Hello, fellow tinkerer 👋

Happy Thursday. I failed to get this wrapped up and sent yesterday because a) my kids didn't have school Monday or Tuesday of this week, and b) yesterday was my middle child's birthday. He's now 14, so I was having a very real, "Where does the time go??" moment.

1) Reflection:

I'm in a few Slack channels where friends/colleagues share their experiments with AI tools. On the one hand, it's really exciting (I'm a nerd about stuff like that). On the other, it's really overwhelming. I run a solo business that needs my attention and I have three kids.
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My experimentation and "tinkering" in the past is often something I can do in one sitting, see an outcome (or not) and then write about it. A lot of these capabilities are much bigger and require me to rethink how I have my systems set up.

I recently read an article about AI brain fry, which is defined as "mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity." I'm not there yet, but I can see that as a really easy leap — and an even greater risk for people working for an employer who are expected to always to more and produce more.

I've got no words of wisdom, other than AI brain fry is something I'm keeping on my radar as I continue to experiment.

2) Product

If you're finding yourself totally overwhelmed by AI, Anthropic has some free courses. Some are specific to Claude and some are more general about AI fluency.

(Or sign up for my AMA session and ask me questions directly 😁)

3) Tip

Like everyone, I've got approximately 1,000,000 screenshots saved on my phone. Some are funny memes. Some are actual things I might want to use or reference later.

I set up a simple workflow in Zapier to extract the text of my screenshots and send them to my note-taking app. If you want to set up the same, here are the instructions.

Want more ideas?

→ In December, I switched from ChatGPT to Claude. You can read more about that here.
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→ If you're feeling overwhelmed with managing your time in general, I recently updated my free guide to managing your time and content.

That's it for this issue of Tinkering! See you again in two weeks.

Cheers,
Anna

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