Productivity

The Observation Touch it once. When something lands, finish it or triage it on the first touch. Do not pick it up, set it down half-handled, and pay the full re-entry cost later. Touching without deciding is how piles become careers. I learned that young. At sixteen, through business class and Business Professionals of America, I interviewed for an On the Job Training slot and got hired as a teller at Norwest Bank, the company that became Wells Fargo. Stillwater in May 1993. Through March 1998 I moved from that floor to the Norwest Center downtown Minneapolis (now Wells Fargo Center), then across the street to IDS as lead teller, then to sales and service supervisor with a second drive-up branch on Portland Avenue while they found a new supervisor. Somewhere in that stretch, leadership training put the line in my mouth: touch it once. ...

The Observation I was explaining how I take notes to someone on a call. I didn’t start them on my whole digital system. I handed them a pack of habits that fit on an index card. Front: date, plus the idea that stopped them. Back: source, and why it mattered. One idea only. A highlight, a short conversation snippet, a Bible verse, a few sentences that can stand alone. Not a chapter dump. Not a book summary. Not a sticky note you’ll never find again. ...

The Observation Paul Ampe would dictate letters. I didn’t know shorthand. So I’d catch the sense, then put the words back in his mouth. Paraphrase first. Then write like him. That was only the start of the drill. Sometimes I had to research. I’d dig, report back, and he’d dictate again from what we’d learned. Shared thinking. His knowledge and my research mixed into one letter. The page left the building as his voice, for his practice, for the client. Not as a memo that announced I had synthesized something clever in the back room. ...

When AI commoditizes text generation, the natural gravity of human behavior is “normal drift,” gravitating toward low defaults and “easy peasy chat” while expecting a “silver magic bullet.” To survive this without losing my own original thinking, I’ve realized I cannot rely on self-discipline or raw willpower alone. I need a triple-layered cognitive defense system: The Tactical Defense (The Code Layer): Encoding Socratic pushback, friction, and accountability directly into the custom agentic skills I build. I don’t just open a ChatGPT tab; I build systems designed to actively resist my own laziness. The Contextual Defense (The Data Layer): Operating under the law of reciprocity. Deep sparring requires deep context. If I don’t build a dense, custom vault of actual thinking, the system has no leverage to push back, and the dialogue collapses back to generic out-of-the-box templates. The Meta-Cognitive Defense (The Mindset Layer): Active self-awareness of my own blindness and non-original thinking. Recognizing that I am naturally prone to low-effort defaults, and deliberately hunting for those defaults inside my daily work. Without these layers, I am just defaulting to convenience and calling it innovation. ...