This morning I was pondering and contemplating all the things I've been able to work on and accomplish and get out into the world (both publicly and privately) since I started using a markdown vault to help me work with AI.
And then it hit me. It feels like I was born in the right time. A time when I'd be able to leverage all these awesome tools to bring so many of my ideas to life. I've just been flooded with feelings of excitement and enthusiasm for accomplishing and building things.
Even though many of them are mundane. Like organizing my pantry. (This goes back to a few years ago, when I first built a meal planner in Notion that automatically created shopping lists for me based on my pantry inventory and the recipes I selected.)
None of this came from the AI. The AI is helping me scale my own skills and competencies. Here are a few things from my past that are all serving me very well in the current age of agentic AI.
I've used Todoist for at least 10 years. But it wasn't just the tool, which made for a great capture and organizing system. It was the methodology. I was excited, inspired, and fell in love with the Getting Things Done method by David Allen. It has served me so well over the years, both when I'm using it strictly and in modified versions, since I've found that different seasons of my life have required different adaptations of it.
There's the concept of projects and project management, which I learned in a PMI course in graduate school. And the enjoyment of planning itself, which I think I developed as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The concepts of setting goals, leading indicators, measuring performance, and improving. It comes from two places. My religious beliefs about eternal improvement and progression with repentance as the mechanism for it. And, again, my mission, where I learned a lot about how to set goals and make progress toward achieving them. I'm also a person of faith, so I believe in partnering with God: sharing my desires with him, and asking for his help in accomplishing them.
And I can't help but be grateful for my parents. Growing up, my mother was always very organized, whether it was using a calendar, creating grocery lists, organizing activities for the kids, or running a household: a pantry, a kitchen, managing chores. And my father, an engineer. One of the purest, kindest, most loyal and hard working men I've ever met.
I'm 40 years old now, and a lot of these building blocks seem to be coming together in a new and exciting way at this moment in my life.
So, yes, AI is a tool that is enabling me to move faster and more efficiently, and to scale my own efforts in a way that I never could before. But there's no way I could do so effectively without all of these building blocks and foundations from the rest of my life.