Is AI Making You Busier — or More Effective?

Is AI making you busier or more effective

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:28Bill Gallagher: I see a lot of people talking about AI today, working on, thinking about AI, but I don't see a lot of people necessarily doing it well. People worrying about it, wanting not to get caught outside or left behind. And there's definitely a distinction between the companies that I see doing it well and not so well. So the real core question that I have right now is: is AI making you busier, or is it making you more effective? I think in many cases, it could be, on a very micro level and even for the whole company, for you personally, for the company, it could be often making you busier.

01:07Bill Gallagher: So we'll get into all that more. I'm going to share a couple of ideas with you. First of all, my name is Bill Gallagher. I'm the host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. This is one of the episodes in the series. We bring a show to you every week. One week, it's a show with me sharing something from our clients. The next week, it's with a guest: author, guru, CEO, somebody who's got something to share about growing and building your business. Lately, I've been talking about my new book, Busy Is Broken. You can preorder it now. It's available online, places like Amazon, that kind of thing. You can also go to busyisbroken.com. You'll find the links there. You can sign up for our announcements, some special offers for early orders. Busyisbroken.com. It examines the stories of leaders who got too busy and those who didn't, and the difference in their companies and in their lives out of stepping back and working smarter, more on the things they're meant to do, and letting their teams rise up. So busyisbroken.com. Go check out Busy Is Broken.

02:08Bill Gallagher: All right. So back to the question of the day. Is AI making you busier, or is it making you more effective? On a personal level, I think there's a tendency. If you're a regular listener, you know, I use AI throughout all of our work. I use it every hour of every day, pretty much. My son is a leading AI developer who first built a thing called Midjourney, and then now he's one of the AI scientists at Anthropic. So AI is a regular conversation in my family, in my house, and in my practice, every step of the way with our clients, in my own developing of and producing our show, and so on. So AI is throughout all of those things.

Training AI to stay focused and not spin out

02:54Bill Gallagher: I notice the possibility. So you ask a question of AI. You go to work on something with AI. You try to generate something with AI, and it can just spin out and go down every little rabbit hole. If your tendency is, like a lot of entrepreneurs, like a lot of founders, to follow your muse, your curiosity, if you get distracted by squirrel ball, whatever, and you go off, AI definitely can be a problem like that. And so too with many of our teams. They get so involved with things, and I can throw more options at you. So the first thing is training and using it in a judicial fashion. So it spews something big at me. I go back and I say, "Stop. I want that in seven words." Stop. "I just want to hear the one option." Stop. "I need…" So I can give it back there. Or if it gives me a whole long list of things with different questions and things like that to pursue, I could get lost answering them. And instead, I could say, "Let's narrow that to three questions and ask me one at a time. Let's knock them out." So you can use and start to talk with AI in a way that narrows it in, that gets its focus. Keep in mind what it is you're trying to do, and don't let it take you down rabbit holes. I think the same thing is true with different members of our team, so it's useful to have a conversation about that.

Why big vendor projects stall and grassroots learning works

04:18Bill Gallagher: The next thing that I see again and again is CEOs and C-suite worrying about the big picture, the core thing. And literally, big picture is what you should be doing. In this case, I'm talking about if you're focused on finding the vendor, the solution for the big answer, for the core functionality of your business, you're probably missing a lot of other opportunities. I'm not saying that's not useful at all. It is useful. But very often, that leads you to developing big projects, trying to find big vendors. And there's an awful lot of people out spinning up these kinds of new apps, new ventures, new things like that, and brand new instant experts. "Oh, I'm an old timer in AI." No. You're not. Nobody is. Yes, a lot of people have been in AI for a long time. Some of what they were working on, if they were involved twenty years ago, is not actually that relevant to today. So instant experts is okay, except there's a lot of people just trying to figure it out just like you and I are. And so be careful about spending big money on big projects with big people.

05:28Bill Gallagher: And instead, I think there's something that actually matters as much or more, and that is that you, in your seat and in a leader's seat, start to use it consistently. I'm talking about every hour, every working hour of the day, I think you ought to be using AI. So in a jillion different ways, you ought to be using AI. And if you and your entire C-suite are using AI every working hour of the day, and maybe even into some of your personal hours, I think you'll start to see things differently. And look, it's evolving so fast. Two years ago, you weren't able to do the things that you're able to do today. Two years from now, it's going to be so dramatically different.

06:14Bill Gallagher: So personally, I use AI for our content, not to generate the content for me, but to assist me with planning the content, sketching it out. I'm still the one talking here. This is not an AI Bill. This is real Bill. This is not a facsimile Bill. This is actually me. So I'm using it to plan things. I'm using it to prep our content, and I'm using it to plan our client engagements, doing competitive research, doing strategy assessment, doing trend analysis, looking at company performance data, financials, operational data, making sense of team input on things going into planning, pulling client history, preparing before planning and strategy sessions, taking notes in the planning and strategy session, creating the artifacts afterwards, the reports, that kind of thing, the to-do items, scheduling follow-up. All of those kinds of things today are AI-infused at every step of the way for us.

