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Seeing through hype

AI isn’t stealing your job. It’s stealing your focus.

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The AI landscape moves faster than anyone can follow (trust me, I’ve tried).

This week, I'm sharing 8 rules that help me cut through noise, so you can focus on what actually matters to you.

In this email:

• AI overwhelm scatters our attention

• 8 rules for filtering out hype

• Reclaiming your time and focus

Artificial overwhelm

AI isn’t stealing your job. It’s stealing your focus.

I’ve recently surveyed 1,500 of you about your biggest challenges with AI. I keep hearing a familiar pattern: not enough time to experiment with AI, and feeling overwhelmed by the constant, often exaggerated, stream of news and tools coming out.

AI is deeply transformative to our lives and we know it's developing at breakneck speed.

I get it. I've been covering AI news weekly for almost 2.5 years now.

No matter how hard I try, there are always developments I miss completely, and others I only know at the most superficial level.

A noticeably feeling of anxiety about not being informed enough creeps up on me all the time.

I’ve noticed how this FOMO scatters my attention and makes it harder to stay focused on what’s actually useful. Staying in that state can easily keep me from learning and building anything worthwhile.

I deal with this by building a strong filter for anything related to AI—one that blocks out the hype, the doom, and anything that doesn't actually matter to me.

I've turned this into 8 simple rules to help you go from AI overwhelm to strategic focus.

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The filter

These rules act as a filter. They help you stay focused in a world that moves at rocket speed, putting your attention on what actually matters—within AI and beyond.

1. Recognise your human value. The things AI can currently do, and how soon it will be able to do all these others things, is greatly hyped. It will remain limited compared to humans for a long time. Don’t let the hype convince you that the human touch and thinking is in any way obsolete.

2. Accept that keeping up is impossible. There is too much happening, on too many fronts, for anyone to stay informed about every model, tool, company, and use case. Let alone understand it all in depth. Narrow down what you care about in AI and focus your attention there.

3. Assume most AI news is exaggerated. Most of the endless stream of AI headlines won’t matter long term. Social platforms surface the extremes; tales of hype and doom to keep you hooked. AI companies inflate their message to keep the temperature hot for their next funding round. Stories of companies that implement AI have a similar problem, but they’re also incentivised to exaggerate due to things like lack of technical literacy at the top, and pressure for perpetual innovation.

4. Read case studies selectively. Reading how competitors or similar companies use AI can be great for inspiration and understanding what’s working. But most content of this type you’ll encounter is too far from your context to matter. As a general rule: seek out examples closely related to your role, industry, and actual challenges. And skip the rest.

5. Learn by doing. Reading another post, article or newsletter about AI doesn't make you better at using it. Some input is good, but focus more time on learning by doing and solving actual problems, rather than consuming content.

6. Unsubscribe, ruthlessly. If you are anything like me, you've amassed an obscene amount of AI-related newsletter subscriptions, people you follow on social media, YouTube, and so on. Take the time to consciously decide if you need them or not; I recommend being minimalistic in your information diet when it comes to AI. There's simply too much hype to afford any source that isn't giving you valuable perspectives. Unsubscribe without thinking twice to anything (even this newsletter) that's not serving you in a major way.

7. Ignore solutions to problems you don’t have. It's easy to see a clever use case or AI tool and suddenly convince yourself you need it. Avoid spending time and money on tools and solutions targeting problems that are secondary to you, at the cost of letting your real bottlenecks go unsolved. And remember: widely useful AI capabilities tend to get absorbed into tools you already use (ChatGPT, Claude, Google Workspace, etc) eventually. Proactively seek out content and solutions about high-impact problems you currently have, rather than passively consuming content on someone else’s problems.

8. Trust your instincts over these rules. They help in filtering manufactured hype and FOMO, but they shouldn't block you from exploring anything of genuine interest to you. If something within AI speaks to you: pursue it, even if it breaks every rule here. Your instinct about what matters to you is more valuable than any framework.

Reclaiming your time and focus

Approach filtering what you see in AI as a continuous practice.

These rules act as a counterweight to a world with an extreme amount of forces at play fighting for your attention—mostly for someone else's gain.

I'm not saying abandon AI. That would be silly. AI is incredibly valuable for productivity and solving real problems. The point here is to filter AI content effectively, so you actually get more time to use and experiment with AI, or focus on whatever is most valuable to you.

Being deliberate about which parts of AI you engage with is a superpower. It makes it easier to see how AI can contribute to the important work that you are uniquely positioned to do.

THAT’S ALL FOR THIS WEEK

Massive thank you to all of you who reply or send me feedback in the poll. You steer me in the right direction and even though I’m slow at responding I read every one of your comments 🤝

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