Howdy !

I have a folder on my Mac called "someday."

It has subfolders. And is color-coded. That's how you know it's serious.

You've got one too, probably. Maybe yours is a note called "ideas," untouched since 2019, sitting right above that reminder to back up your hard drive. Mine sat there for four years, giving me the side-eye every time I scrolled past.

Then AI gave me some hours back, and three things came out of that folder in the last two months. Alive. Blinking at the light.

1. The CNL Cheat Sheet Club. Cheat sheets from Creator News Live, free, in your inbox. Wanted this since I listened to Amy Porterfield say, "we've taken the notes for you" in her podcast! The idea was never the holdup. The 40 minutes per episode was the holdup, and I did not have 40 minutes. I had 40 minutes of thinking about how I didn't have 40 minutes. Grab them here.​

2. My own link-in-bio page. My old service folded. Found out the way everybody finds out: the link stopped working, and people who love pointing out mistakes filled my DMs making sure I knew. So I built the replacement myself as a WordPress plugin (Person schema for SEO, GA4 tracking, the works). It lives on my domain, I own the data, and nobody can go out of business on me again. Here it is.​

3. Editing video with AI. The holy grail. I'd been "researching" this for two years, which is creator-speak for watching other people do it on YouTube and feeling things. Then Claude Code plus a tool called ChatCut, and an entire video got edited with prompts instead of a timeline. No scrubbing, no dragging clips around for three hours. I got the whole afternoon back. Watch it in action here!​

Here's the truly bonkers part...
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None of that happened on a keyboard.

All three got built by talking. I use Wispr Flow, so I say what I want out loud, and it shows up as text. Two months in, it stopped feeling like some weird Star Trek thing where I talk to a computer. It now feels like standing over somebody's shoulder going "cut that part, now push in on my face, okay too much." Except the somebody is a video editor who works at 2 am and a programmer who never rolls her eyes at me.

Wispr Flow also hangs on every word and has never once judged me. I cannot say that about certain members of my family!

Okay. Now the part where I get a little serious with you.

When AI hands you time back, your first instinct will be to shovel more work into the hole. More posts, more emails, more everything. I felt that pull hard. I had over-optimized my time to the point that "pet the dog" had a color-coded slot on my calendar.

Allie K. Miller says it better than I can: "productivity is a trap." When the whole AI plan is "do more with fewer people," it gets toxic fast. The real win is better work, and new work you couldn't do before.

Cal Newport put numbers on it. People report saving around 11 hours a week with AI, and only 13% of companies saw performance improve. Eleven hours! Gone! Absorbed into more meetings about the time we saved streamlining our meetings. Where did yours go?

Here's what's been working instead:

• Take the walk. All three of these ideas showed up away from my desk, which is insulting, because I paid real money for this desk.
• Give AI the part you dread, not the part you love. If writing is your joy, don't hand it your writing. Hand it the task of writing your podcast show notes. Nobody's joy is show notes.
• Pick one thing off your someday folder this week. Not the folder. One thing. The folder will still be there... watching.
• Protect one block a week with zero ROI attached. Play with a tool. Make something ugly. Nobody has to see it.
• Sit with a hard problem longer instead of solving it faster. Deeper beats quicker, and you'll like the answer you land on a whole lot more.

Three things out of a four-year-old folder. That's what the time bought.

So what's in yours? The thing you've been saying "someday" about since before Netflix quit mailing DVDs? Hit reply and tell me. I'd love to know!

See ya around the interwebs,

-Jeff

P.S. The Cheat Sheet Club is free and takes about nine seconds to join, which is less time than you spent deciding whether to keep reading this email. Come get in on it!​