Too busy for AI? Start with the work already on your plate.

1:16Scott

Yeah, well, the first thing I would say is I understand that mentality. And the reason why is because it comes, I think, a lot from just tool fatigue over time, that oh, I need to learn a new tool. And that tool will certainly help me at the very end of my mastery of it. But it's the in-between that I don't know when that time can fit in. The wild thing is, is that that's been true for every tool that's kind of existed.

The interesting thing about this one is that everything is true about that same process, but it has been truncated down. Like it's a lot smaller than it was in the past. And main reason why is because if you have people that have figured it out, if you have tools, packages that just like install it, then just answer some questions and then boom, you're up and running. You just need to know that you just can talk to it and tell it stuff. I don't know, what about you?

2:10Colleen

I think what's true in my mind always is I'm always looking to kill two birds with one stone. And truly, I'm always looking at like, all right, if workload's heavy, how can I do work once and like use it in like three different ways? And so I think like this idea that like implementing AI has to be a holistic organization-wide endeavor to start with is probably just too much to bite off at first. I think if you're looking at a heavy workload, like pick one thing that you're gonna do AI first and do it all the way AI first. See how it feels, like what's the one piece of work in front of you that you're willing to do a little bit of trial and error on to put together something AI first.

So like, I was just talking to an executive director last week who was talking about using AI to build her board report. And she like went to go do it and man, she just fought the tool on the outputs. Like it was back and forth, back and forth, trying to get the right outcome, but then she got there. And she got this report down and she loves it. And she's pumped because the next month when she has to do the next board report, it's gonna take her 10 minutes.

All of that work that she typically does took her about the same amount of time, but now she's got this repeatable process and she's got about three hours back in her week in a month because she's just gonna say, "Hey, here's what the next board report is. Boom, let's go."

3:39Scott

Yeah. Oh, do you know what this is? I don't know why I just thought of this, but it's the analogy would be in the airport when you're walking down the airport and then they have those escalators that just move.

3:53Colleen

And moving sidewalks.

3:54Scott

Yeah, whatever, right? And so just imagine that like that you're walking and then you stop, but it keeps moving and somebody is walking right next to you and they're walking and you're standing and you're just like, "Oh, I needed that." That's what AI is.

4:10Colleen

That's a good one.

4:11Scott

What you could do is you could keep walking and get there twice as fast. Do you know what I'm saying? So you could do that or you could just stand for a minute and be like, "That was awesome." And that's really what AI is here is that you feel like there will be a time. Okay, think of it this way.

Whatever that thing is, let's say that you have something on your plate tomorrow that potentially could be automated. That doesn't mean that tomorrow's work goes away. What it means is you start thinking about tomorrow's work differently. And that's really the start of all AI. AI implementation is I'm going to go do this work right now, but I'm gonna do it differently.

And so what that means is I'm just gonna start working with it in Claude and then start to discover what's possible with using Claude to do this sort of work. And then as I do it, I'm thinking to myself, "Claude, can you do this for me? How can you help me do this task?" And you just continually ask that question to Claude or to yourself to continually try to think through. And then all of a sudden, you have done the work that you have set out to do.

You did it differently. And now the next time that work needs done, it doesn't need done by you. It will just get done. That's what AI is right there in a nutshell. ♪

5:52Colleen

Appeal. They're looking at their giving day. They're looking at every aspect of their work. And this client's got a new website that they are launching. They're switching software on a bunch of different things. And so they're looking at it and they're like, "I don't think we could do one more thing."

What do you say to

6:10Scott

That? You don't have to do one more thing. I think that's actually the answer. What you need to do is do the next thing that you are going to do, but do it differently. That's what I mean. So it's not about doing one more thing.

It's actually like, what's the work in front of you right now? Like legitimately, what is it right now? Well, I gotta figure out the strategy for the year-end appeal. Okay, great, sweet. How are you gonna do that strategy?

Well, I usually sit down and I whiteboard some stuff. Great, no problem. Instead of using a whiteboard, use Claude. Or use a whiteboard and then record yourself and talk it out loud as you do the whiteboard. And so you just do all that.

And then once you have that transcript, then you take a photo of it and then you bring it into Claude and then you say, "All right, Claude." And then you start talking to Claude. You just hit that little transcription or whatever tool in the bottom. And then it listens to you and you say, "All right, I just did the strategy. "I just did this whole thing."

And you explain everything that's on your mind, just mind dump it. Just keep talking until Claude says, "I'm not listening anymore." And then you hit send and then you sit back. Oh, and then at the end you just say, "Give me a really cool looking HTML." And then as an output, that's the format I want.

