“I wish my task manager would tell me what to do without me having to date everything.” / “I would love it if my calendar would schedule my day for me.”

These are two of many similar comments I have recently received, and they worry me. Why would you want a computer to tell you what to do? Isn’t that the stuff of nightmares? When we allow computers to tell us what to do, we essentially turn the film franchise The Matrix into reality.

There are a whole load of issues here. The first is that, in theory, it would be nice to look at your calendar and see it all nicely organised and your day scheduled for you; in reality, computers do not know how you are feeling. They do not know how you slept last night or whether you had a fight with your partner that morning. It knows nothing about you as a human being.

A few months ago, I was shown a feature in Outlook Calendar that automatically filled your free spots with suggested focus work times. The person showing me it was amazed. She thought it was a genius feature until I pointed out that perhaps doing focus work on Thursday afternoon might not be the best thing for her to do. What if what she really needed was to go out for a walk or take a rest?

I can imagine in the future, we will feel we need to stop for twenty minutes to get some air, but we don’t because our computer tells us that the best use of our time at that moment is to sit back down at our desks and do some focused work.

Do you really want that? I hope not.

Many AI features are great. They do help us to be more productive. I love how my phone can predict what I might want to search for based on the time of day I am searching. For instance, I often use my phone to search for topics on YouTube in the evening while sitting in front of the TV. As soon as I tap the search button on my phone, without doing anything else, YouTube is there at the top of my search screen.

I also love how I can take scrambled meeting notes, put them into ChatGTP and ask it to tidy them up, and within a few seconds, I have a beautifully organised set of notes.

However, there are limits to where you want technology to control your life. Allowing tech to tell you what to do is scary. You are a human being with independent thoughts. It’s that ability to make choices that make you uniquely human. Trees, plants and other living organisms do not have that ability. If you take away the freedom to make decisions, you take away the essence of being human.

A computer has no feelings. Rather than taking the morning off to visit your dying grandparent in the hospice, your computer will tell you to make twenty sales calls or do two hours of deep, focused work. Is that the best use of your time in that moment? No, it isn’t. (I hope you did not need me to tell you that.)

There are two areas in which you do not want AI to operate. That is your task manager and calendar. These are the tools you use to decide where you spend your time and what you will do with it. It’s where your freedom lies. You have the freedom to decide whether you write the report you need to write or take your dog for a walk. Your calendar and task manager let you decide when to do your deeper-focused work today. It means you can choose when you respond to your email or nap.

The same applies to when you do your weekly planning. You do not want AI telling you what you should be focused on next week. That decision should always remain exclusively yours.

However, AI-generated meeting minutes, standard email replies and presentation outlines are great uses for AI. You remain in control; you tell it what to do — like having your own personal assistant. It can also be helpful to break down complex concepts and find answers to problems. The difference between using technology this way and allowing it to control your day is what makes you human.

Technology should serve you, not the other way around. Never forget that. It’s your ability to make independent decisions about how you spend your time that makes you a functioning human being. So, taking twenty minutes or so to plan out your week and allowing ten minutes at the end of the day to plan the next should never be delegated to computers. If you do that, you have effectively put yourself into a pod where highly advanced machines leach your body’s heat for energy — AKA living inside the Matrix.

Thank you for reading my stories! 😊

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