8 Things AI Taught Me About Making the Manual Creating Process More Efficient

AI is FAST, even when you factor is the slowdowns that happen in approvals, judgement, and strategy. But funnily enough, I've found myself feeling competitive against the AI the more I use it. There are definitely some tasks I prefer doing on my own, and that I know the output is higher quality when I work on it myself (mainly to do with writing, like now) but what does it mean to work more efficiently in a world that encourages us to go faster and faster?

Finally, I asked myself: What can I do in my won hands-on tasks to make my output fast?

After a fit of brainstorming, I came up with these 8:

Before you start

1. Know when you think best, and do the hard work then.

I remember when I would use Claude in 2025 and during peak hours, it was noticeably slower, and it would even show a message mentioning how it was peak hours and it wouldn't be able to work during that time.

Similarly, knowing yourself is a big part of making your own manual process more efficient. Are you a morning person? Do you work better at night? I've had friends who tell me they work from 12am to 4am because that's when they work best; not to mention they get way less interruptions during that time.

Your body is sensitive to even something as simple as how much sunlight you're getting, and for women, your body has certain peak hours where it has a LOT of energy, and certain down hours where you may feel lower in energy and prone to tiredness.

Arming yourself with that knowledge can help you take advantage of your most alert times for the hard work.

2. Get the context ready first.

When it's time for you to start work, are you batching your research and context first, or are you creating and learning as you go?

I find that when I dedicate myself to a good amount of research and learning before I start my tasks, it allows me to come up with more ideas that are diverse and all help me stay within flow state.

Rather than having to delve into the World Wide Web for other peoples research and perspective because you keep getting stuck, you have an idea in your head of exactly where you're going to go, and what stops you're going to make.

This is not to say that you never do research again after the first time, but doing research before is a significant part of staying within your work.

3. Never start from blank: use a template.

I joke to myself that templates are like AI before AI. When you have a template, especially for writing new documents, all you're really doing is following instructions.

You can use templates for SOP's, email marketing, social media graphics, presentations, websites, and much more.

Templates are great because they help ease the anxiety of starting form scratch even when you're creating something in which a template doesn't apply, you can take the principles of a template and start form what is the "easiest " to do first. This could be a title, subheadings, certain logos, dates, whatever it could be.

It's important to try to get to completing part of the work as soon as possible. When you're able to successfully complete the work, you're proving to yourself that the work you have yet to complete can become finished as well. It's an easy way to encourage and sooth yourself into the right headspace you need to keep on truckin' along.

While you work

4. Protect flow state above everything.

Protecting your flow state means protecting yourself against interruptions.

A well-known study by Gloria Mark at UC Irvine found people took about 23 minutes to get back to a task after an interruption. That means even one 30 second interruption can have an outsize effect on the flow of your work.

Combat this by setting your devices on do not disturb and if you're someone who forget set it, you can set up your Do not disturb status to activate during certain times you know you like to work.

Be brutal about avoiding interruptions, even if it's only for an hour of work. Trust me, it's worth it.

5. Give the task a fixed window.

Timeboxing is effective in it essential y keeps you in flow state. When you know you only have a specific amount of time to complete something, that signals to your brain to stay in a state of focus, not lose track of your objective, and get to the goal faster.

Think about when you knew you had an essay due for school. Did you start the day after it was assigned, when there was still a month left? Or did you start it a week before it was due when you felt the pressure?

Similarly, when you tell yourself you have to complete a task in this amount of time, it encourages you to stay on focus and increases the likelihood of you completing your goals!

6. Type faster, literally.

Now this is really an interesting one. Watching an AI generate words on the screen was and still is fascinating to me. Iw Ould think to myself, can a human even type that fast? Well, I took that as a challenge.

Increasing your typing speed, is not as difficult as it sounds. The average typing speed is 40 words per minute. Me, as someone who spends a lot of her time typing, averages 60 words per minute. The fastest typing speed of a human achieved is over 300 words per minute. The equivalent typing speed of Ai text generation? 2,000 to 5,00 wpm.

If you really want to hack your typing speed, you can purchased chorded keyboards. These keyboards discard the concept of typing one letter at a time. Instead, they use a process called chording, where you press multiple keys at once to type entire words simultaneously—exactly like playing chords on a piano.

While they have a steep learning curve, they completely break human speed barriers, pushing typing limits well past 200 to 500 WPM

Drafting and review

7. Stop hesitating. Finish start to finish, then review.

A famous rapper once said, "create like a child, edit like a scientist".

When you think about a child sitting down with their crayons and a blank piece of paper, do they ever sit there hemming and hawwing about what they're going to draw? Or do they immediately attack the pair with crayons, scribbling nd drawing with intense determination?

A famous study often cited from a NASA-commissioned test on divergent thinking found that 98% of 5-year-olds test at a "creative genius" level, a number that drops significantly as people grow older. Can you guess what it drops to?

It drops to only 2% of adults who maintain that level of divergent thinking. That's a complete reversal as one gets older, cause by fear of failure and societal conditioning.

When you allow yourself to completely be in a creative flow and state of creation without negative thinking you get to finish your work in peace, whatever output that turns out to be. And finishing is the most important step. Only then can you review and edit your work as needed.

After

8. Rest on purpose.

It has to be said: you need rest. I can shout it from the rooftops, and say it right here, but it may continue to be undervalued.

You might be shocked to know just how many of my clients ended up in places where stye neglected their sleep, and it immediately showed: poor decision-making, negative thinking, and definitely not in a place where the deep, needed, work could happen.

What I learned form looking back on when I did my smoothest and "fastest" work is that the doubts in my head, whether there or not at that time, I did not allow it to get in the way of my work and my process.

Since the AI does not have doubts, fears, it doesn't stop to think about, "what if this doesn't turn out good?" It just does it, and if it's not good, oh well.. A human will probably correct me.

Now obviously there's big downsides with lack of emotion (i.e The tasks that require creativity, context, perspective, judgement, vision all struggle in output) but it's surprising how many little ways we can trick our brain into doing the work without having interruptions, and without interrupting ourselves.