You finally compile your giant to-do list, big-picture goals, and half-baked ideas into one place… only to freeze when it’s time to turn them into a workable weekly plan. The browser tabs promise productivity hacks and shiny new AI tools, but a little voice in your head whispers: “Isn’t it cheating to let tech do this for me?”
If you’ve ever felt guilty about using shortcuts, second-guessed whether you’re “doing it right,” or struggled to stick with a planning system, this episode is for you.
In this episode, I’m diving into the mindset blocks and practical strategies around using AI tools (like ChatGPT!) for planning and productivity, especially for entrepreneurs navigating limited time, busy brains, and way too many tabs open (literally and mentally). We’ll talk about what helps, what doesn’t, and why there’s no one right way to stay on top of your business tasks.
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Here’s what I cover:
- How to use AI tools for planning, organizing, and decision-making (without the guilt spiral)
- Why we glorify struggle and feel weird about “easy” solutions in business
- Real stories of clients who used ChatGPT to turn chaos into clarity
- When it does make sense to outsource and automate, and when it doesn’t
- The sneaky downside of letting tech do all the thinking for you
- Essential mindset skills for follow-through: handling resistance, perfectionism, and fear of doing it “wrong”
This episode will give you a permission slip to use the tools that support your brain, your bandwidth, and your goals, while keeping the heart and creativity in your business.
Where in your business do you still feel like you have to “do it the hard way”? What would shift if you let it be easier? Take a screenshot while listening and tag me @kirstyknightcoaching on Instagram — I’d love to hear your take and celebrate your permission-to-simplify moments!
If you want more support aligning your tools, time, and mindset, make sure you’re subscribed at KirstyKnightCoaching.com for freebies, updates, and upcoming productivity resources.
Connect with Kirsty:
More about The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
The podcast to help you, as an ambitious high-achieving Type-A woman, master work-life balance as a business owner.
Join Kirsty Knight each week, so she can help you create the level of success you truly desire, in a business that you love, without needing to sacrifice time for yourself, your health, your family, and your enjoyment of life outside of your business. Without hustling, without working yourself into the ground, and without burning out.
Kirsty will be sharing lessons from her own business journey, business strategies, time management and productivity hacks, and the psychology you need to understand – to help you go from overworking and overwhelmed, to mastering your time and productivity, so you can be working less, and earning more.
If you are trying to build or scale your business, but find yourself struggling with overwhelm, self-sabotage, procrastination, distractions, perfectionism, people-pleasing, hustling, overworking and always thinking “there just aren’t enough hours in the day”, this podcast is for you.
You CAN have it all. And she’s going to show you how.
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of the The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
Good morning lovelies, how are you today?
So today’s episode I wanted to just talk about something that has come up in recent sessions with my clients around the use of AI in helping you plan and helping you be more productive
So one particular client has just been diagnosed with ADHD which she’d suspected for awhile but I hadn’t got an official diagnosis on. But what she had known was that she found it incredibly difficult categorising her to dos, putting them into a calendar into some kind of order and in a way that would give her a plan to follow through throughout the day.
She could do a brainstorm of everything that she needed to do in her business and what she needs to remember, all the to do’s that were weighing on her but then she would get stuck
She found it very difficult to then make sense of that information and plot it into her schedule
And she came to the call yesterday to tell me that she’d put it all into ChatGPT had told it what the priorities were and asked it. How would you structure my day based on all of this information? How would you plan my week?
And it had created a schedule for her. And she said it had been helpful. She said it made her realise she didn’t have as much free time as she thought. Which is one of the reasons why I recommend scheduling because it’s a visual representation of exactly the amount of time that you’ve got an exactly the things that you’re trying to fit into that time. So you can quite clearly see if the math adds up. If your time supply, the amount of hours you have to work on your business, matches your time demand, the number of things demanding time from you. She had also found it incredibly useful to give her direction throughout the day. She had been more productive. Which is another reason why I advocate for having a plan your time. Because one of the biggest productivity saboteurs is in the moment not knowing what to do. That lack of clarity that leads you to looking for something to do and feeling overwhelmed by all the options. And lead you to doing things that aren’t necessarily gonna move the needle in your business. Or to you just wasting time in general.
So that was all incredibly validating for the methods that I use and teach my clients to use.
But one of the things that she had said was that she felt it was cheating. She was asking me was it okay that she used AI to plan her week.
This might not be something that you are concerned about, and I hope it isn’t and I’m going to explain why now, but just in case you were feeling like using AI is cheating, I wanted to do this episode for you.
Because it’s actually not just about AI. It’s about the subliminal message underneath that if you take an easier route. One that requires less effort that feels easier that maybe other people can’t have or don’t have access to. That takes less time. Less struggle from you. That you are somehow cheating.
