Ep 144: I Stopped Using AI for Weekly Planning After 6 Months

Written By Dustin Pead

Here's Why (And What I Do Instead)

SUMMARY

For six months, I let AI plan my week. It was efficient, it was optimized, and it was completely wrong for me. Let me tell you why.

About six months ago, I started having AI plan my weeks for me. In fact, I did a whole episode on it (Episode 125) with one of my friends and clients, PJ Towle from Forty-Three Creative. It was a long and clunky episode, but through the process of that episode, I realized that I was kind of forcing this.

Even when I was using AI (Claude, which I still use for a ton of things and love), it was super efficient. It did expedite the process of me planning out my weeks. If you're familiar with Michael Hyatt's Full Focus Planner, he has what's called the weekly preview. Me and all my clients do a weekly preview.

The appeal was being able to mind dump anything without organizing my thoughts first—which I still do that, I still use that tactic all the time. I would dump every thought that I had, every task that I had into AI, into Claude. And AI would take all that chaos and create structure out of it through the project that I built.

For months, it felt like a superpower. But eventually I noticed that I wasn't actually more focused. I was more efficient, but I was not more organized. I was still having to think of the context in which the things I had to do was so disconnected from what I actually had to do that week because AI did it for me and I didn't think through it myself.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • ⚡️ Speed isn't the same as clarity. AI made planning faster, but when you skip the thinking process, you skip the clarity process. Sometimes the inefficient process has value because it forces you to engage with your priorities mentally.

  • ⚡️ The physical act of writing creates mental commitment. The act of writing isn't just about the output—it IS the planning. The physical motion of writing connects to a part of our brains that AI cannot connect to, giving us deeper connection to what we're working on.

  • ⚡️ Use AI for distribution, not decision-making. The 80-20 rule applies: AI excels at routine tasks (formatting, distribution, communication), but strategic work (priority setting, thinking, processing) should remain human.

NOTABLE QUOTES

  • 💬 "I think the human race made a big mistake at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We leaped for the mechanical things. People need to use their hands to feel creative." - Andre Norton

  • 💬 "The physical act is what creates the mental commitment."

  • 💬 "We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn." - Peter Drucker

EPISODE RESOURCES

TRANSCRIPT

For six months, I let AI plan my week. It was efficient, it was optimized, and it was completely wrong for me. Let's get into it.

Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity. This is a podcast for all creatives, designers, photographers, writers, and all creative entrepreneurs who might be seeking maybe some practical or actionable strategies to grow their creative business through some efficiency.

I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process consultant, and I help creatives and agencies know themselves, their process and their teams so that they can create with efficiency as they scale together.

Now, I want to start today's episode with this quote from Andre Norton. He says, "I think the human race made a big mistake at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We leaped for the mechanical things. People need to use their hands to feel creative."

And that really hit me because about, I don't know, six months or so ago, I started having AI plan my weeks for me. In fact, I did a whole episode on it. Episode 125, I had one of my friends and clients, PJ Towle from Forty-Three Creative on. It was a long and clunky episode. If you made your way through it, thank you. But through the process of that episode, I realized that I was kind of forcing this.

And even when I was using the AI, which I was using Claude, which I still use Claude for a ton of things and I love it. Even when I was using it, it was super efficient. It did expedite the process of me planning out my weeks or if you're familiar with Michael Hyatt's Full Focus Planner, he has what's called the weekly preview. Me, all my clients, we all do a weekly preview. In fact, I'm recording this right now on a Sunday right before I do my weekly preview.

And what I used to do in the AI process, you can go back and watch Episode 125 if you want, it's super clunky. But let me just kind of take you through how I used to do it. And you'll probably pick up on a few things for me. The appeal I want to start with was being able to kind of mind dump anything without organizing my thoughts first, which I still do that. I still use that tactic all the time, right?

I would dump every thought that I had, every task that I had into the AI, into Claude, right? And AI would take all that chaos and create structure out of it through the project that I built, right? And for months, it felt like a superpower. But eventually I noticed that I wasn't actually more focused. I was more organized, maybe even then, maybe even not more organized. I was more efficient. Let me say that. I was more efficient, but I was not more organized.

I was still having to think of the context in which the things I had to do was so disconnected from what I actually had to do that week because AI did it for me and I didn't think through it myself. And that's the first thing I want to bring up today is when efficiency becomes the enemy.