And then it will say, "Okay, cool." And then it will cook for a long time and it will come back and you will go, "What is happening in life?" That's your project, everyone. Tens of thousands of listeners. You tell me, I've been talking a lot.

What does it mean when we cook?

7:35Colleen

I just wanna highlight a couple of things you just said because it's very important. First, let's define cook because we're gonna say it all the time. What do we do when we say cook? The truth about AI is you spend some time waiting. In the same way, when you're cooking a meal, if you're any good in the kitchen, you probably have a few different dishes going at once because you're trying to time everything so it all comes up hot.

At the same time, delicious meals. We've got a main course, we've got some side dishes, all of those things. But there's a processing time that happens when you're cooking something. So it's gotta heat up, it's gotta simmer, it's gotta do the things. Same is true in AI is you send it down a path, especially on complex work.

And if you're using a model that's a little bit higher effort, it's gonna take a few minutes, sometimes 10, 15, sometimes even longer to process that work. And so get it in the oven and start your next thing. You've moved to something else. I did that this morning where I was building context at the start of a project. And I spent, I don't know, a little bit of time putting together the initial context for this thing.

And then I was like, great, here's what I'm gonna be doing while you're building context, this is my next input. And I moved to the next part of the work in that time. So that's cooking.

8:46Scott

That's it. It's juggling, it's cooking. Imagine if you're in like a really big kitchen or a bigger kitchen than probably one of the ones you have at home. And let's say that there's three stoves in three different cooking areas within this really big kitchen. One, if you have to cook three things, you don't choose three, I'm on the stove top, so you would say, I need to put the sauce pan on this one and then I'll put it on the other stove in the other stove. That would be silly.

You wouldn't choose three stoves, you would choose three of the burners on the same stove. Same thing with AI is that when you're cooking, you want to try to batch your mental load into one focused area. So if you have something that you're working on that's in the same ontological nature, it's the same essence, you know, I'm working on this one thing and I need to cook three things. So that way you're not jumping big time with context switching.

9:43Colleen

This is a huge, huge thing. And I think this is where those people who are like front of the pack, they're really working AI first. This is the conversation they're having is like, how, what do I do with the time when Claude is processing? What do I do so I'm not constantly context switching because that's not healthy for our brains? And I think the way we think about it is one is like, what's the level of effort that it's going to take you to do the tasks that you're coworking with Claude on?

Like how big, how complex, how much focus do you need to give that thing? And then two, are there complimentary tasks that you can be working on while you're waiting? So like step one for me today was gather context. Step two, was outline my strategy of like, what do I want to do before Claude tells me anything? Because I'm going to pull that in after it gets up to speed and that's going to shape our step three, which is like, let's turn this into a

12:06Colleen

People, I think is this perception that they don't have time because they don't. They feel like they are spread thin. Like I was talking to a nonprofit, executive director of a nonprofit last week. And she was like, look, it's beginning of September. So now all we are thinking about is year-end, Giving Tuesday, everything that is between here and there.

Let's talk in January. And again, we're months out right now, but that is so true because the added workload that comes in that cycle is significant. There's all these grant deadlines. There's all of these communications things that have to happen on top of their normal work. There's never been a better time to choose to use that time to implement an AI and free you up from some of that work while you're doing it.

Like that's the thing that I think that people don't realize is like you're building the system to do the work for you that is both repeatable, but also will buy the time back to give you the time to do this. You know what I mean?

13:05Scott

Great way to think about this. Early mid September, we got January 31st coming up. Come on, big year-end push. Let's get going. Cool, oh man, it's gonna take me months.

It's gonna take me months to get all this stuff together. Okay, I gotcha, you know? So I can't do it this season. I can't do it, but maybe in January, we'll start thinking about AI. Totally get that.

Or you can start in September, build the system that you need. And then in a couple of weeks go, oh, the system's done. Let's run year-end stuff. Oh wait, it's all done. The thing that I thought was gonna take months now just took a couple of weeks to build a thing and then an afternoon or a day to work out all this stuff.

And then you're sitting here at the end of September going, well, that was my whole last four months. I just did it. So what do I do now? Mission, go back to mission. Like this is what new life is.

Do you know what I mean? So you can start, actually, you know what? October, November, oh my gosh, year-end. What am I gonna do? Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's talk.

'Cause you should have started months ago. No, no, no, actually you're right on time. It's fine. Just apply AI to it and you'll be fine. We're talking November, you know what I mean? Something like that, you'll be fine.

It's pretty wild.

