This past week I was on the BasicAF show to talk all about AI workflows.

The technology has advanced at a rapid pace, that it can now operate a computer like a human.

At the same time most of the tools don’t live up to the marketing hype.

BTW I renamed this publication to Press Pause and migrated platforms from Substack to Beehiiv.

This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about here.

I spent days agonizing over what I should call the newsletter.

I wasn’t in love with The Digital Pulse anymore as a name and I want to move away from the newsletter being a re-post of my videos, to offer something unique and personalized to what I’m thinking and doing as it relates to the technology and productivity systems that I build and test.

At first I tried to have Claude come up with a name. “Claude, I am rebranding my newsletter, come up with 5 to 10 new names”

All 10 were garbage. Not even worth the tokens that were burned to generate them.

A few more days of journaling and I put together a list of the top 10 newsletter names that I love and why.

I found 5 that I thought were painfully average and put all these into the prompt box and asked for 20 more suggestions.

10 messages later and all I had were a bunch of names that were fine.

Nothing jumped out that I wanted to scream to the world “This is my new publication!”

Then this morning I sit down to write and instantly had a great YouTube video idea. It has been awhile since that has happened.

I wrote.

Then it hits me. A few of the newsletters I like are also podcasts.

I have a podcast. I like the name of it.

Why don’t I just call the newsletter Press Pause? It is about slowing down and being more intentional with tech, rather than falling for the hype cycles and blindly buying things that I don’t need.

And there is the problem.

I had to sit with that discomfort for awhile.

Sitting with that discomfort long enough to come up with my own ideas and conclusions.

This is the future.

When I outsource my thinking to AI, I lose all sense of ownership.

Having AI finish a thought or eliminate the struggle might seem inconsequential, but it’s killed my motivation more times than I can count.

Claude can give me endless content ideas or the perfect hook, but I’ve never felt so disconnected from a process while actively making myself avoid the one thing that will give me satisfaction.

Doing the work.