Come visit us at Modus Institute or see our Calendar of Events.
This is a plea for the holidays if anything.
A conversation is a connection. I am a person, writing to you with intent. You are a person receiving my intent. That is a relationship. The more thought, the more respect.
A task, on the other hand, is a burden. When you do a task, your goal is to finish the task and move on with your life. It is usually done as quickly and, frankly, thoughtlessly, as possible. The more thought, the more burden.
When you use AI to write your emails, you give the AI the agency to make that connection, and you remove it from yourself. You ask the AI to respond. It looks pretty good, you say good enough and hit send. That’s a task. You will forget it.
If I’m like “Oh, I’ve got to respond to Tonianne. I’ll just pop it into the bot. It will write something…yeah, that looks good enough. Send.” It feels like I wrote an email, but I didn’t. It’s not me. It’s not the relationship.
Tasks vs. Conversations
There is a reason why we forget tasks. Most tasks are designed to be forgotten. We do them in a specific place and time, and once they are done, we flush them from our working memory so we can move on to the next thing. If we didn’t we’d have brains filled with “I turned off the lights on Jan 7th and 8 pm”.
Toni and talk a lot about the Zeigarnik Effect. Our brains hold onto unfinished business (open loops) to ensure we complete them. Once we check that box, the brain essentially deletes the file to free up cognitive space.
Again, AI turns conversations into tasks.
A conversation isn’t a task; it is a connection where you say something, I process it, and we build a direction together. But when you use AI to not have to bother talking to me, you are artificially closing that loop too quickly. You treat your friend like a kanban ticket. Your brain registers “Task Complete” and immediately flushes the interaction.
You are very efficiently deleting your relationships from your mind. If they aren’t there, you won’t value them. If you don’t value them…you won’t have them for long.
The Science of “Good Enough”
In the video, I say that when you accept an AI draft because it looks “good enough,” you are skipping the struggle of creation. That struggle is not a bug; it is a feature of human memory. Writing things down might not be fun, but we’ve had thousands of years linking writing and memory.
This is known as the Generation Effect. Decades of research show that information is better remembered if it is generated from your own mind rather than simply read. When you type out a messy draft, delete a sentence, and retype it, you are physically encoding that thought into your long-term memory.
Maybe more important is that you are asking yourself, did I mean this? I’ve written enough books to know that editing is more important than writing. (Which is likely why a lot of you are saying Yeah, that’s why I hate writing.
When you simply “approve” an AI output, you are robbing yourself of that encoding process. Recent research backs this up:
A 2025 study from MIT, mentioned in this Study International article, found students who used AI to write essays had significantly lower neural connectivity and “had a harder time recalling vital points” of their own work.
In Psychology Today, Dr. Cornelia Walther, calls this “Agency Decay.” We think we are hyper-connected, but by offloading the process of communication, we are engaging in a pseudo-intimacy where we are present in output only, not in mind. I strongly suggest you read her terrifying article.
The Integrity Gap
I’ve folded these ideas into what I call the Locked Loop of Forgetfulness.
Overload: You have too many messages.
Offload: You let the bot write the replies to survive.
Amnesia: Because you didn’t generate the thought, you don’t remember the promise you just made.
Indifference: You didn’t respond, you don’t remember, you stop caring. You are more likely to do it again, which overloads others, forcing them into the same cycle.
This is dangerous. If you make a decision, a promise, or a statement of fact to another human being, you probably want to remember what that is. This means that you could very easily end up committing to things you have no initial intention to and then, later, won’t even remember that. A paper recently published by Cambridge University Press, titled Homo Promptus, warns that this leads to a state of “grey memory,” where we can no longer distinguish between what we experienced and what the machine fabricated for us.
This means other people will believe you wrote something (because the received it from you) and you will believe it too.
This Is Avoidable
When autoresponses first started, I got a text from Tonianne that was alarming. She had a situation I need to delicately respond to. Google felt the best response was “HaHa”. I accidentally hit it.
After much explanation and apology, we started using HaHa as a response meaning everything. “What would you like for lunch?” “HaHa.”
AI has barely made it past that hurdle. You can avoid this simply by avoiding the urge to cut corners. If you use AI for anything, you need to edit it like you gave it to your worst enemy to write. But, it’s easier in the end to just write the email yourself.
CTAs FTW!
Join us for the workshop or the webinar. We’ll go deep on your actual limits, help build visuals that work for you personally, and create boundaries that work. Spend some time with us: Free Webinar | Deep Dive See Your Work-shop
Read the full Personal Kanban book to understand the humanity behind the practice.
Work with Jim and Toni for personalized guidance implementing visibility in your specific situation.
Like and subscribe and all that stuff. But … really, everyone is running way above capacity and it’s hurting us all. So, please … opt out of that pain.
