AI has changed how much I can get done—and how quickly I can do it.
It’s not a small difference. It’s huge.
For years, I’ve kept handwritten notes. I use red ink to mark tasks, ideas, things I don’t want to forget. For a long time, those notes came with a price: I had to sit down and manually type each item into my task manager. One at a time. Slowly. Carefully.
Now, I take pictures of those notes, feed them into AI, and a custom GPT separates out the red ink and turns it into a clean task list. What used to take hours now takes minutes. Easily ten to twenty times faster.
The same thing happened recently with my social media cover images. I spent about an hour updating them by clearly describing what I wanted—call to action, color palette, layout. The last time I did this, I hired someone on Fiverr. That meant time finding the right person, time explaining what I wanted, money, and waiting. The result back then was good. What I did in an hour with AI was better. And I’m okay saying that.
And then there’s something bigger I’m working on now—something I simply could not have done before.
I’m taking my handwritten notes, LinkedIn newsletter articles, books, Word documents, social posts, and more, and putting them into one large, searchable database so I can answer questions long after I’m gone. Tentatively, I’m calling it PhilGPT. That idea doesn’t exist without AI.
So yes—AI has been a massive accelerator.
It’s made me more effective. More efficient. And, somewhat unexpectedly, it brought a new character into my life.
I call him Imposter Ivan.
The Birth of Ivan
Early on, I’d write something with ChatGPT and immediately hear his voice:
That’s not how you write.
Or worse: That’s way smarter than you.
It felt like I was slowly handing over the steering wheel.
I’ve always said AI should be the co-pilot—not the pilot. And yet, especially early on, there were moments when it felt like AI was flying the plane and I was just hoping we landed safely.
Here’s what I eventually realized about Imposter Ivan.
He’s loud. He’s persistent. He’s very confident.
And he contributes absolutely nothing useful.
The discomfort I felt wasn’t because AI was doing things well. It was because of where it couldn’t.
One place that became immediately clear was humor.
I have a video series called Darcy’s Daily Dad Joke, where I animate our puppy and have her tell a dad joke. I asked ChatGPT to help write the jokes. Technically, they were fine. Structurally sound. Grammatically correct.
And not funny.
Not by my standards, anyway.
So I scrapped them. I wrote some myself. I researched lesser-known dad jokes. The final product worked—but only because I stepped back in.
That experience clarified something important.
I don’t want AI to replace creativity.
I want it to remove friction.
How I Came to This Realization
There wasn’t a single lightning-bolt moment. From the beginning, the goal was simple: automate the things I’m not good at so I can spend more time on the things I am. The mundane tasks. The admin work. The things I’d happily hand off to an assistant if I had one sitting next to me.
AI became that assistant.
Roughly 80% of what I use AI for falls into that category—tasks that would take me longer and where I don’t add meaningful value by doing them myself. That frees me up to brainstorm. To work things out on a whiteboard. To think.
It also frees up time to play with the dogs.
Or teach them new dad jokes.
That’s where Imposter Ivan loses his leverage.
As long as AI is the co-pilot, you’re not cheating. If you hand everything off and add none of your experience, judgment, or context, then yes—that’s a problem. People can tell. And they won’t value the result.
But using AI to save time, reduce friction, and support your process—while keeping your voice and direction intact—that’s not cheating.
That’s just being smart.
And if AI removes the friction while you supply the judgment, experience, and heart, Imposter Ivan doesn’t get a vote.