of death by a thousand paper cuts

The promise of AI is not one killer app. It's a hundred small, ergonomic, compounding improvements.

Have you been waiting for me to share all my favorite Custom GPTs? Today is the day! Scroll to the bottom for all the links.

I had my first baby 7 weeks ago. It’s honestly unbelievable to me that I could get a newsletter out less than two months postpartum. My world has completely changed. I have much bigger priorities than writing. My attention is fractured. My brainpower is, uh, not always brainpowering. And most practically, I very rarely have both of my hands available.

I dictated the first draft of this newsletter to Wispr Flow while one of my hands was trapped under my sleeping baby’s head. And then I beat up some of my core ideas by dictating to my Writing Partner GPT. Now I am sitting at my kitchen table with my baby sleeping in a carrier on my chest, writing the final draft as quickly as I can before he wakes up.

That workflow is extremely specific to me - not only how I like to work and write generally, but also the specific physical, temporal, and cognitive constraints I am navigating as a new mom. And no piece of it is, alone, transformative. But the fact that a relatively new technology allows me to do my favorite thing (write essays) at a time when it would otherwise be extremely difficult for me to do that is, for me personally, life-changing.

This is why I think it’s so hard to talk about the impact and potential of AI.

small, compounding improvements

My brother and I were discussing how AI is going to impact the field of architecture. Neither of us has a clear view of this. When AutoCAD was released in the 90s, architects went from hand drafters to digital modelers in just a few years. That was, essentially, a different job. Many industries have had similar shifts; I think they have trained us to expect AI to show up as one singular, revolutionary tool that changes everything at once, rather than as a thousand small improvements that compound over time. While AI has transformed how I work, I would not say my job feels entirely different. It simply feels more ergonomic. The tedious parts are less painful and go much faster. I make better decisions. I can provide more support to my team without feeling like I am drowning. And that extends beyond work into my personal life as well.

Yet I’m aware that if I showed you a single micro-improvement I’ve made, you wouldn’t be all that impressed. Reading about my workflow above probably did not amaze you in the way that it amazes me. Likewise, I watch other people demo their supposed life-changing AI use cases, and I’m kind of like, *really? All that work just to save yourself some copy pasting?*

But that’s the point. This technology allows you to identify and remove friction from your work and life in extremely niche and personal ways. And it’s the sum of all these micro-improvements, as well as the breadth of them, that make it so useful.

The below tweet really stuck with me. He framed this around Healthcare, but I think it perfectly encapsulates the real potential of AI. Each improvement is easy to dismiss. It is the aggregate that is transformative.

friction is personal

I’ve found it interesting the way my “AI wins” compound. I learn to add one improvement in one domain; that inspires me to try something similar in a completely different domain, and over time I find I’m using it for most things.

But I’m very particular about how I use it, and what I use it for. Again, I think of it like an ergonomic layer that removes friction in areas I may not have even realized there was friction before. (It never would have occurred to me that the lack of a machine to talk my ideas out with was creating friction that previously prevented me from writing and sharing those ideas publicly, or from getting more value out of my doctor appointments - more on that below).

This raises an uncomfortable question I keep coming back to: is smoothing over friction ... good? Plenty of people would argue that the way technology has removed friction from our lives over the past 15 years has made us more lonely, anxious, and depressed than before. We don’t have to leave the house to eat, socialize, learn, etc, and so we don’t. Kurt Vonnegut and his envelopes, and all that.

What I find interesting is not whether some particular friction is “good” or “bad.” I’ve realized that what counts as “good friction” or “bad friction” varies wildly by person, context, and values. What I consider useful and formative friction, you might consider pointless friction.

I still take meeting notes by hand and synthesize them with my brain. This is not something I would ever automate. But clearly I am a minority here. “Meeting note scribe” appears to be one of the most popular use cases for AI at Work. (And I will admit that I only find certain meetings worth this effort, and sure, it would be nice to have notes from all my meetings without me having to take them every time).

Meanwhile, when students are using ChatGPT to cheat, they are eliminating the short-term friction that is the discomfort of learning. For some, that is worth sacrificing the long-term satisfaction of mastery that comes from learning, especially when under the gun of an impending deadline. But … seems bad, overall.

So I think it is obvious that we do not want to eliminate all friction. The goal is to identify and remove the obstacles between you and the things you actually want to be doing. Ideally, the things that will actually make you happy over the long run. And that’s deeply personal.

here’s what it looks like for me

All that said, I think it’s cool and wild that the same technology that is helping me get a newsletter out is also helping me parent my baby more confidently, and helping my team at work ship faster.

People often ask me what these tools and use cases are. Again, I don’t think any one of them are transformative, nor do I think they are necessarily generalizable outside my own context. But stacked together, and within my life, they make a big difference. I’ll share some examples here in case they inspire you, in the form of the humble Custom GPT:

1. Baby dossier
   This GPT will ask you questions, then create a file that you can use as context for any AI conversation you want to have. I find it helpful because it is impossible to parse information about babies on the internet given how wildly different individual babies and their circumstances can be.
   With this context, I can ask AI questions like:

   • We have our one-month pediatrician appointment today. What questions should I make sure to ask?

   • Create an FAQ and extremely specific step-by-step guide for me on pumping that aligns with my goals and situation.

   • When will my baby likely outgrow newborn sizes across different popular baby clothing brands?

   • What would Dr. Harvey Karp say if I told him my baby seems to hate having his arms swaddled while sleeping?

2. Momentum creator / Action plan builder
   Tell the GPT a goal you have; it will break it down into a daily set of sequential tasks and export this into a spreadsheet so you can track it. I like to use this for tasks I’ve been procrastinating—like getting myself a new driver’s license before mine expired.

3. AI-powered job search tools

   My husband Colin made these and I think they are excellent. I particularly like the Resume Refiner, which helps you tailor your resume for a specific role and tune it for ATS screening and human readability. But the tools for finding and understanding specific companies, telling your story, and answering behavioral interview questions are all fantastic.

4. Discover your core values
   A GPT based on this exercise that helps surface your core values and translate them into practical success criteria for daily life.

5. Discover your superpower

   Uncover your unique superpower and learn how to harness it.

6. Work frustration eraser
   Turns your biggest sources of frustration at work into a 30-day development plan.

7. Wally the writing partner
   Drop in a rambly voice note of something on your mind, and the GPT will collaborate with you to turn it into a coherent thesis and eventually a memo or essay.

8. Break down my problem
   Describe a problem you’re working on. This GPT will help you break it down into its subcomponents and provide tips for leveraging AI at each step.

9. Self Review Evaluator
   Upcoming performance review? Upload your self-review to get actionable feedback on how to improve it.

10. Slacky
    Paste your hastily written Slack message here and Slacky will clean it up to make it easier for your audience to digest.

11. nobot
    Struggle to say no to things? Paste in the ask you want to decline and get help writing a polite but firm “no.”

12. Aristotle the Product Management Logic Coach
    Type “GO” to improve your logical reasoning skills.

13. Hilary’s Executive Editor
    Paste in an email you’re writing to an executive and this GPT will grade it and suggest improvements.

14. Presentation Clarity Coach
    Upload a PDF of a deck to get feedback and actionable suggestions for increasing clarity.

life by a thousand tiny improvements

We know what death by a thousand paper cuts feels like. It’s the accumulation of small annoyances and inefficiencies that, individually, seem too minor to address but together make you feel buried.

AI is the opposite of that. It’s life by a thousand tiny improvements. None of them dramatic on their own. But each one removes a little friction, saves a little time, gives you a little more clarity or confidence.

And when you stack enough of them together, you might finally have the capacity to do the things that matter most to you.