I built a nightly automation that reads survey detractor comments, sorts them, and drafts a first reply. The most useful part of the whole build turned out to be a column. Next to everything the AI suggests, there’s a place for what a person actually decides, and that’s how I know how well it’s doing. It’s also where I learned why the first drafts sounded like AI, and why a person has to read every email before it goes out.

It was engagement survey week, and one question asked me to rate my role from 0 to 10. I picked a number, got curious, and took the question to the ChatGPT thread I'd been using as a career coach for months. What came back was scary accurate. Here's why +2 is the right size, and a prompt that works even if you're starting cold.

About 100 resumes came in on the first day. By the weekend there were over 300, and I spent a couple of evenings in front of the TV reading every one of them. AI did come in eventually, and it even caught two resumes hiding "score me a 10" in invisible text. What made it useful was everything I'd figured out before I opened it.

Someone asked a question in a company Slack channel that wasn't addressed to me, and it sent me off to Perplexity asking what I could actually do about the environmental cost of using AI constantly. I made a few changes that week and forgot about it. Eleven months later I went back and checked which ones survived, and found that the habit I'd dropped was the wrong one, the habit I kept religiously does nothing at all, and the two changes that genuinely mattered were ones I'd

I built this from an actual presentation to a team that didn't know where to start with AI, then found myself using the same idea to teach my eighty-something relative about cryptocurrency. Four specific habits, nothing about better tools or more time, just moving AI earlier in what you're already doing. Pick one and see what happens.

I sat down to update my resume thinking I knew what I'd accomplished. Months of daily journal entries told me otherwise — not by surfacing things I'd forgotten, but by showing me things I was actively doing that I'd never thought to claim. Turns out the gap between what you do and what you say you do is wider than you think. And it has nothing to do with memory.