You see, AI made planning faster, but speed isn't the same as clarity. So what I was doing is I was using AI to organize my weekly priorities for my brain dumps and take all my tasks and all my meetings and everything like that and give it to me straight. The promise was that it was going to save me time and it was going to get me organized faster, right?

But 87% of creators use AI daily, but creative agencies are cautious about over-automation and I think to a certain extent, rightly so. Because what actually happened in the end was that it was harder for me to save time during the week. It was harder for me to stay focused from week to week and day to day on actually what I was, because I was so disconnected from what I was actually supposed to be focused on.

You see, when you skip that thinking process, then you skip a little bit of that clarity process. We talk a lot about this in the Future You Framework, right? Sometimes the inefficient process is value because in the Future You concepts and the Future You note-taking methodology, we're writing notes down that we are with thoughts that we have right now that we know future us is going to want to know, right? And there's no AI involved in that. It's strictly a note-taking methodology.

And so when we kind of get our hands down to it, yes, it may slow down efficiency a little bit, but it will vastly increase clarity. Now this was just for me, right?

So what I went to, I kind of did a little bit of a hybrid approach. I still don't really use AI a ton other than I let it create a calendar for me for my team to have of what's going on and for my family to have to know what's going on. And I spit that out at the end of my weekly preview every week. Go, "Here's my calendar, create this in an easy-to-read format for my family and my team so that they can kind of quick reference it without having to have all the access to all my calendars." And not really because I'm trying to be private about it, but it's just overwhelming. There's a lot on it, right?

And so before the AI thing, I was using the Full Focus Planner. Now to back up a little bit more from there, I started using the Full Focus Planner from Michael Hyatt in 2023 when I launched Chief Creative Partners or Chief Creative Consultants. And it radically changed the way that I focused on what I needed to do. I've always been a real focused individual, very organized individual. That's what this podcast is about, right?

But it radically changed my focus and I was able to really focus and get narrowed in and get to just, "I'm not giving up until I see this thing come through." And then I ended up buying a reMarkable tablet, which if you don't know what a reMarkable tablet is, it's strictly for taking notes, right? It doesn't send email or it doesn't check your email, it doesn't have apps on it, you can't do text, you can't surf the web or anything like that. You can email yourself or other people some notes, but it's only one-way emailing. It's not like you can do all your work on it. It's strictly for what we would call analog note-taking.

And I bought the reMarkable because at the time I heard Michael Hyatt of Full Focus was working on a template for the reMarkable for his Full Focus Planner to be digitized on the reMarkable. And I thought, "Well, this is great, because I do love the Full Focus Planner, but I was carrying around that and I was carrying around all these other things. It just got to be so much to carry around." I was like, "I would love to carry one notebook that had many notebooks in it," which is why I use the reMarkable.

And what I love about the reMarkable, this is a key point of this entire episode that I want you to understand, is that the act of writing, that IS the planning. Right? It's not just about the output. See, I thought planning my week and the weekly preview was about the output. I thought it was about what do I need to create here so that I can clearly reference it throughout the week. But it was actually the process. The act of writing is what gave me the focus. It's what gave me the clarity. I needed to write it down myself. Right? I needed to put pen to paper or stylus to reMarkable as the first step in staying focused.

And this matters because the physical act is what creates the mental commitment. I want to say that again. The physical act is what creates the mental commitment.

All right, here's what AI can't replicate. It can't replicate your thinking. It can't replicate your processing. Or maybe I should say it shouldn't replicate your thinking. And it shouldn't replicate your processing and it shouldn't replicate prioritizing what happens while you write those things down, right?

It's the slower method ultimately made me faster in execution because I was more connected to the focus that I needed to have.

Hey, I wanted to interrupt this episode to tell you, if you're running a creative agency and feeling like you're constantly firefighting instead of leading, you're not alone. At Chief Creative Consultants, we don't just tell you what to fix. We roll up our sleeves and implement systems with you. We're talking project management that actually works, client workflows that create margin instead of stress, and team processes that scale without the chaos. We partner with creative agencies as your fractional COO team, building sustainable systems together. So if you're ready to transform from reactive to proactive, visit dustinpead.com today and book a call. Okay, let's get back to the show.

Don't overlook that value of mental clarity that doing things with our hands can bring. I love in psychology, I've been a big proponent of counseling for many, many years. And I've had a few counselors in my life, all of them have been amazing. I still go to counseling. And the one thing any good counselor will always tell you is you need to write this down. You need to keep a journal or a diary or whatever of your thoughts and your feelings.