Using AI every hour across content, client work, and planning

07:21Bill Gallagher: And I think it ought to be in a similar way for our clients as well. If you are thinking about planning, so in the beginning and the end of the day, I have AI looking at my email for: what am I missing? What might I forget? What could I just file away? Generating draft replies for certain kinds of things that are fairly routine, it generates a draft for me. It doesn't send it off. I have to go look at it, revise it, edit it, send it myself. But getting a lot of those kinds of things done. Looking at my week ahead, looking for where we might be dropping the ball with clients or with travel or other logistics. I've got scheduled AI actions running through all of that kind of thing. And then in the middle of the day, I hear or read a news story or I see an interesting email.

08:07Bill Gallagher: It leaves me with a question. Instead of going to Google and then paging through websites or YouTube videos today, I'll just go right to an AI. I'll be like, what am I missing here? And it'll be like, that's not on my training set. Let me check the latest news. And then it'll go out and look. Oh, this is a development of today. Here's what I see. Here's the implications for you. So every step of the way through, I'm looking and I'm finding ways to do it. If you're not yet personally using AI every hour of the day, no matter the kind of work you do, I think that is a personal challenge you might undertake. And then I'd make sure all of your team is doing it. More and more now, I see the leadership teams of the winning teams that I'm working with are doing that kind of thing. There are others where they're not, where they're resisting, and those teams, by and large, aren't doing as well. So the first thing that I would say that would make a difference for many of us is to start using AI every hour of the day, every day, and getting that in place. If you start doing that, I think that would make a difference.

Building internal groups to share what's working

09:10Bill Gallagher: The next thing is, if I could encourage small groups of people in the company who are enthusiastic about AI to start helping each other to take it on, to make it more of a grassroots thing. So this is like an internal mastermind or brainstorm or lunch and learn or whatever you want to call it. Lunch, breakfast, afternoon, something where a few people in the company across functions, across departments come together, and they share something cool. I saw this thing. I tried this thing. Just the open part after the welcome is sharing all around something cool. And then one by one, they bring challenges. My biggest challenge right now is I wish I could do this with AI. I'd love to do that. This is our biggest problem here. And then the group brainstorms ways that they might try to use AI to do it. If you had grassroots people talking about how they're using AI and working together to use it more and more, you'd become the company that uses AI the best. If you were using it in the C-suite and you have some people like that in the company, that'll catch fire on the company, and that is working in many of the companies we work with.

10:24Bill Gallagher: That's very distinct from trying to hire some big expert firm to help you do it. It's getting it at a base level of grassroots. And then from that, you'll start to see more and more opportunity. See, I don't think, unlike some big predictors of the future, that we're all about to lose our jobs to AI. I think it's more likely we're going to lose our work and our jobs to people and companies that use AI better than we do. So starting to use it as a tool that can amplify your advantage is better than trying to replace every job or thinking every job's going to be replaced. Companies that really use it well, individuals, I think are going to do fine for at least the foreseeable future. Who knows what beyond that? I think a fair amount of curiosity. This is a profoundly altering, empowering, destabilizing kind of technology. So that's the thing I think matters more than anything else. Don't decide, yes, we're all in AI. Yes, we're going to become an AI company or not. We should all be using it like the beginning of so many other technologies. But for sure, the basic personal computer and the basic Internet itself, it took over us. It didn't eliminate us. It actually empowered all kinds of new companies in new places. I think there's some real potential here now. It certainly has empowered my work. I've got a book coming out. I produce the show. I coach companies. I work with an accelerator program around the world, and I have a PhD working. And I do all those things, and I still have time for surfing, for family dinners, for a little vacation time, for skiing, for things like that. So I think it could make a difference for you. AI ought to make you more effective, not more busy.

12:10Bill Gallagher: Anyway, I hope that's helpful for you. These ideas, this thinking and that kind of thing is certainly consistent with the work of the book Busy Is Broken. You should go check it out now. Busyisbroken.com. In the audiobook version, there'll be a little addendum where I have a conversation with Jack, not only about the evolution and what he learned from watching me lead companies, but also then his work in AI, and we talk back and forth about how we're using it. He works for Anthropic as one of the Anthropic scientists today. So, hopefully, that's useful for you and you get something out of that.

Companies that use AI well will outcompete those that don't

12:47Bill Gallagher: I think I would be looking at how to make AI more effective every way. Personally, I use a variety of the tools. I'm still using Anthropic. I'm using ChatGPT. I'm using Gemini. I'm using the Claude tool from Anthropic the most. I have it running in co-work on my desktop. I'm using via API. I'm using the Claude code. And I have some apps running, and then I also have it just using the basic chat interface in my browser. So I'm using all those things and running them all the time. I think you should too. But don't let it take you down rabbit holes and make you more crazy and less productive. And have that be for you if you're going to lead the company, and then have it be for the people in the departments that you lead, in the rest of your C-suite and on down into your individual functions and so on. Until next time, keep scaling.

13:46Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less. Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.