Welcome to our weekly newsletter!

09 March 2025

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Hey friend,

I started a new project. Creating a tool for something I get asked for constantly. Incessantly. "What happened when?" When did Mr Z email you? How many weeks ago did we start doing Y? This leads to me searching through mountains of emails for an answer. So I'm building a tool to help solve this issue. Stay tuned.

Some Thoughts

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” ~ Mary Oliver

Your creativity doesn’t need to be art or music or writing.

You can be creative in technical fields too.

…

Implementing new project management system is creativity.

A different team structure is creativity.

Imagining a new path for your day/year/life is creativity.

…

Don’t wait for regret.

What you will learn this week:

☀️ The best way for newbies to get into AI

🌍 My AI mistakes (don't repeat them)

🍄 BONUS - How I am going to improve my AI usage

I Let AI Manage My Projects for a Week - Here's Why It Didn’t Work

I decided that I wanted to try an experiment that I doubt many have tried before. Replace my job with AI.

If the revolution was coming and artificial intelligence was so powerful, surely it could replace me pretty easily. Save me from doing a bunch of work.

And do it better than me right?

This would be easy. I’d spend my week relaxing and giving instructions to my new robotic employee. But it didn’t end up that way. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not but here is what happened.

Lessons learnt (and some tips if you want to try it yourself) at the end.

The Week

This was a fairly typical week for me. Lot’s of meetings, often with very limited direct participation from me. I find that for most of my meetings I am listening for 90% and only giving input occasionally.

Apart from meetings, I process and write a large amount of emails daily. Perhaps in excess of fifty. Some of the emails I write are single sentences, but often they are a few paragraphs.

Report writing is not a daily activity and I spend at most a few hours per week writing reports. These are mostly updates and not full reports. Those will happen once or twice per month. The updates I write are nonetheless important and are used to keep stakeholders informed on project progress.

How I Used Artificial Intelligence

I decided to use the most freely available (and free to use) tools I could find.

...

You might enjoy this:

I thoroughly enjoyed this article from Nadina. D Lisbon on Substack. Building a culture of innovation into your team is a long-term game that pays off massively. Have a look here if you want to learn more.

Postscript

Over on Substack I am launching a new side to this newsletter. It's called "200 Word Tuesdays". And that's exactly what it is. A short, actionable email each Tuesday, teaching you one thing that creates change. That may be a new AI tool, a new mental model or an emerging career stream you might like. If the newsletter is successful I will bring it here too. In the meantime you can sign up here.

Until next time,

Jonathan (The Effective Project Manager)

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