I’m obsessed with efficiency (& doing what makes sense). I enjoy organizing and discovering tools or techniques to help me (and others) to do things smoothly and faster. 

With the boom of AI’s capability, it becomes a strange feeling of excitement and overwhelming with what AI can bring to efficiency (and maybe effectiveness). Honestly, at this stage, I’d say it is rather overwhelming and concerning rather than the pure positive excitement. 

The old metrics of efficiency to measure outputs are not so meaningful with AI-assisted super power. One cannot rely on the number of emails sent, the number of meeting minutes, how many pages in the document or presentation slides as the indicators for productivity. Furthermore, it is also convenient to automate everything, to remove every frictions and offload one’s decisions to AI while labelling it as being efficiency. The trend will become the fallacy of efficiency (i.e., optimistic on outputs while missing substance and ownership), which will hit us hard eventually.

I’d call for 2 core principles as boundary on this path toward efficiency here: to stay discerning and to keep the meaningful frictions. These are the lines that I won’t cross:

• “to stay discerning”: not offload to AI for the output that I cannot understand or the decisions that I cannot validate
• “to keep the meaningful frictions”: remember that frictions bring meaning and there are frictions that remind me of my relevancy and joys.

For examples, I’d keep these frictions:

• The time it take align everyone on an important decision to move forward
• The time required for good conversions or discussions with people where insights emerge
• The joy of immersing and staying focus while reading a good book or article
• The joy of intentionally set shutter speed and aperture and wait for the moment while taking photograph

To you, readers: What are your meaningful frictions, at work and in life? I’d invite you to identify those and protect them from being buried in AI-powered workflow.