That it’s somehow wrong
You could think this also about using Facebook ads instead of organic marketing
You could think this about outsourcing to a marketing agency instead of you doing it yourself
You could think this about hiring someone instead of you doing it yourself
You could think this about outsourcing your website to a website designer instead of you learning how to build a website yourself
You could also think this about leveraging other peoples audiences instead of just building your own
And the reason I know this is because not just other clients, but I have also had similar feelings around those things
Because of the messaging that you are hearing in the industry
Because people who you look up to or who are further ahead than you where you want to be are saying things like you should not outsource anything until you know exactly how to do it yourself
You should never outsource copywriting and marketing because no one will ever say it like you
Other people have spent time and money and effort at building those audiences. You shouldn’t then go in and poach from those audiences.
And let me be clear here I’m not talking about going in and stealing or slightly trying to show up in other audiences to get them to come to you – I’m talking about being invited as a guest pitching to speak in someone in front of someone else’s audience and then still feeling like you’re cheating because if they do follow you, you didn’t create them organically
People people saying you shouldn’t need to hire anyone in your business yet because they didn’t need to hire until they reached 1 million
People saying they reached 600 K organically
I’m sure you will have heard people saying things like this
And the trouble is is when we see somebody who’s further ahead than us and when they are sharing what they did to create it, we automatically put them on a pedestal, we automatically assume that their way was the right way because it worked for them and we apply it to ourselves, that that’s how we should be doing it and if we don’t do it that way or if we aren’t doing it that way we are somehow doing it wrong
What’s underneath? This is really a fear of us failing that fear of us failing which is totally normal and natural for our brain to be afraid of that because in the caveman days failure would’ve meant being eaten by a tiger so we have a stronger version to it.
The trouble is that fear of failing has us looking for clues to succeed and it has us weighing those clues more heavily than our own internal instincts on our own internal judgements
And it blind us to the fact that actually everything that we’re going to lie in our business comes from failure
And that nobody else else’s path to success is actually going to be the same as our path to success
So that’s The first reason I think we feel like we’re cheating
And then the second reason is that sometimes we glorify hard work and effort – we tie whether or not we deserve something to how hard we work for it – and this has come from societal conditioning this also comes from parental conditioning.
It also comes from lots of messages around hard work equal success
And again, that’s all underpinned with our desire to get it right
The question is a little bit bigger and deeper than just using AI cheating
What we really want to be asking is what does cheating even mean
Why do we have this notion that I can’t have something unless I’ve worked really hard for it?
Why am I glorifying struggle?
And do I like my reasons?
Because it’s not that I’m saying that’s wrong that’s bad
What I’m saying is everything that you believe that is running the show of how you operate in the world
you want to be doing that consciously
You want to be aware of the programming driving you
And you wanna make sure that it’s serving you and that you are consciously deciding to think like that
Not because somebody else has told you that that’s how you should think
My personal opinion on AI is that it’s a tool just like scheduling is a tool
And tools can be very helpful for us to get where we want to go
And if there’s a tool that’s available to us that will get us there faster or more enjoyable way
And we want to use it there is nothing wrong with us using it
If you find something particularly challenging and there’s a tool that helps make it easier use the tool if you want to use the tool
And the reason why I’m saying if you want to
Because sometimes you might want to develop the skill
Sometimes you might want to think about how can you get your brain on board with something?
How you can create a system to make it easier for your brain to do the thing
Sometimes you don’t wanna just bypass the hard part
Because you want to learn how to do that skill
And that’s fine too
I don’t ever care to learn about coding or designing a website so I will outsource my tech because I don’t see the value in me spending more time than necessary struggling with it when I could be spending my time on other areas of my business that take me where I wanna go fast faster
But I’m quite happy to spend my time thinking about content and marketing and my clients and I don’t want to outsource my writing or my coaching because I love doing it and I want to get better at the skill of coaching and marketing and writing and creating content
You know there’s a train that takes you right up to the top of Mount Snowdon. This is the Mountain that we have here in Wales in Snowdonia. So if you don’t want to walk you can save time and effort and energy by getting on the train to go when you wanna go
Does that mean everyone should get on that train? Because it saves you time and effort and energy.
No. Some people want to hike. They want to put the time in on the mountain. They want to feel the leg burn and that’s okay.
So just like the train you get to decide if you want to use AI to schedule.
And just one other thing to add here is to not make yourself wrong for doing that. Not make yourself wrong for having a brain that finds this particular thing challenging. Just because somebody else finds it easy to sort through a bunch of information and make decisions about where it goes on the calendar. It doesn’t mean anything has gone wrong that you don’t. Just like Usain Bolt can run pretty fast. Or Michael Phelps swim really well. It doesn’t mean the rest of the world is broken that we can’t match them. All of our brains and bodies find some things easier than others.
