If you are anything like me, then every time you see a blank page, you’re probably paralyzed. Every time I start a new project, it’s such a pain to get those first couple of words together, whether it be the first sentence in a blog post or a first recording in a video.
So, getting past that first hill is crucial.
One of the things I’ve been focused on trying to figure out over the past couple of months is how to get through that first hill. And I feel as though AI does have a benefit here in terms of getting you past that bump. If I tell an AI to draft my blog post with X bullet points or draft a blog post with X title or draft a blog post with X stuff in mind, it’ll give me something. That something won’t good, for sure, and I’ll have to edit a lot. But editing it, I find, is much easier than staring at that blank page. Because of this, my new strategy in making blog posts is to dictate them (via Otter.ai — easier to just say my thoughts to a phone as stream-of-consciousness), then have an AI edit it (makes it coherent, from “stream of consciousness” to “first rough draft of post”), and then I do last pass editing (actually making it sound like I wrote it). I’ve found this process is a lot faster than writing it wholesale myself, even with the heavy edits, and that’s because it avoids the first hill problem.
So, I think there is a benefit if you use AI just to get you motivated into working. Staring at a blank page and trying to figure out how to write a first draft of something that you’re not really super interested in writing can end up taking you a couple of hours just to get something down on paper. But if you just have the AI generate something, you look at it, you’re like, “Oh, this is terrible. Now I’m motivated to edit this work that is garbage and fix it.” That’s going to take you a lot less time because you’re not going to be starting at that blank page. So that’s just a small detail of what I think is beneficial when it comes to me and how I use AI.
