Vanessa Raath

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I spent three hours yesterday staring at a blank prompt box, feeling like a total fraud.

Me. The person who literally teaches AI Fluency for a living. I had a complex research project to finish, a deadline looming, and my brain just wouldn't engage with the machine.

Do you ever have those days where the tech feels like a wall instead of a window?

Here's the thing: we've been told that AI is a 'productivity' tool. But productivity requires a clear head, and sometimes, life just gets in the way (in my case, a very persistent leak in the kitchen roof and a dog who decided to eat a cushion).

I realized that I was trying to force the tool to do the thinking for me, rather than using it to clear the path.

So I closed the laptop. I went for a walk. I dealt with the cushion-eating dog. And when I came back, I changed my approach.

➡️ I stopped asking for 'the answer' and started asking for a 'brainstorming partner'

➡️ I fed the LLM my messy, unedited notes from the morning instead of trying to write a perfect prompt

➡️ I used a voice-to-text tool to just 'talk' at the AI for ten minutes while I made a coffee

➡️ I stopped worrying about the 'perfect' output and focused on the first draft.

The result? The project got done in forty minutes.

The lesson isn't that the AI got smarter while I was walking the dog. It's that I had to get more 'human' before I could be more 'artificial'.

We often blame the tool when the real bottleneck is our own mental clutter.

So, if you're staring at a blinking cursor today and feeling behind: step away. The AI will be there when you get back, but your perspective might not be if you don't protect it.

What's your go-to move when you feel 'stuck' in your workflow? I'd love to hear your reset routines. 👇

#upyourhuman

PS. I've shared my favorite 'un-stuck' prompts in this week's newsletter for those days when the brain just says no.

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