Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should

If you didn’t know, I love to crochet, which means people are always sending me pictures of things they want me to make.

A while back, someone sent me a picture of men’s crocheted shorts and “dared me” to make them for my husband.

To which I replied, “Just because I can doesn’t mean I should.”

(because he’d probably actually wear them just to embarrass our 2 young teenage daughters, and I don’t want to be responsible for scarring them for life 🤣)

That phrase has been my mantra for months now about investing time, money, and energy into AI tools just because someone said, “Look what I’m doing, isn’t this so cool?”

And yes, it probably IS cool, which is why I made the exact rookie mistake I warned so many others about.

If you saw my post or read my email yesterday, you know I was on a panel with some seriously brilliant AI people.

One guy was doing things in Claude Code that genuinely blew my mind.

I got off that call feeling inspired (read: slightly triggered), and I immediately signed up for Claude.

I told myself I was just going to “poke around and explore.” (You know how that goes.)

I was too intimidated to play with the code option, but I’ve heard amazing things about Claude Cowork, and within about 20 minutes, I was deep in the trenches, trying to get it to clean up my entire CRM.

I’m talking contacts, pipeline, the whole thing. A task I had been putting off for weeks.

And here’s where it gets embarrassing…

3 hours later, I had accomplished, well, very, VERY little.

Not because Claude CoWork isn’t a powerful tool. It absolutely is, and I’m actually excited to learn it. But because I didn’t have a clear picture of what “cleaned up” even meant for my CRM.

At first, I felt wowed by what the AI was telling me it could do, but in truth, I wasn’t actually getting anything done.

In a nutshell, I was just throwing vague instructions at it and hoping it would figure out the thing I hadn’t figured out myself.

I didn’t have a system for the cleanup. I didn’t have steps. I just had a task I was avoiding and a shiny new tool that felt like a shortcut.

But it wasn’t a shortcut. It was a rabbit hole.

When I finally stopped and actually thought about it, like sat down with a regular chat window and said, “Okay, here’s what my CRM looks like, here’s what’s bugging me, help me figure out what done actually looks like,” the whole thing got simple.

Turns out all I needed to do was run a few filters and delete contacts that didn’t belong in my pipeline anymore.

The actual task took me about 15 minutes.

Yup. Fifteen. Whopping. Minutes.

So I spent three hours trying to use a tool I don’t fully know yet to avoid a 15-minute task I just didn’t feel like doing.

I say all that to say this…I got caught feeling FOMO around AI and got sucked into AI-tool shiny object syndrome, and just because I could use AI to do it doesn’t mean I should have.

And I think this is happening to a lot of us right now. There are SO many AI tools available, and they’re all impressive, and it’s really tempting to reach for one every time something feels hard.

But if you don’t actually know what you’re trying to accomplish, if you don’t have a simple process or even a definition of “done, ” AI isn’t going to save you (even if you “know how to use AI”)

It’s just going to give you a more sophisticated way to spin your wheels.

The first step is to get clear on what you’re actually trying to do. Map it out. Define done. Yes, use your fav LLM to help with this part!

And then decide whether using AI is going to speed that process up or slow you down in a super stealthy kind of way you weren’t expecting.

Weekly Challenge

So here’s your challenge this week: think of one task you’ve been avoiding.

1. Open up whatever AI tool you like, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever, and just have a conversation about it.
   
2. Tell it what you’re stuck on. Ask it to help you figure out what done looks like, or what steps you’d need to take.
   
   Don’t try to get it to do the task. Just use it to think through the task. You’ll be surprised how fast things move once you actually know what you’re doing!
   
3. If, and only if, the task lends itself to being improved or repeated by AI, then, by all means, use it!

Truth be told, I will likely find a way to have Claude Work regularly clean up my CRM for me…after I nail down the process.

Next Steps

And if building systems and figuring out where AI actually fits in your business is the part that trips you up… that is literally my zone of genius.

Next week I’m hosting a free live webinar called Escape the To-Do List Treadmill: The Smarter Way to Use AI in Your Business on Thursday, April 16, from 1:00–2:00 PM EST.

I’m pulling back the curtain on my own business, showing you the 4 main systems I’ve built and how I’m actually leveraging AI to make them faster and make my life easier.

You should be there, so register here if you haven’t already. And if you have, invite a friend!

Friend, if you have gotten swept up in the whirlwind and feel like you are floating in the AI abyss, let me be a lifeline, not because it never happens to me, but because I have been there and know the way back.