Why I don't let AI make my time management decisions

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I see more and more people using or discussing using AI to make decisions around how they spend their time. Let’s talk about it.

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Full transcript:

Kelly Nolan: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bright Method Podcast, where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up the bright method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep, proud of what you got done today, and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in.

Hey. Hey. Uh, all right, so today I wanna talk about something that is probably gonna be a little controversial, but please know, as always, you’re welcome to push back on anything I say. So. I’m gonna come out with my opinion on some stuff. You push back if you want to. And to kick it off, I wanna talk about a story I heard from a friend about being in a high level strategy meeting, like top execs.

And they had been using chat GBT to like analyze data, pull together data, have some takeaways, that kind of [00:01:00] stuff. And then they were at the point where they were making like the strategy decision around what the data dictated and. An executive said, let’s ask chat GPT. And it was a weird moment for my friend being like, we’re really going to just delegate the strategy decision making side of this job to chat GPT.

And I think that it was a really representative example of how I believe some people are misusing chat, GPT, I think. Chat, GBT has a lot of benefits. This is not a, a knock on chat. GBTI find it very useful to talk things out, to come up with topics for things like, there are all sorts of things that I use it for, but I do not use it for.

Basically not having to make hard decisions myself and take strategy decisions. And if it was more just like, I think it was the way this exec said it, it wasn’t like, I’m curious what chat GBT says so [00:02:00] we can like, you know, talk about it. It was more like, well what would chat GPT decide is if like that’s what they should decide.

At least that’s the way my friend heard it and I think that that’s really. Telling and also an example of how we should not relinquish decision making and strategy to chat GBT. And the reason I’m bringing all of this up in this context is I see signs of people doing that with time management. This is not to say anyone who talks about chat GPT in relation to time management in any way.

Is doing this, it’s more just saying, this is something to be aware of. If people are using chat GPT in this way, I think it’s important to be aware of it when you’re doing it and really think hard about whether you want to relinquish that level of control to chat GPT or AI or even other people. You know, like some people I think.

We can expand this into, some people will have like [00:03:00] executive assistants or chief of staffs, and they rely on them a little bit too heavily, in my opinion, to set direction. It’s like if I hire an assistant, they’ll tell me what to do, and it’s like, no, you need to, and I’ve heard that more in like a personal context.

By the way, I, I don’t think anyone’s like hiring a. Assistant, fully thinking that way, but I think there is a level of deference that can happen in an understandable way when we are overwhelmed and all we want is for someone to tell us what to do, that we follow that desire a little too far instead of just having to kind of be the adult and make those calls for ourselves.

Even when they are, they can be very hard calls. And the reason this is coming up right now for me is it’s, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but I didn’t, you know, it’s all so new, so I don’t really know. And I feel like also the technology changes every day. So you’re like, well, maybe it’s not okay today, but maybe it will be tomorrow.

And, and maybe that still is true, but I read this [00:04:00] quote by Shane Parrish, he has FAR M Street. I really like his stuff. And he said, your primary job is time allocation. And I really believe that like our primary job as adults, as parents, as individuals, as whatever employee you are or whatever job your career is, like how you experience and enjoy life and accomplish things, all comes down to time allocation.

I mean, obviously I’m biased and that’s why I really believe in this stuff and the power of this stuff, but I so often have clients be like, man, I thought we were talking about calendars, but this is going so far beyond calendars. That to me is because everything does come back to time and our primary job to move anything forward, work-wise or in our personal life or just being present or all of that comes down to time allocation.

And so I really believe in Shane Parish’s statement of your primary job is time allocation. And just to tease that out [00:05:00] a little bit more, ’cause I think it’s so important is like where you spend your time dictates so much at home, dictates your relationships with loved ones. And I’m just including quality time here.

I don’t think quantity time is all, all of it, but quality time. Your ability to have quality time at home dictates so much. It dictates the boring stuff too, like whether you get food on the table, how rested you are, all that kind of stuff at work. It determines whether you move the needle on big projects or whether you’re just busy in the email inbox all the time and not really moving things forward.

So long as that’s not where your value is for some people, that is, you can just spend so much time treading water and meetings and inboxes and chats and all this kind of stuff, and without being very intentional on time allocation, it’s very easy to stay busy versus like moving the important things forward.

And again, all of that comes down to time allocation. Yet given its importance because [00:06:00] deciding and executing and maintaining and Reid and executing and maintaining all of that is hard. We are very understandably tempted to outsource that decision-making to other things or other people because it’s hard and it just feels easier.

It’s just like, just tell me what to do. And that’s so much easier. ’cause it is, but it’s not necessarily the right approach. It’s a very reactive, responsive place to be versus you deciding where you want your time and energy and attention to go and the impact that will have. We’re tempted to outsource to chat TPT, as I said, at AI apps, I know there’s some really cool ones out there like Motion and I think some Sauna has AI behind it too.

