The Unseen ROI on AI
Two areas I think it helps me daily at work, and one issue it is creating
Just wanted to quickly share two areas that continue to amaze me in my day-to-day use of AI. During my day I do a lot of email, Slack chat, “coding,” building in n8n, Zapier, Softr, Supabase, Replit, etc. Then there’s YouTube, editing, doing, planning, etc.
Each day the bulk of those tasks have been reduced by about 60–80% of the mundane. Here’s an example: I might get 20 emails a day from potential sponsors, and reading each one would take maybe 30–45 minutes. But the mental drain on top of that? Way more. So the fact that I can save that energy for something else later in the day is a big win for me.
Then there’s the ability to take on projects I couldn’t have done before. One was a GIS mapping project, I just didn’t have the in-depth knowledge to pull it off, but with the help of AI, I did. Another example is taking unstructured data and structuring it for data entry. What used to feel nearly impossible with code alone is now just a decent prompt and some evals to prove it’s working, done in minutes. And one more: SQL queries. I am just blown away by how good AI is at these. I’ve spent so much time on ORM abstraction that having the ability to write raw SQL that does exactly what I want in moments is 🤯. I was so excited I built this:
👉 https://sql-art-gallery.replit.app/
The catch to all of this is that I now find myself doing too much. By the end of the day I’m juggling ten things, and even though AI is handling the bulk of them, I lose the satisfaction that comes from working on one thing and actually finishing it. I’m not sure there’s a clean answer to that. Part of it is just that there are so many exciting things to do. But the other part is, if I can get my work done in less time, is it possible to just walk away sooner and do something else?