INBOX INSIGHTS: How To Manage Overwhelming Productivity, AI Digital Clone Part 2 (2026-04-01)

INBOX INSIGHTS: How To Manage Overwhelming Productivity, AI Digital Clone Part 2 (2026-04-01) :: View in browser

👉 Register for our free “Do You Have a GEO Problem” webinar on 2026-04-10!

👉 Take our new GEO 101 for Marketers course!

INBOX INSIGHTS: How To Manage Overwhelming Productivity, AI Digital Clone Part 2 (2026-04-01)

Watch this video on YouTube

When You’re So Productive You Forget What You Did

I’m going to tell you something that happened to me this morning, and I need you to not judge me. (Or judge me. That’s fine too)

We had our team call today, and one of the things on the agenda was promoting our AIView Pro service and our upcoming GEO webinar on April 10th. I volunteered to get everything together — the landing page, a sales enablement deck, the whole package. I opened up my laptop, ready to start building it all out, and then… I realized we had already done it. All of it. Chris and I had put it together a couple of weeks ago. We had even shared the links with each other.

I had been part of the entire process, and it felt like an afterthought. Not because it wasn’t important — but because we’ve been getting so much done and creating so many things that the individual tasks just blur together.

Here’s the thing. This isn’t a story about getting old or needing more sleep (though, honestly, both might apply). This is a story about what happens when you are operating at a pace you’ve never operated at before — and your brain hasn’t caught up yet.

The Productivity Amnesia Problem

If you’re using agentic AI — and I mean really using it, not just asking ChatGPT to rewrite your emails — you’re probably producing more in a week than you used to produce in a month. That’s not hyperbole. That’s literally what’s happening at Trust Insights right now.

With Claude and Cowork, I’ve been scoping projects, building pages, creating decks, fixing technical SEO issues, and running autonomous workflows — sometimes overnight while I sleep. I wake up and things are done. Things I planned, things I directed, things that required my strategy and my thinking. But the volume is so high that the individual tasks blur together.

So when someone asks, “Did we do that yet?” my honest answer is sometimes, “I genuinely don’t know.” Not because I wasn’t involved, but because I was involved in seventeen other things that same week.

I’m calling it productivity amnesia, and I don’t think I’m the only one experiencing it.

This Is a Process Problem, Not an AI Problem

Now, before you think I’m complaining — I’m not. This is a genuinely good problem to have. But it IS a problem, and it’s one we need to solve with (say it with me) process.

If you’re 10x more productive but you can’t remember what you shipped, you don’t have a productivity issue. You have a documentation issue. You have a tracking issue. You have a “where the heck is my project log?” issue.

And this is where I get a little bit nerdy about it (I’m a nerd, I know). The answer isn’t to slow down. The answer is to build the system around the speed. You need:

A running log of what your AI agents have completed. Not just what you asked them to do — what they actually delivered. A regular review cadence — even 15 minutes a week — where you look at what shipped and what’s next. Clear naming conventions and project tracking so that when Future You goes looking for something, it’s findable.

If you run this through the 5P Framework by Trust Insights™, what I’m describing is a Process gap. The Purpose is clear (move fast, ship more). The People are in place (me, Chris, our AI tools). The Platform is working (almost too well). But the Process — the connective tissue that helps a human brain keep up with machine-speed output — that’s the piece we skipped. And I’m not too proud to admit it.

Your AI Is Not Your Bestie (And That’s the Point)

There’s a related conversation happening right now that I want to address. I posted about rebuilding katierobbert.com using Claude and Cowork, and someone pushed back on the idea of calling AI your “bestie” or your “brain.” Their point was: AI is a platform, a tool, a strategy. Not a friend.

And honestly? They’re not wrong. I get why that language makes people uncomfortable. We are absolutely in a moment where AI is getting more human-like in how it interacts with us. It remembers context. It anticipates what you need. It works alongside you in a way that genuinely feels collaborative. I understand why people reach for words like “partner” or even “bestie” — because the experience feels different from using a spreadsheet or a search engine.

