Hello!
Sorry for the silence here. I’ve been quiet here for the last month, thanks to lots of hours in the lab (on my laptop) working on new projects and workshops, and spending quality time with family overseas.
Since taking a pause from writing, I’ve found it almost impossible to have a conversation about AI where ROI is not mentioned (RoAI?). The last few years seem to all be about innovation, creativity, and imagination with AI. And now that we’ve been building more with it, the skepticism is higher than ever.
My take is that people who aren’t getting returns on AI are pointing AI at the wrong things in the wrong way to start with. So today’s post is about putting AI to work in simple ways on boring tasks - not because it’s easy, but because it’s more valuable than you might think.
Enjoy!!
I built an AI agent that does something incredibly simple. It takes meeting transcripts and creates tasks in ClickUp.
That’s it.
No fancy orchestration. No RAG. No sophisticated reasoning. Just: transcript in, properly structured tasks out.
And this boring thing has become the most valuable AI work I’ve done as a 1-person team.
Not because it saves time. Not because it’s technically impressive. But because it revealed something I’d been thinking about backwards.
The Ceiling Problem
Every AI demo I see is about raising the ceiling. Write better than you could possibly today. Analyze data in a way you didn’t think was possible. Do things you couldn’t do before. Make your best work even better.
And I get it. That’s exciting. That’s what gets funded and celebrated and shared on LinkedIn.
But watch what actually happens when people try to use AI this way.
They want it to make them better writers, so they feed it their drafts. The output is... fine? Different? It doesn’t quite sound like them. They spend more time editing the AI’s version than they would have just writing it themselves.
They want it to analyze their business data in new ways. So they build complex dashboards with multiple models. It breaks in weird ways. The insights are technically correct but somehow miss what matters.
They’re chasing capabilities they don’t have. Trying to raise a ceiling that doesn’t need raising. And it exhausts them because they’re trying to become someone they’re not.
The Floor Problem
Here’s what I realized building this agent:
My problem was never that my best work wasn’t good enough. My problem was that my worst work was terrible.
On a good day, when I’m focused and energized, I do fine. I have good conversations. I make smart commitments. I follow through. That’s my ceiling - and it’s probably high enough.
On a bad day? When I’m tired or distracted or just overwhelmed?
I forget things. I drop balls. I lose track of what I committed to. My ClickUp instance becomes a graveyard of half-captured information that doesn’t reflect reality. That’s my floor - and it’s way too low.
The floor is what actually kills you. Not your best days. Your worst ones.
What Raising the Floor Looks Like
After every meeting, my agent processes the transcript. It knows my ClickUp structure. It creates tasks the way they’re supposed to be created: proper descriptions, realistic due dates, clear dependencies, appropriate priority.
It does this every single time. Doesn’t matter if I’m having a great day or a terrible one. Doesn’t matter if I’m energized or exhausted. The operational discipline happens consistently.
That’s what raising the floor means.
I didn’t get better at project management. I didn’t develop new capabilities. I just stopped being as bad at it on my worst days.
And since I’ve turned it live, it’s become the quickest-to-ROI investment than any ceiling-raising project would have been.
Because when I open ClickUp now, I can trust it. I can see what I committed to without trying to remember. I know what’s blocking what. I have the context I need. The system actually works.
Not because I got better. Because my floor got higher.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
Most people I talk to - especially solopreneurs and fractional folks - have the same pattern.
They’re good at their core work. On their best days, they’re genuinely excellent. They don’t need AI to make them better at that.
But they’re drowning in the operational stuff around it. Project management. Follow-ups. Documentation. All the boring discipline that lets you actually execute on the work you’re good at.
That operational floor is low. And it costs them constantly.
They drop follow-ups after networking calls. They lose track of client commitments. Their systems don’t reflect reality, so they can’t trust them, so they stop using them, which makes everything worse.
They don’t need to raise their ceiling. They need to raise their floor.
And that’s what AI can actually do right now, today, without any sophisticated architecture or complex prompting or months of implementation.
It can just handle the boring stuff. Consistently. Every time. Regardless of what kind of day you’re having.
The High Agency Trap
Here’s the specific way this shows up for high-agency people.
We’re good at seeing opportunities and moving fast. We’re comfortable with ambiguity. We can hold a lot in our heads at once. Those are real strengths.
But those strengths come with a specific weakness: we’re terrible at operational discipline.
And we’ve accepted this as the trade-off. You can be operationally disciplined, or you can be high-agency, but probably not both. The discipline feels like it would slow us down.
But what if that’s wrong?
What if you could maintain operational discipline without it constraining how you work? What if the boring stuff just happened automatically, without you having to change who you are or how you operate?
That’s what raising the floor actually enables. You get to keep being yourself - having conversations, making commitments, moving fast. You just stop paying the constant tax of inconsistent operations.
Your worst days stop being as bad. And everything else gets easier.
What Changes
I’m not prescribing that everyone build ClickUp agents.
But the pattern matters: we’re obsessed with AI giving us superhuman capabilities when the most valuable thing it can do is prevent us from being subhuman on our bad days.
The boring operational work we know matters but never maintain. The systems we build with good intentions and then abandon. The gap between how we should work and how we actually work.
That gap costs us constantly. And for solopreneurs especially, there’s no one else to cover it.
Maybe AI’s real value isn’t doing things we can’t do. Maybe it’s consistently doing the things we should do but won’t. The boring, unglamorous operational work that creates the foundation for everything else.
Maybe instead of asking “how can AI expand my capabilities,” we should ask “where do I consistently fail, and can AI just handle that?”
The answer is probably yes. And raising your floor turns out to be more valuable than raising your ceiling.
Because you can’t build anything sustainable on a shaky foundation. Even if you’re building with AI.