14:15Colleen

That's real. I mean, and I think that's a crazy thing for people to think about if they haven't experienced this like yet. Like right now, okay, this morning we had a meeting at 10:30. I got here about 8:30, 9:30. I started building a deck for that meeting, like a presentation deck, an hour before the meeting.

14:33Scott

Okay, here's another question for you. Hour before the meeting, presentation deck, number one, how many slides was it?

14:39Colleen

I like 18 or something like that.

14:41Scott

18 slides in under an hour. How stressed were you?

14:45Colleen

Zero, on that, zero.

14:48Scott

Why?

14:49Colleen

Because I knew I had all of the context I needed to get the right output. And I knew that Claude Design can get that done in under like 10 minutes and I'd have a good 30, 45 to dial it into where I wanted. I was right on all counts. It was a good deck and ready to go in ample time before the meeting.

15:10Scott

When the deck came out in 10 minutes, first round, V1, how good was it?

15:14Colleen

90%.

15:15Scott

Yeah, that's the wild thing about AI and context. If you just went into AI and said, fresh, brand new install, colleen@colleen.com. You know what I mean? Like that email, it's just so simple. Okay, cool. And then you say, make me a slide deck.

It will make you the worst slide deck you've ever seen. Like it will be so bad. But if you sit there and work with it in a single conversation and multiple conversations that has it goes back to a brain that understands context around everything, then you say, make a slide. It will be so incredibly good to the point where it's like, I'm rounding third. I should have been starting on this a day or two ago because this is a pretty big conversation that we're gonna have.

But you've been having that conversation for days and weeks and it's all but now stored in this one spot. And then you just say, hey, that one spot where I've been storing everything, I now need to like present all that. Can you just do that for me an hour before the meeting with full confidence and 90% off the rip, just it crushes it. What world are we living in?

16:21Colleen

That's it. That's it. And if I think we know those things, it changes how we think about the work in front of us. So like, I'm not hesitant to say yes to something like that. I'm not hesitant to take on new things in the same way as I was when I thought it was gonna take me four or five hours to get a deck like that prepared for a meeting. When you're looking down the year-end spiral of work, like if what you're thinking is we don't have time to do the thing that is most important to our mission, whether that's meeting a need that you need to raise money for, whether that's like moving towards an endeavor that you've been holding off or whether it's like even just giving your team the technology they need to do their jobs better, holding on that I think is the biggest mistake you can make because just choosing to move into it and creating space by letting AI replace some of your work, I think that that allows you to like start next year in a much better place.

17:38Colleen

Wanna say about that mindset and posture. And I think if everybody could just adopt this, it would change the way they're working with AI is you're the CEO of your AI employees. Like you are making the executive decisions and then you are sending it to do all of the micro decision-making because a good CEO understands the macro and is able to make principle-based decisions and say this is what I want, this is how I want it. And here are the things that you need to know. So here are your capabilities, here are your goals, here are your constraints, this is what I need, this is what I need, what are your questions?

18:13Scott

Yeah, and then go do it. I'm just saying like this is the cool thing that you can do here is that you can just try and get to the next iteration, go faster. And it doesn't have to feel fast. It can just feel like we're just time skipping a little bit. You're still gonna get that thing that was next, it just didn't take three weeks, it took an hour, like that's cool.

Let's not say that it's not cool, it is.

18:40Colleen

Yeah, it's way cool, it's way cool. Yeah, dude, I like what you're saying. I think the time skipping thing is also really helpful like from an expectation standpoint is, I think one of the frustrations from people as they're like getting used to AI-first work seems to be that they expected to save them time right away. And I think that that kind of mindset is fine for chat, I suppose if you're like, "Hey, I wanna know this." And it's like, "Here's the answer."

But for work, there's just more depth to that and there's more complexity usually. So you're building context for a while, you're shaping understanding, you're building strategy, and then you're moving into like the actual like building part of your work. And once you've got that dialed in, like refined and dialed in, that's where like it gets fast. It's like, oh, now this happens either in the background or it happens in a really like quick progression. And I'm able to buy capacity back in that moment.

And then we make the secondary decision about, and this is where I'm applying it. So we don't become any less busy, we just make a micro choice about what needs of my time and attention next and that's where our energy goes. And that's how people are working with AI. But that first time is like you're building something and you gotta think about it with a builder mindset.

19:59Scott

Yeah, I like it, dude, that's really good. Yeah, and the thing that you build is you build one time and then you don't have to build it again. You just actually just, it's just a bunch of addendums at that point. You're just slowly adding to the thing that's now built, but that thing that's now built allows you to do all the things so much better and so much just with more context. Because yeah, you just need context.