But here’s what I want to be really clear about: the humans in your life who are meaningful to you? AI is not a replacement for them. Period.

What AI is replacing — or more accurately, augmenting — is the capacity gap. It’s the extra set of hands you don’t have the budget to hire. It’s the ability to execute at a speed that was previously impossible for a two-person company. When I say Claude is my “bestie,” I’m being playful about the fact that this tool has fundamentally changed how I work. I’m not confused about what it is.

The distinction matters because when we anthropomorphize AI as something that has feelings or consciousness or a soul, we set ourselves up for two problems: we over-trust it and we undervalue the actual humans around us. Neither of those is great.

So yes — I am fully, enthusiastically embracing AI to improve the quality of my work. I’m building websites autonomously. I’m running four-phase SEO projects overnight. I’m shipping faster than I ever thought possible.

And also? I know the difference between a tool that helps me think and the people in my life who actually care about me. You can hold both of those things at the same time. You can be both.

What I’d Tell You to Do This Week

If you’re in this agentic AI world and you’re moving fast — great. Keep going. But do yourself a favor and build the system that helps you remember what you did.

Start a simple project log. Even a shared doc or a spreadsheet. Date, project, what shipped, what’s next. It takes five minutes, and it will save you from the embarrassment of opening your laptop to build something that’s already live and linked.

Side note: I just asked Claude to clean up and organize all the files it created for me.

And if you’re wrestling with how to talk about AI — whether it’s a tool, a partner, a coworker, a bestie — stop worrying about the label and focus on the relationship you have with the humans who matter. AI doesn’t need you to call it anything. The people in your life do.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.

Want to understand how ready your content actually is for a world where AI answers the questions?Join us for our GEO webinar on April 10th or check out AIView Pro — our GEO content readiness assessment and audit. Or just hit reply and tell me what you’re working on.

Are you developing productivity amnesia? Reply to this email or join the conversation in our Free Slack community, Analytics for Marketers!

– Katie Robbert, CEO

Weekly Check-In Poll

Please click/tap on just one answer – this is our weekly survey to see how we’re doing, so please do take it. There are no forms to fill out, this is the entire thing. One click/tap and you’re done, with our thanks.

How likely are you to recommend Trust Insights as a consulting firm to someone in the next 90 days?

Do you have a colleague or friend who needs this newsletter? Send them this link to help them get their own copy:

https://www.trustinsights.ai/newsletter

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss the three phases of GEO, or generative engine optimization. You’ll discover the core mechanics behind Generative Engine Optimization. You’ll learn the steps to prepare your website for artificial intelligence models. You’ll uncover the truth behind misleading search tools. You’ll master the process to capture the machine audience.

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last time on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Livestream, we looked at agentic product marketing. Catch the episode replay here!

This week on So What? we’ll be sharing how to manage AI usage limits. Are you following our YouTube channel? If not, click/tap here to follow us!

Here’s some of our content from recent days that you might have missed. If you read something and enjoy it, please share it with a friend or colleague!

Take your skills to the next level with our premium courses.

Get skilled up with an assortment of our free, on-demand classes.

You could be reaching 37,000+ marketers, analysts, data scientists, and executives directly with your ad. Want to learn more? Reach out and contact us.

In this week’s Data Diaries, we look at part 2 of making a digital twin. One of the most difficult things about a remit like “make a virtual version of yourself that solves client problems” is decomposing fundamental, core things about yourself.

Very often, we can’t put into words how we do things inside our heads. We just do them. This goes back to the late Daniel Kahnemann’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”, which introduced the concepts of System 1 and System 2 thinking. System 1 is fast, reflexive thinking, while System 2 is slow, deliberative thinking.

When we’re learning something for the first time, we live in System 2. Watch a toddler learning how to walk, and every step is a huge set of calculations. Over time, as a task becomes habitual, we encode it in our brains as reflex, as System 1. Eventually, it becomes second nature; only in situations where things are unpredictable or unfamiliar do we slow down to find our footing, like on ice or rock climbing.