And the reason is because it's been psychologically proven that there is power and clarity that comes when we can write things out with our hands. That physical motion of writing something out connects to a part of our brains that AI cannot connect to. And it gives us more connection to the thing in which we're writing and to be able to observe that thing.

We're writing, it's what they teach you in counseling is to write it out and to be able to observe it for what it is. That I am not the thing, I'm just feeling this thing and I need to observe it for what it is. So don't overlook the value and the clarity that comes from doing things with our hands.

All right, I don't want this to be like an AI-bashing episode at all because I love AI, I use it every single day, but I want to be clear here: AI is a tool for distribution, not a tool for decision-making. So I still use AI for weekly calendar emails, like I said, to my family and my assistant, my team, right? The difference is in that scenario is I'm using AI for communication, not necessarily for clarity, right?

Again, everything always comes back to this 80-20 rule. I don't know why everything in life is 80-20, 80-20. It's rarely 50-50, it's usually 80-20, right? The human for strategic and AI for routine. If it's strategic, we need it. If it's routine or automated or formatting or distribution, we can let AI do it. And that can be 80% AI and 20% human, there are times for that. And there are other times when it's flipped and it's 80% human and 20% AI.

So what now? I would love to just encourage you. Again, this is just for me, I just want to kind of share what I'm thinking about, what I'm going through right now as I'm moving away from this completely AI-generated weekly preview and back into a little bit more of an analog mode.

One thing I want you to try this week or a few things I want you to try right now, if you're up for it, is an analog test, right? Try one week of manual planning, whether it's on paper or iPad or reMarkable or any other kind of tablet. Just try one week of manual planning, legal pad, index cards, post-it notes, it doesn't matter. Just one week of planning out your week using something analog and notice what clarity it may or may not bring from the physical act of being able to write things down.

I'm willing to bet it's going to give you a ton of clarity. Then you can compare your week of AI-planned weeks and your week of focus from the analog way as well.

Second thing I want you to do is I want you to identify what your think work is versus your distribution work, right? Think work is priority setting, strategic decisions, what matters most—keep those things human. But the distribution work is formatting, sending, organizing, automating. AI can help for all those things. Use AI for distribution, not necessarily always for thinking.

The third thing I want you to consider is to create your own hybrid workflow. I'm not saying you need to totally throw out AI when it comes to your planning. And I'm not saying you need to only use AI when it comes to your planning. I'm saying there's some type of a hybrid and that's what I'm discovering right now. Right, AI for communication, but then the strategic connecting to the focus and connecting to the goals, giving me that clarity is going to come from my manual work. So figure out what the hybrid workflow looks like for you.

Peter Drucker said this, he said, "We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process. It's lifelong process of keeping abreast of change, right? And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn."

And that's what I'm called to. I love teaching people how to learn new things. I love teaching people things that I'm learning. And so if you're learning something along the same line as me and finding that balance between AI and humans, specifically when it comes to organizing your thoughts and having clarity and having focus on what you need to be focused on, I would love to hear from you.

Hit me up, email address: dp@dustinpead.com. You can find me on Instagram at dustinpead. That's D-U-S-T-I-N P-E-A-D. Again, you can go back and listen to Episode 125 if you want to. And you can hear me fumble my way through the process. There's definitely some good nuggets in there. You can find the Future You Framework or other things that I mentioned at dustinpead.com/free.

I want to leave you with this, though. AI is powerful, but it can't do your thinking for you. The clarity that you need, it doesn't come from faster organization. It comes from the act of processing, prioritizing, and committing to the act yourself. Use AI for what it's good at, right? Distribution, formatting, routine communication, automations. But keep the thinking work, the human work, for yourself and for your team and for the humans around you.

Don't overlook the value of that mental clarity that doing things with your hands can bring.

Next week we're going to be back with another episode of Creativity Made Easy. We're going to talk about from maker to manager. This is something that I just finished taking a handful of my clients through and I can't wait to talk to you about what do you do when your creative control becomes the bottleneck. And we're going to talk about the identity shift that creative founders have to face when it's time to lead people and not just make great work. Cannot wait to talk to you then. Have an amazing week. I'll talk to you next time on the Creativity Made Easy podcast.

Dustin Pead
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