I'm not smarter than my teammates.
I want to be clear about that up front, because what happened over the last year could sound like a brag and it isn't. I started shipping noticeably faster than people who are, frankly, better at parts of this job than me. The reason wasn't talent. It was three small AI habits I did every day while everyone else used AI occasionally, when they remembered.
The gap between occasional and daily turned out to be enormous.
Three daily AI habits gave me a real speed edge: (1) draft-zero everything — never start from a blank page; (2) think out loud with AI before deciding — use it as a sparring partner, not an answer machine; and (3) review my own work through AI before shipping. None are dramatic. All compound. The people who use AI as a daily reflex beat the people who use it as an occasional tool.
The blank page is where hours go to die.
I used to stare at empty docs, empty emails, empty slide decks, waiting for the first sentence to arrive. Now I never do. Every single thing I create starts as an AI draft-zero — deliberately rough, often wrong, but existing.
Editing is ten times faster than creating. A bad draft gives my brain something to push against. I'm great at "no, not like that, like this." I'm terrible at "create something from nothing at 9am."
My teammates still face the blank page every morning. I deleted it from my life. That's most of the edge right there.
The draft-zero doesn't need to be good. It needs to exist. I tell the AI "rough is fine, just give me a structure to react to," and that single reframe killed my procrastination almost overnight.
This is the habit nobody sees and the one that matters most.
Before any real decision — an architecture choice, a tricky email, a pricing call — I don't ask AI for the answer. I think out loud with it. I dump my messy reasoning and ask it to poke holes, name what I'm missing, and argue the other side.
It's like having a sharp colleague available at 11pm who never gets tired of my half-formed thoughts.
The output isn't the decision. The output is better thinking, faster. I catch my own blind spots in minutes instead of discovering them in a meeting three days later when someone smarter than me asks the obvious question. It's the daily-reflex version of the lesson at the heart of the honest truth about AI productivity tools in 2026: the edge isn't the tool, it's the habit you wrap around it. Surveys like McKinsey's State of AI research keep finding the same gap — the value lands with teams that build AI into routine workflows, not the ones who reach for it occasionally.
I don't use AI to think for me. I use it to think with me, out loud, before I commit.
Here's the practical move: I literally type "here's my plan, tell me the three strongest objections" before I act on anything that matters. The objections are usually right, and finding them early is the whole game.
The last habit is the most boring and the most reputation-saving.
Before anything leaves my hands — a doc, a message, a piece of code, a proposal — it gets one AI pass. Not to rewrite it. To catch what I'm too close to see.
I ask three things every time:
This catches the embarrassing stuff. The unclear sentence, the missing context, the claim I can't actually back up. It's a thirty-second habit that has saved me from a dozen "wait, what did you mean by this?" follow-ups.
My work looks more careful than my teammates' not because I'm more careful, but because I have a tireless second reader on every single thing. Quality automation, applied as a reflex.
Here's the math that explains the whole thing.
A habit you do once a week saves you a little, once a week. A habit you do twenty times a day saves you a little, twenty times a day. The second one isn't twice as good — it's an order of magnitude better, because it compounds across every task instead of one.
| Occasional user | Daily-reflex user | |
|---|---|---|
| Blank pages faced | many | ~none |
| Decisions stress-tested | rarely | almost all |
| Work reviewed before sending | sometimes | always |
| Net effect | small bumps | a compounding edge |
My teammates aren't worse at AI than me. They're worse at the habit of AI. They reach for it when stuck; I reach for it by default. Over a year, default wins by a landslide.
This is the quiet truth about getting ahead with AI agents and tools right now: the advantage isn't access — everyone has access. The advantage is making it automatic. The same compounding shows up in the underrated AI use case nobody is talking about — a dozen small, dependable habits beat one flashy trick — and it's why running my whole calendar through AI for 30 days worked: the win came from the routine, not the cleverness.
Knowing about a habit and doing it without thinking are completely different things. Here's how I bridged that gap, because the bridge is where most people fall in.
I attached each habit to a trigger — a moment that already happens in my day, so I didn't have to remember to do it.
Trigger-based habits beat willpower-based ones every time, because willpower runs out and triggers don't. A cue that's already baked into your day will fire whether you're motivated or not. That's the whole secret to why these stuck when so many "productivity hacks" didn't.
Whenever I talk about this, someone says: "Doesn't leaning on AI this much make you soft? Won't you lose the ability to write, think, and self-edit on your own?"
It's a fair worry, and I've watched for it in myself. My honest answer is that it depends entirely on how you use the three habits.
If you use draft-zero to skip thinking — accept whatever AI gives you, ship it, move on — then yes, your skills will atrophy. That's the lazy version, and it's a real risk.
But that's not what habit two and three are for. Thinking out loud exercises my judgment harder than I used to, because I'm now stress-testing every decision instead of going with my gut and hoping. Reviewing makes me a sharper writer over time, because I see the same weaknesses flagged again and again until I stop making them.
Used well, the habits are a gym, not a wheelchair. The danger isn't AI — it's the temptation to let AI replace your thinking instead of sharpening it. Keep yourself in the loop as the editor and the decider, and you get faster and better. Hand the loop entirely to the machine, and you get faster and worse. The choice is yours every single time.
We had a tight deadline last quarter. Everyone scrambled.
I finished a day early, not because I worked harder, but because I never hit a single blank page, I'd already stress-tested my plan the week before, and my draft went out clean on the first pass.
A teammate asked how I was "always so fast." I almost said "AI" — but that wasn't quite it. Everyone had the same AI. The real answer was that I'd turned it into muscle memory while they kept it in a drawer.
If you want to feel the same edge, pick one of these three habits and run it every day this week — the compounding does the rest.
Q: Won't relying on AI make me worse at the core skills? The opposite, if you use habit two right. Stress-testing your reasoning sharpens your judgment over time. The risk is only if you let it decide for you instead of thinking with you.
Q: Which habit should I start with? Draft-zero. It's the easiest to adopt and has the most immediate payoff — the blank page is everyone's biggest hidden tax.
Q: How is this different from just using ChatGPT a lot? Frequency without a system is noise. These are three specific, repeatable moves applied at the same points in every task. The structure is what compounds.
Q: Does my team know? They do now. The funny part is that knowing isn't enough — the edge comes from the daily reps, and reps are hard to fake.
I'm not faster because I'm better. I'm faster because I made AI a reflex instead of a rescue.
Three habits, done every day, quietly outran more talented people doing them sometimes. That's not a story about intelligence. It's a story about consistency.
So pick one. Do it tomorrow, then the day after. The edge isn't in knowing this — it's in not skipping it.
I went from 200 to 11,000 subscribers without hiring anyone. AI didn't write my newsletter — it did everything around it.
One person, output that looks like five. It isn't about working more hours — it's about a kind of leverage teams rarely have.
One idea a week to a published issue in under an hour. The boring system behind a newsletter I never dread sending.
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