All of these things where you like list out your tests and then it assigns time for them. Like time in your calendar to do tasks, but it like it decides when you’re gonna do all of these things. Some people, as I said, rely heavily on like chiefs of staffs or executive [00:07:00] assistants to do that work, and maybe not even necessarily.

Proactively think that way. Like I’m giving my ea the decision of where I spend my time. But if they’re managing your calendar, if you haven’t given sufficient guidance, like they’re making a lot of the decisions about where you spend your time and you are in essence relinquishing a fair amount of that.

Today I am gonna focus on chat, GBT and AI because I think it’s the kind of hot new thing that I’m seeing more and more come up. But just know that this could apply to other people too. So it’s good to be on the lookout for that. But focusing on AI and chat, GPT, I hear too many people, in my opinion, again, disagree.

Letting chat GPT dictate where their time is spent. The reasons for this, I would assume are either it’s hard to make decisions and it’s helpful to have somebody else do it. We can talk about, you know, helpful and that it makes the decision making easier. I’m not sure it leads to a better outcome. It can be [00:08:00] helpful just to talk things out.

So if you’re using it to like talk things out, that’s not necessarily what I’m talking about. It’s more like letting it decide what you then do. And the other element here is some people think it’s time saving and so I wanna dig into that today of. Having it make decisions and then questioning whether it really is saving you time to have AI in whatever form make decisions for you.

So there, there’s kind of two main points and then a third point I wanna make. The first, as I said, is I don’t believe ai. Knows the nuances that go into deciding when to assign certain tasks to time, like when you’re going to do certain things. And this could be work tasks, this could be things you do at home.

This could be all this kind of stuff. And I just don’t think that AI understands your priorities at work. Your kids and your loved ones needs and their special quirks and preferences and things that you like to do with them at certain times. Your desires for breathing [00:09:00] space or grinding during a season and so much more, and in a kind of meta way.

I actually asked at GBT. What are things you don’t understand without guidance when it comes to time management decisions? And it gave me a lot of things that I think are just useful for you to understand that like chat, GBT itself recognizes it sounds, it’s so weird, like feels like I’m talking about person, but even chat, GBT is aware of what it doesn’t know.

And so these are all the things you would have to train it on and make sure you are teasing out for it to understand. And I think. The only benefit I can see of doing that necessarily is that you are then really thinking through some of this stuff in the way that we talk about it in the Bright method.

Maybe going through some of these exercises would be good for you to know, but I also think then it’s, and we’ll get to it just as efficient for you to manage your times and tasks and more effective. Then chat, GPT. The helpful part is actually thinking [00:10:00] through this stuff and the thinking through this stuff I don’t think is happening when people are using chat GPT.

And that’s actually the main benefit you would get. And then when you think it through, I don’t think you need chat GPT, I don’t think it still can get you where you wanna go. Maybe one day it will, but I do not think we’re there yet based on what I’ve seen. So some of the things chat GBT brought up, I, I don’t even think I can read ’em, although I think it would take too long, is your current season of life, how much capacity do you actually have right now, emotionally, physically, mentally?

Also, are you in a push season right now? Are you launching a program? Do you have a big trial? Are you pushing for a promotion or are you in a breathing season where you are recovering from burnout or parenting? Small kids or grieving or healing? I’m not saying, you know, if you have small kids, you have to be in a breathing period, but more to the point, what season are you in?

What, I read this somewhere. I think it was in a life design book. Oh, I’m blanking. Life by design. It’s by some Stanford professors. And they talked [00:11:00] about what role do you want work to be in your life? And that can change. I think it definitely has changed for me. You know, when I was 20, role was a different, like work was a different role in my life, a bigger role in my life than it is right now.

And I should say I don’t even know if it was a bigger role. I still think about like work is so much of what, who I am and what I do now. Not all of it, I’m not saying my identity, but it is where my, a lot of my time and energy goes, but in a very different way. And unless. Time dominant way and regardless, more to the point is just know what season you’re in right now and what you want the schedule to be, because that will dictate what the schedule will turn out to be is whether you’re in like a push or a breathe or somewhere in between season.

And similar to that under the, this is all under the umbrella of what current season of life are you in, you know, what trade-offs are you willing to make in this season that you might not have made in other ones, but that you are now. Without that information and clarity and really [00:12:00] teasing it out, what chat g PT will spit out of what your day should look like or what or should look like.

If you give it, you know, 15 tasks that you wanna organize, that it’s gonna look different. And so you just need to be aware of that. Another one it said is your energy patterns. When you think best focus, deepest hit a wall, how are different types of work like creative, analytical, people, heavy like affect your stamina and I would say like match make to those time energy periods.

