Are you being busy... or productive?

Quick one from my in-laws' guest bedroom (we're over visiting family, so HQ this week is a laptop balanced on a chest of drawers).

And I’ll be honest it’s not exactly comfortable.

Yet even with my awful sitting posture, the pain in my neck, and having to bend my wrists back at an ungodly angle to type… I could easily knock out a month of content before lunch.

We’re talking ad variations, a landing page, thirty social posts, or whatever.

AI doesn't care whether I’m sat at my usual desk with a back straighter than an iron rod, or hunched over a temporary “desk” looking like a shrimp at a keyboard.

AI works regardless of where you are.

And it kinda sounds like a superpower, but it’s not exactly all it’s cracked up to be.

For example, a few months back I built a system that cranks out 70+ social posts and schedules them across multiple platforms in minutes.

And I still use that system so I’m not about to tell you it doesn;t work. The tools work frighteningly well to get stuff done.

The issue is that most people I see using AI are getting addicted to doing loads of things, without knowing if the thing they are doing is actually useful.

I mean, if you’ve used AI, you've probably produced more marketing in the last 12 months than in the last 5 years.

The real question to ask yourself is… is revenue growing with your output?

Maybe it is. If so, you've already figured out what I'm gonna spend the next few days unpacking.

Cause here's what I keep running into.

When anyone can produce a hundred average assets in a weekend for twenty dollars a month, output stops being the edge it used to be.

Your prospects' feeds are full of generic content. Their inboxes are full of cookie-cutter outreach. And most of it reads the same, cause most of it came out of the same machine.

As the tools to create marketing noise have become cheaper, the ability to generate attention has become harder.

The advantage in any market lives in whatever is most scarce. Simple supply and demand.

For the last decade or so, decent marketing assets were scarce. Making good ads, pages, and emails took time, skill, or money. So the businesses that could pump them out had the edge.

AI killed that scarcity. The assets aren't the scarce thing any more, cause anyone with $20 a month to spare can pump them out.

What's scarce now is something that's always mattered. Knowing WHAT to produce, and WHY.

That's the bit everyone's skipping cause their addicted to AI “productivity”. They're shipping more than ever without knowing whether any of it is the thing their business actually needs. So the output climbs and the results don't.

As I always say, it’s being busy without being productive.

Over the next few days I'm gonna dig into why that happens, and what the businesses actually growing right now do differently.

Tomorrow I'll start with the instinct doing the most damage (you've almost certainly got it, I had it for years and still have to battle it)/

Pete "guest bedroom HQ" Boyle

P.S. I wrote a longer piece on what all this cheap output does to buyer trust. If you want the deeper version, it's here → The trust economy​