Can AI truly boost your productivity?

I didn't send my BearwithAI newsletter last week because I was swamped with my day job. We're close to delivering a new feature, so I had to finalize the design and deliver it to the dev team, and properly explain the design decisions to stakeholders. In short, I was too busy to send out the newsletter.

Interestingly, not only did I lack the time to share AI tips, but I also didn't use AI to support my work during this crunch time. This struck me as odd, considering I once believed AI could be a major productivity booster. If that's true, why didn't I use it?

Is AI for productivity just an illusion, like the hallucinations ChatGPT sometimes produces?

To answer that, let's first define productivity. For me, productivity means accomplishing similar tasks in less time to produce more outputs. While AI, specifically generative AI, can create content quickly, it often can't solve complex problems and sometimes ends up taking more time overall. So, in general, AI for productivity can be an illusion.

For example, over the past few weeks, I've been iterating high-fidelity designs, gathering feedback, finalizing designs, documenting them, and communicating with the team. I also worked closely with developers to ensure everything was accurate. This required precise actions where AI couldn't really help. The only AI support I used was Grammarly and ChatGPT to quickly check messages I was sharing with my team.

Reflecting on this, there are some steps AI might handle, like documenting design decisions or checking design specs. However, this requires investing time to explore and integrate AI into my workflow, which might take more time than doing it myself. Plus, current tools aren't quite there yet for tasks like reviewing and correcting design specs from a prompt.

So, what's the takeaway? First, AI isn't a silver bullet. It can improve productivity for specific tasks, but it isn't a game changer for designers. Critical steps like team communication and articulation are still human domains. Second, invest time to explore AI options when you're not busy. Check if AI can be integrated into your workflow and gather real data. Then, when you're in busy mode, implement the specific steps you've tested to ease some of the workload.

For me, I'll explore using AI for design documentation. That way, I won't miss another newsletter just because I'm busy writing design docs after work.