I Only Do Anything Once

I was walking someone through my setup this morning and caught myself saying the same thing over and over, so I might as well write it down.

I only do anything once. The goal is to never have to do repeat work. And I'm talking about not just in the system, but in life in general.

Here's the example I keep coming back to. How many times have you had to look up something related to Ubiquiti stuff? When you look up stuff, you're always like, yeah, go look up this, or go look up that, and you think about, okay, what was it called? It was Firewall Pro, I think. It was Ubiquiti WiFi 7 AP or whatever.

You already knew that. You knew it six months ago. You looked it up then too.

That's the shape of the waste.

Hard problems are memorable, and you only get them once anyway. So they're fine. The expensive thing is the small retrieval you have already done a dozen times and will do a dozen more, each one costing four minutes and a thin slice of attention, none of which you ever bill to anyone.

So now I have skills for everything in my life. I have a skill for the home in general. I have a skill for network, which is Ubiquiti stuff. The home one includes my Hue, cameras, and it includes my studio lights and stuff like that. Without additional context required.

The lookup happened once. And the only thing I paid extra for was writing down what I found, in a place my AI reads by default. Now it's gone as a category of work.

Building the skill is the easy half. Noticing is the hard one.

What do I do day to day as a human, which I don't even realize is an annoyance and constant churn and noise and repeated effort? We have to find those things. We have to list them and say, how can I get my harness to automate those things for me?

And that's genuinely difficult, because you've normalized all of it.

The friction goes invisible the same way a heavy pack goes invisible after an hour on the trail. You stop feeling the weight. You just get tired earlier than you should and can't say why.

So use a different signal.

If you're ever thinking about it and you're thinking, hmm, I really wish I could do that one day, that's the tell. That sentence is your brain quietly pricing a task as too expensive to keep doing by hand, which is exactly the information you want.

Write it down. That list is your build queue.

I think we are imprisoned by this idea that we have to deal with the specifics and we have to put our focus on the tech itself. When in fact, I think we should be way zoomed out and thinking, what do I want as a human?

So most people are pointing AI at going faster on the treadmill. Get off it instead.

Notes

1. 🤖 AIL 2: These are my words, taken from a recorded conversation this morning and lightly cleaned up. Kai, my AI assistant, pulled the transcript, picked the idea, arranged the sections, and made the header image. Learn more about AIL.