🗞️ The Wellness Briefing – Edition No. 16: “Is AI Streamlining or Sabotaging Your Productivity?” | October 14, 2025

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Quick, high-impact wellness insights for ambitious professionals. Delivered Tuesdays.

Welcome Back to The Wellness Briefing

You turned to AI for more bandwidth—only to find your inbox, reviews, and corrections multiplying. The promise of generative tools was “do more with less.”

But what if low quality AI responses and errors are making more work for you? This week, we’re unpacking how AI can both streamline and sabotage your productivity, depending on how you use it.

Let’s begin.

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🧠 1 Insight Worth Reading: Harvard Business Review’s article “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity” warns that many AI outputs look polished but lack substance—requiring humans to clean up the mess. Harvard Business Review

Stanford’s collaboration with BetterUp estimates that workslop costs organizations ~$186 per employee per month in rework time. Axios

💡 What That Means for You: AI doesn’t replace cognitive load—it can relocate it. You might shift from creation to correction, prompting, and oversight. If your systems, standards, and context aren’t built for AI, you end up with “fast slop” instead of fast value.

In short: AI can amplify your capacity, or amplify your chaos. It depends on your guardrails, feedback loops, and the quality of your prompts.

✅ Try This: Next time you use AI to draft a strategy:

1. Generate deliberately with an explicit, detailed instructions. The more background, information, context, and examples you can provide AI the better the output will be.

2. Audit immediately spend 3 minutes asking What’s wrong or shallow here? Scan for logic holes, tone misalignment, or jargon.

3. Verify sources - Unless you provide your AI tool with sources you want referenced in your draft, AI may provide outdated or fake sources as placeholders. It’s your responsibility to fact check.

4. Refine the prompt + iterate before passing the final version along.

Treat AI as a junior partner: helpful for the grunt work, but worthless if you don’t step in for nuance, values, or decisions. Your oversight is the difference between a tool that lifts you vs a tool that leaks time.

🎯 Pro Tip from the Guide: Your oversight is more valuable than your output. The quality of AI use will depend less on the tool and more on the standards, feedback, and critical lens you bring.

🔧 Resource Spotlight: The Washington Post recently covered the rise of “workslop” — AI-generated junk that creates more work than it saves. Their piece, “Work Advice: How to avoid ‘workslop’ and other AI pitfalls,” shares five smart ways to make sure your use of AI isn’t quietly breeding resentment or tanking productivity. The Washington Post

💬 Coaching Cue “AI is not your brain’s autopilot. You’re still in the cockpit. Use it to extend, not replace, your attention and values.”

Think of this as communication strength training. The better you get at giving AI precise, contextual instructions, the sharper your clarity becomes everywhere else—delegating to your team, managing up, or setting boundaries.

Clear prompting isn’t just a tech skill; it’s leadership practice in disguise.

📈 The Burnout Approval Matrix: AI & Productivity: What’s genuine leverage, what’s hidden drag, what’s sneaky sabotage.

Want more support?

• Book your free 20-min burnout consult here

• Download your full Burnout Recovery Roadmap Guide

• Forward this to a friend who needs it

See you next Tuesday.
– Michelle

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