And are other things going on in life, you know, at work that would have an impact on your work energy? Next up it said the emotional weight of tasks. I think that’s important. I’m gonna just gonna go through the highlights of this, the ripple effects of your choices. I feel like this is like also regurgitating a lot of what I talk about because it’s much at GBT, so what you fit in might be different, but I’m more just, I’m like laughing at this because I feel like, you know, I give it so much content that it’s just like cherry picking these things, but.

You know, it says like, how do does saying [00:13:00] yes to something at work affect your kid’s bedtime or your partner’s schedule? How does scheduling one more meeting cut into your deep work time or your exercise? And how do small commitments accumulate into exhaustion? Like this stuff is really good to think about, and this is what I’m saying is like Chachi PT has value, but.

It also doesn’t know these things about you, and it’s important for you to think through these things and understand them, and you probably have a fairly good understanding of them. Right now, it’s just the chat. G PT doesn’t, and so that’s why I’m always just like, well, I don’t, I can’t, I wouldn’t bring someone off the street who is really, really smart.

Like PhD level, super brilliant and be like, here’s all what’s on my plate. What order should I do it in? Because they don’t know. They don’t know my life. They don’t know who I am. They don’t know what’s important to me. They don’t know what my aims are, and that’s such a same way as what’s going on here.

And that’s basically the equivalent of what [00:14:00] people are doing. Okay. Other things it brings up, which I love are invisible logistics. The human side of work and life and you know, relationships, not just completing deliverables, your boundaries, your preferences, and the pace that’s sustainable for you. And these are all great things, but again, we just need to make sure that whoever’s making these decisions understands these things.

And more to my point, if you were to educate an AI tool, chat, GPT, whatever it is, with all of this information. Is that really saving you all that much time? You know, I asked chat GPT also ’cause I just, I thought it was interesting given the context to be like, let me see what chat GPT has to say about this.

Like, how much time would it take to have someone explain all of this to you? And I said, on average, and Chad, GPT said, if we’re talking about how long it takes someone to give enough context for me or any AI to make truly sound nuanced, time management recommendations, the short answer is a long time, easily 30 to [00:15:00] 90 minutes, sometimes more.

I suspect not only would you have to remind chat GPT of this to a degree like I do every time I go in, I wish that it remembered exactly what I had said before, like even in the same thread in the earlier conversation, but I constantly have to remind it of things. Not only would you have to remind it of all of this stuff every time you make a decision, but those things change and that’s what’s hard.

That’s what’s really hard about time management, is the answers to all those things we just like listed out. They change, you know, not necessarily week to week, but within a year they due for those who have kids, like whether your kids are in school or in the summertime, whether it’s a break, whether it’s not.

Whether your kids are at home sick on the larger scale, you get the promotion, things shift. You go through phases of learning with that. Maybe you have a new baby that’s like life altering. Maybe you’re moving, maybe you have a health issue going on for yourself or a loved one, like [00:16:00] for all of these things, constantly change all of those answers, and so you would be.

It sounds easy to be like, okay, even if it takes me two hours to explain this, then I set it and forget it and they can help me from then on out. Awesome. That would be awesome. I would probably have a different approach to what I’m talking about right now, but that’s what’s really hard about time management is it’s not a set it and forget it thing.

You could spend two hours teasing it out and in a month or less, you would have to do it again to reconfigure the priorities, the pace, the preferences, all of that. And that’s why I, I felt like compelled to talk about this because I see more and more people either doing this or being very intrigued by doing it.

And I just have like some deep hesitations about it, which I have to check, right? Like, obviously I’m biased, I like teaching this stuff. I’m like, you know, I’m, I’m constantly being like, am I, do I not like these apps in chat GPT? Because. [00:17:00] It could like take a lot of my business or all my business and step into it.

So I just wanna be clear about that. Like obviously I’m biased, but just taking a step back, while I think chat sheet PT could be very useful in time management in the sense of like, I have this project, what are all the things I have to do and like breaking projects down and that kind of stuff. Super useful.

I wouldn’t rely on it, but I would use it as like a rough draft. What I might do is like start with blank piece of paper, come up with my own ideas, then ask Jet GBT and see if I’ve been missing anything. And if it sparks any other ideas, I wouldn’t rely on it. But I do see the utility. I’m not saying don’t ever, you know, use Jet GBT or use it for this kind of stuff.

But I think it goes beyond my bias and my hesitation is that. It does not understand all of this stuff that is so critical when it comes to time management, and even if you educate it to understand all of this stuff, [00:18:00] that constantly changes to the point that I don’t think it would be time efficient. My last point here is also that it is trained by humans.

