Something that I've found happening as I've started using AI tools more, especially agentic AI workflows, is that the AI very quickly comes back with a solution, and it puts me in this frenetic state where it feels like I need to make a decision on this thing now.

I think this is a bit of a psychological quirk, and here's an example to demonstrate it:

Imagine you’re working in an office and you ask a colleague to prepare an itinerary of places to visit to pitch some idea on, give it to you to evaluate, and if acceptable, ahead and book the events.

Now imagine your colleague goes away, and comes back in two minutes with a multi-page itinerary in a dossier.

In that scenario you might feel pressure to immediately review the itinerary - there’s an understandable heuristic at play - if it only took them two minutes to create the itinerary then it should take about that long to review it.

Also, that they’ve immediately done the thing demonstrates the kind of priority they have for you.

If on the other hand, they took a day to prepare the itinerary, then you also would feel psychologically safe taking a day or two to review the itinerary.

If, on a third hand, instead of of leaving at all, they immediately just started verbalising suggestions ‘How about the X Museum, they would be a good candidate because…’ - in this scenario the format allows them to communicate the pieces in bite sized bits of information, avoiding the situation they give you some information that gloss over.

(Although, it's worth also mentioning that, especially in large meetings, often something will be said that you have no understanding of, and you smile politely and move on).

We need to be careful when using AI tools, that we're using them at our pace, not AI tool's pace.

Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Get in the comments! 👇