And so once you have the machine, like the thing that holds all of your context, then everything else has just become so easy. Like it just, it's not hard to create things once you have it. Because then it knows all the decisions you've made. Why do all Chipotles look the same? Why do all Burger Kings or McDonald's?

It's just like you, or like there's variances, you know, it's modular. It's not just anything you want. It's no, you can choose these sort of things. And that's what we've done here is that like, we've got everything that a nonprofit needs is that now it's just like, just install it. And then from there you can make anything whatever you need it to be.

It's a kit.

21:08Colleen

Dude, it's a kit. Yeah, it's like, yeah, come assemble it. All of the pieces are there. You're gonna end up with the furniture that you're trying to assemble here. But there's a little assembly required.

But boy, once you get it assembled, it's so fun to get to work this way. And it's so fulfilling Because you can really start to put your energy towards the things that are like best. Like, it's like, what's the best board packet we can put together? Not what's the one that can get done in time.

21:55Colleen

I think if you're doing this, you gotta be intentional about building the work life that you want for your team, for yourself, for your company, your organization, whatever you're doing. Like, this is the biggest technological shift I expect us to ever experience in our life.

22:09Scott

I hope so,

22:11Colleen

Dude. Dude, for real.

22:12Scott

This is too much.

22:14Colleen

It is a lot. If you're not using it to build the life that you wanna be living, like, what are you doing? What are you doing? I feel like we have no business in startup mode again, and we wouldn't have been if this wasn't true in the same way of like, because it's been possible, we've been able to do it. And because of what we've figured out through the process, I'm really excited for more people to get on board with this because the clients that we're working with right now, man, I'm just like grinning ear to ear, walking away from these conversations, completely changing what's possible for their missions. Like, we talked to somebody last week who got an airport project approved in their county that they never would have done if they hadn't been using AI in this way.

And they said, look, this would have been a $75,000 consultant spend. We never had funding for that. Nobody has tackled this as long as this airport has been existing. And they got it approved by their county commissioners.

23:11Scott

Oh, but it's, yeah, they went in front, you know, presented, everybody was like, this is great. We don't have any questions. Like, they went point by point. To what you said, $75,000 is what they're estimating consulting just done because they knew how to do it. You know, that's the thing is that you can't just go, give me $75,000 worth of consulting report.

You can't do it like that. It doesn't work like that. So you have to know how to do it. And in know how to do it, you gotta put in the work and put in the work of what work. That's the thing is what do I do?

And that's what we're saying is like, you have to figure that out from somebody who is banging their head against this AI wall to figure out the 99 ways that thing doesn't work, but this one person, one does. And I want to show it to you and it's cool. And that's over dramatizing that. I mean, it's not that bad, but it is, it is often a challenge. And there's multiple different ways to handle it, but you need a system.

Like you need a way of thinking and processing with AI. 'Cause if not, then it becomes chaos. And you just don't have great output and you walk away thinking this technology is not helpful. But in reality, if you've worked it exactly the way it could for your situation, it could be revolutionary for your nonprofit.

24:31Colleen

Yeah, and so like, I think you're, it's a good close to the loop of where we began, which is like, you're looking at the end of the year and you're saying like, we are spread way too thin to even begin to think about using AI. Our argument is there's never been a better

24:46Scott

Time. Yeah, and the reason is, is because I just keep going back to the idea that what, okay, let's talk about, you're gonna do Giving Tuesday coming up here. Or maybe you say, hey, we have end of the year appeal, something like that. And you say, I don't have time to implement AI because I have to do the year-end appeal. I don't have time to implement AI because I have to prepare for Giving Tuesday and all the work that comes with that. And what we're saying is, is that you still have to do the work.

AI, no AI, you still have to do the work. The only thing that's different is that when you do the work the next time, use different tools, use the AI tools. But you say, well, I don't know which ones, aha, that's the thing is that no problem. So it's not about not having time, it's just not knowing what to do because then it's just like, cool, just find that out. It's not a time issue because you're still gonna have to do the work.

Just do it in a different way. And then the cool thing is, this is the wildest thing is that the moment that you get that done, the next time you have to do that thing, you have the system to do that thing. Then it goes real fast. And that's actually what everybody should know as to why you would wanna do it this way. Is that you would, 'cause you're not just building, you're not just doing the next work.

You're doing almost all the work from that moment

26:02Colleen

On. Two works at once. You're doing the work you need to do and you're building the repeatable system for the next time.