You know, I think sometimes we treat it as though it’s this like all knowing, being like AI and whatever it spits out is, right. And I had an episode with Woody Taylor a long time ago on ai. It was at least a year ago, I think. And it was so good. And it was about, you know. It is being trained off the internet, and the internet was created by humans.

And you can see the systemic biases in this stuff. If you’re like, give me a picture of, you know, a guy in tech, I think that was his example, or, or a person in tech and it’s like a white dude that looks like a hipster and it’s just, that’s not exactly who works in tech and it is just very like white male dominant because the internet is, because that’s historically where it’s been.

It’s not, I’m not trying to knock on it, I’m just saying it’s just factually where it is right now. I’ve shared this before, but I’ve experienced it when I’m [00:19:00] like, can you gimme topics that like a professional working woman would be interested in? And it’s like, Hey, boss babe. I was like, oh my gosh. It’s like makes me like shrivel up inside.

And so I just think that. Again, I’m not knocking Chad GBT as a whole, but we have to be wary of the humanness in it too, and the human limitations in it too. And so one of the biggest things I see on the time management front is just like humans, it underestimates like crazy. All humans underestimate how long things take.

And I would also just throw that out there that if you’re using chat GBT to tell you this should take you 20 minutes and it takes you 45. You’re not the one in the wrong, it’s just underestimating in the very human way that we all do, including ai, and so just be aware of that. I would also say that in the same way that I believe why I love working with women is I think women have been neglected, at least in when, up till when I was overwhelmed in the time management space.[00:20:00]

A lot of the time management stuff that was out there when I was struggling was by. White, older dudes with support at home, and it’s, again, no knock on them, but it was a different understanding of how you should manage your time when you’re not the lead caretaker of your home and your personal life, because somebody else is able to do that for you at home.

And also then once kids or aging parents or anything enters the picture, typically women are the ones carrying that load more, unless we can get really clear on it. Delegate it out and share it out and make it more equitable over time to the extent we can. And so just be aware that my chat JPT did spit out that invisible load.

I do wonder if it was a bit informed about my brainwashing of it, but without that, I don’t know if it would do a good job helping you manage the invisible things. Even last time I checked [00:21:00] like motion and some of the. Some sauna stuff. It puts like, I think lunch and email on your calendar, but there is so much more invisible load that comes with so many of our roles that a lot of the stuff does not tease out.

And so that’s just what I wanna caution you on as well, is understand that AI also has human limitations. Whether it’s estimating time or biases or lack of understanding of all the things that working women manage. I just wanna throw that out there for you too, to consider. So should you stop using chat GPT when it comes to time management?

No. Again, I think that there are valuable ways to use time management and save a lot of time, whether it’s meal planning, whether it’s planning. Aaron’s based on location, whether it’s breaking down projects to help you think through all the things that need to be done, whatever it might be, there are really wonderful ways to incorporate it, but don’t [00:22:00] let it get to the point where you are deferring strategy or your.

Decisions around time allocation to something that does not have the full scope of what is going on in your current life right now, and training it on that I believe is a little bit not worth it just because those things keep changing and evolving. And to me, it’s more valuable for me to think about those things at a cadence that makes sense.

Not all the time. But at a cadence that makes sense that we talk about in the program. And then using that knowledge to have ownership over where I spend my time, because as Shane parishes quote, so succinctly puts our primary jobs, our time allocation, everything comes back to time. And so making those calls is so critical and do not delegate that out just because those decisions are hard.

They are hard. But we need to make them so that we’re getting the life and the experience and the day-to-day that we [00:23:00] want in our own lives. I truly believe that time allocation and us deciding what we, where we wanna spend our time is really what will dictate whether we have breathing, space, happiness, accomplishment, and the ways that we want, and so much more.

Everything comes back to time, everything. And while I do know that we all want quick fixes and I totally get it, especially when we feel like we’re drowning, I have yet to see a quick fix, including AI on the time management front, that will give you true relief on that broader scale. When it comes to my approach, if I could give you a quick fix that I think would work, I would.

But I really believe more in more thoughtful, in depth work that unfortunately takes time. It is what it is, but it does have a long term solution that has so much impact on just every part of your life. So don’t outsource those decisions. That’s work that can and should be done by [00:24:00] you. And if you need any help doing it, just know my program’s open.

You can learn more at Kelly nolan.com/bright. And thank you for being here. You are absolutely more than welcome to disagree with me. Push back on anything I said. I would love to hear. As I said, this is a totally new area and it’s hard to keep up. It’s almost hard to come out with a opinion on things.

Because I feel like I don’t know enough, but at the same time, I have to realize that a lot of us don’t. So might as well just raise my concerns for you to consider and then make your own decisions on how you wanna use these tools and make these types of time management strategy decisions. All right.

Thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.

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Why I don’t let AI make my time management decisions

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