the ai workflow nobody talks about is the boring one

everyone wants to talk about ai writing your emails or building your deck. fine, it does that. but the highest leverage use of ai in my actual week is something much less exciting: triage. deciding what deserves my attention before i spend any of it.

i run enough conversations, calls, and pipelines in parallel that the bottleneck was never generating content, it was knowing which five things out of fifty actually mattered today. that's a sorting problem, not a writing problem, and it turns out models are extremely good at sorting once you give them the right context and the right question.

the trick is treating the model like a colleague who reads everything overnight and hands you a short list in the morning, not like a vending machine you poke for outputs. give it the full picture, the goals, the constraints, and ask it what it would prioritize and why. then argue with it. the argument is where the actual thinking happens, the model just gets you to the argument faster.

what breaks this is people using ai to avoid thinking instead of to think faster. those are opposite postures and they produce opposite results. one makes you sharper, the other makes you dependent.

where in your week is the bottleneck actually a sorting problem you've been treating like a generation problem?