Is Your Task the Journey or the Destination?

As a freelancer, you may see AI as a way to increase how many paid projects you can get through in a month as those jobs don’t allow you to stretch your creative muscles anyway. Tight deadlines and fussy clients make creativity in design a luxury, which is why designing for yourself is often a necessary exercise to ensure your paid work continues to be fresh and fast.

As long as you’re maintaining your skills in other ways, you’re not neglecting the ones you rely on. You may even gain a new skill for those jobs that are more about getting it done than challenging yourself creatively.

Stop, Go, Wait

⛔️ The Hard Parts Are The Good Parts

If you want to get better at it, don’t use AI. The critical thinking (and failing) is the progress. When you’re using an AI, you’re not getting better at doing the thing, you’re getting better at using AI. It’s one thing to know what looks good, it’s another to create what looks good and while uncomfortable and time consuming, not getting the answer handed to you is what makes you better at it.

E.g. asking AI to rewrite my blog posts isn’t going to make me a better writer. Asking the AI for feedback or help learning about narrative structure may though…

✅ It’s Got To Get Done

If it’s a skill you don’t need, use AI. If you’re not good at something, never intend to develop that skill, need to get it done, and have no budget to hire someone to do it, then you should use AI.

E.g. creating supplement sketches for my TTRPGs. Drawing is something I would like to get better at, but I’m not at a place in life where I’m going to prioritize developing the skill. The sketches aren’t adding a lot to the game so I’m not going to pay someone to do it either. If by some miracle I ever had the opportunity to sell my sessions as a module, I’d pay someone to do it.

⚠️ Neural Connections Are Like Muscles

You can delegate, but there’s a cost. If you want to get something done fast and it’s one of your core skills, you can use AI, but know that every time you do you’re losing a little bit of the reinforcement that maintains the skill. It may not look any different to you but you can quickly find yourself in the role of manager rather than creative.

E.g. writing for loops has always been something we believed so simple we’d never forget. But after just a few years of using AI auto-complete, devs are already reporting they’re struggling to remember how.

Water

Like so many people, I’ve been trying to drink more water for years. I’d tried counting ounces, counting bottle refills, paper trackers, apps, and a all sorts of reminders. I’d been bringing water to the table at meals but one day I decided to tweak the model a little so that I’d only get to my coffee/soda/beer/etc. after my water.

A pattern quickly emerged where I’d eat a bit, get thirsty, chug the water, then finish the meal and maybe get to the fun drink. I didn’t know this but when you’re dehydrated, you don’t always feel thirsty. Once you’re properly hydrated though, your body starts to signal thirst more reliably. Once I got into a reliable flow (ha ha) with the three core pints, I began to get thirsty throughout the day.

After around a week of this, I started to feel pretty good. I felt good about hitting my daily water goal, but I was also sleeping better and my mind just generally felt clearer. I began to believe I finally hit a state of being I believed unattainable by the busy-go-getters we are: hydrated.

Alcohol

Then one day something completely unexpected happened… I didn’t like the way alcohol made me feel. I hadn’t made myself sick on alcohol or switched to anything, it just wasn’t the warm buzz I was used to. It felt weird like the dull without the calm, so it just felt confusing. It’s been liberating to be freed of a chain I didn’t know I was carrying. I still want something other than water in the evenings, but all of a sudden a cup of tea is sufficient when before I’d be looking for a way to “unwind”.

Which is kind of a funny phrase if you think about it. Like you get so wound up throughout the day that you need something to help you calm down before bed. I’m coming to realize that I’m always wound up, and I’d been relying on even a single drink per night in a ritualistic way, and that ritual had become a habit. Not yet a chemical or physiological habit, but a habit nonetheless.

Layers

I still drink socially and sometimes have a Friday happy hour, but it’s not the same. I sleep better, I feel better, and while it’s uncovered the underlying anxiety and focus problems that were likely driving use to begin with, at least I’ve pulled another layer away that’s allowed me to look those problems in the eye and address them without the complexity of ritualistic alcohol muddling things.