It feels fitting that on the first day of the new Talis year (post 366 means version 7 started a year ago!), I look at the concept of scheduling and reflect on how I spend my time and how to better spend that time. Yes, I know there are AI for that. Let me start by saying what most people are commonly calling AI is not actually AI. This post by Amazon does a fairly good job of sorting out the discussion. When most people talk about AI and fears of AI what they are really talking about is Artificial General Intelligence. When people use chatbots or gpt, which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformers what we are talking about are retrieval algorithms that can process information based on specific training and questioning. They ain’t thinking bots, y’all.
But that wasn’t the point of this post. Not really. Actually I am considering Skedpal as a tool to help optimize my calendar, but the facts are the calendar is hardly the issue. The issue for me is that I waste entire blocks of time on, well, nothing. I need to get better at not doing that and being more productive during the blocks where I actually do observe Butt in Chair philosophy. For example, I plan to get to work early tomorrow–6 AM I’ll be in the home office cooking up the plan for the week. I could cook up that plan post blog when I have probably 15 to do so, but I am going to play Apex, because… I am. These are the choices that shape my life.
Algorithms are very good at telling us the best time to do things, but the truth is that we need to be wiling to sit down and do them. I will try and honor that this week by getting back to the weekly checklist and using that to ensure I am doing what I am supposed to be doing every day.