When it comes to the tasks we do every day for work, especially if they’re repetitive in nature, much of our thinking is in System 1. We just do stuff, and in a business culture that prioritizes productivity, we’re encouraged not to think too hard and just ship as fast as we can. That means a ton of our knowledge and processes is subconscious.

For this particular project, one of the things I wanted to know most about myself was how I solve problems. It’s very difficult to do this honestly, because we always want to be the hero of our own stories and because we don’t often think about how we think, thanks to a ton of it being in System 1.

Why? Because there is no such thing as thinking as a discrete entity, much in the same way there’s no such thing as writing style. Thinking is an umbrella term that describes hundreds of ways of accomplishing a task. By taking the time to decompose thinking into its components, I’ll be able to more clearly articulate what KIND of thinking I do in different contexts or to create different outputs.

So one of the first steps I took was to determine what thinking even was. With multiple AI systems – Gemini, Perplexity, Qwen, ChatGPT, and Claude – I had them each do large deep research projects on different thinking techniques, techniques like systems thinking, divergent thinking, etc. After each AI tool built its results, I used Claude Code’s agents to consolidate them down to a single catalog of over 400 different thinking techniques.

The second major corpus of data I needed to gather was MY thinking. Thankfully at Trust Insights and in my personal life, I’m a data packrat. I keep every email I send, every conversation, every newsletter, every podcast and YouTube video. I gathered up all my content from everywhere I could find it, categorized it by content type, and converted it all into plain text.

With these two very large corpuses of data in hand, I was ready to move onto stage 3 of the project, cataloging my thinking. Next week, we’ll look at how they went and what the results were. Stay tuned!

Almost every AI course is the same, conceptually. They show you how to prompt, how to set things up – the cooking equivalents of how to use a blender or how to cook a dish. These are foundation skills, and while they’re good and important, you know what’s missing from all of them? How to run a restaurant successfully. That’s the big miss. We’re so focused on the how that we completely lose sight of the why and the what.

This is why our capstone course, the AI-Ready Strategist, is different. It’s not a collection of prompting techniques or a set of recipes; it’s about why we do things with AI. AI strategy has nothing to do with prompting or the shiny object of the day — it has everything to do with extracting value from AI and avoiding preventable disasters. This course is for everyone in a decision-making capacity because it answers the questions almost every AI hype artist ignores: Why are you even considering AI in the first place? What will you do with it? If your AI strategy is the equivalent of obsessing over blenders while your steakhouse goes out of business, this is the course to get you back on course.

👉 Take this course now to become an AI leader

Here’s a roundup of who’s hiring, based on positions shared in the Analytics for Marketers Slack group and other communities.

Are you a member of our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 4000+ like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today. Members also receive sneak peeks of upcoming data, credible third-party studies we find and like, and much more. Join today!

Where can you find Trust Insights face-to-face?

SSI, Charlotte, April 2026
SMPS AEC.AI, November 2026
MarketingProfs B2B Forum

Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!

Want some private training at your company? Ask us!

First and most obvious – if you want to talk to us about something specific, especially something we can help with, hit up our contact form.

Where do you spend your time online? Chances are, we’re there too, and would enjoy sharing with you. Here’s where we are – see you there?

Read our disclosures statement for more details, but we’re also compensated by our partners if you buy something through us.

Imagine a world where your marketing strategies are supercharged by the most cutting-edge technology available – Generative AI. Generative AI has the potential to save you incredible amounts of time and money, and you have the opportunity to be at the forefront. Get up to speed on using generative AI in your business in a thoughtful way with our workshop offering, Generative AI for Marketers.

Workshops: Offer the Generative AI for Marketers half and full day workshops at your company. These hands-on sessions are packed with exercises, resources and practical tips that you can implement immediately.

👉 Click/tap here to book a workshop

Some events and partners have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them. Read our full disclosures statement on our website .

Thanks for subscribing and supporting us. Let us know if you want to see something different or have any feedback for us!

Need help with your marketing AI and analytics?

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Pin It on Pinterest

Watch This Newsletter