And that’s okay
It doesn’t mean that you can’t create the life that you want for yourself
It just means that sometimes it makes more sense to have a tool help you
So hopefully that helps with that.
And then the second topic that has come up in sessions around AI and using it to be more productive
Is how useful really is it in saving you time…and helping you be productive and what are the costs of that
And I’ll just preface this with I am no AI expert
I will probably get someone who is an AI expert at some point to share their wisdom?
I am not at all tech inclined so I think that my opinion is not going to be the most qualified opinion out there and it will probably change as I lean more in to using AI
But what I will say is this if you have the know how and you are willing to invest time upfront in creating systems in training AI on your methods and your knowledge and your approach and your voice because there is an upfront investment of time required to do that
If you are able to do that and you do it well it is irrefutable that AI will be useful in saving you time and producing things
Whether that is copy, Sales page, a funnel, social media posts the lot.
And regarding whether or not that’s cheating, take the same thinking as above and apply it
What I will say, though
Is that I think you still have to be mindful that you don’t fall down the trap of thinking that just because you can produce more in less time, the more is the solution
Because I think that there is a danger that you could be creating more just for the sake of creating more
Because it can take you two seconds to put out a post and so you do
Without much rhyme or reason as to what that post is doing
So I think it’s important to consider is this actually being productive?
Is this a productive use of AI time
Because of course, there is an environmental cost of using AI
I also think that there is a danger of outsourcing all of your creativity and problem-solving to AI
That in doing that, it’s making AI more valuable but not your brain
And you could argue that that’s not a problem
Much in the same way that we don’t have to memorise our times tables anymore or even have to have that much knowledge in our heads about the world because we could just be one Google search away from the answer or one button on the calculator
Maybe that hasn’t had a negative impact on our brain’s real estate and maybe this will be the same
But I have a hunch that it won’t be
Because there will be other intangible benefits in your life that come from you having the ability to be creative and problem solve with your brain not just with a computer
And so that’s something else to consider
And then, lastly, I think that as the competition starts to use and rely upon AI more and more for their productivity and their content creation there will be a greater need for you to stand out as a human
Because at the end of the day, we are social beings and even if we can get the answer from a computer you often rather pay someone to tell us
We would rather have a conversation with a real human being, even if we could have the same conversation with a computer
And so yes, I would say use the tools available to you to help you get more done without guilt without feeling like you’re cheating AND keep your brain fresh so you can use it when you need to and when you want to AND work on the fears and discomfort you have around being more authentic vulnerably you so that you can show up more in your content as you.
And then the last thing I wanted to talk about today is the fact that even if you have a perfectly calendared week, even if AI has helped you schedule everything neatly and in the right order with the right priorities in the right quantities not forgetting anything
You still have to be able to honour the plan
You still have to be able to follow that calendar
And that is a separate skill set to planning
It’s actually multiple skill sets
Because there’s a skill set of not giving into urges to do other things that aren’t on your calendar at that time
There’s the skill set of making yourself do things that you would rather avoid and overcoming all the fears and anxieties your subconscious mind has around certain tasks and the potential outcomes of said tasks
There’s a skill set of not having perfectionism have you take twice as long to do the thing than you allowed?
And both of these things are things I ended up coaching my client on – because whilst she had the perfectly mapped out calendar, she was stuck on what she wanted to say in her emails – because of a fear of not getting it right, being judged for her opinions,potentially not having it received well.
So those are still challenges you will have to face, or potentially get coaching on.
There’s also the skill set of getting yourself into a flow state
And then trusting yourself that if you allow yourself to carry on in that flow state you will get the other things tended to later
There’s a skill set of stopping work when you said you were gonna stop work even when the temptation arises for you to carry on
There’s the skill set of not allowing other people to interrupt your flow and saying no instead of people pleasing when other requests and demands for your time is made.
Or of distracting yourself when you’re in the middle of a task
There’s also the skill start of keeping yourself in a positive state of mind and not slipping into critical self talk when things are not going well
There’s the skill set of motivating yourself to get things done on your calendar
And as much as you might like to outsource those skillsets to AI and who knows maybe you will be able to with some
Right now, AI is only gonna get you so far
If you currently don’t know how to do any of those things how to manage your brain to get yourself to take action how to overcome the resistance and affair and the procrastination and the perfectionism and the people pleasing and all of the things getting in the way of you getting more done in last time
Then make sure you’re on my email list
So that you can get up-to-date with my latest offers
And so you can start learning how to do those things today
That’s it for today, my friends. I’ll see you next time
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