Position Before Productivity: Why You Shouldn't Rush to Optimize with AI

TL;DR — Speed is not the first thing you should optimize; position is. Getting faster with AI only compounds what you're already doing — it doesn't tell you whether it's worth compounding. Before you adopt another tool or automation, ask where you're going and what you're uniquely good at. Otherwise you'll optimize your way into the wrong life, just faster.

There is a scene almost every knowledge worker has lived this year.

Someone posts a new AI tool. It can draft your emails. Triangulate your calendar. Summarize your reading. Automate your workflow.

And the immediate, almost Pavlovian response is: I need this. How fast can I get it?

I understand the pull. I use these tools daily. But I want to make an uncomfortable case:

Speed is not the first thing you should optimize. Position is.

Because here is the pattern I keep watching repeat across the industry: a person adopts every productivity stack, automates their calendar, delegates their drafting, triples their output — and ends up, twelve months later, somewhere they never actually meant to be. Just faster.

You can optimize your way into the wrong life. Hyper-efficiency simply helps you arrive faster at a destination you never chose.

This is the distinction I want to spend the rest of this piece on.

The trap of optimization-first

The modern default is optimization. More throughput. More output. More "leverage."

AI supercharges this instinct. It hands you a lever and whispers, pull harder. And pulling harder feels productive. It feels like winning. You are moving, generating, shipping.

But here is the mathematical lie hiding in that feeling:

Optimization only compounds what you are already doing. It does not tell you whether what you are doing is worth compounding.

If you are pointed in the wrong direction, all the speed in the world does not help you — it actively hurts you, because it accelerates the distance between where you are and where you should be.

This is why I started asking a different question before I touch any new tool:

Am I stuck because I'm slow — or because I'm misplaced?

The answer changes everything.

Position is a skill, not a mood

Most people treat their career direction as a one-time decision they made years ago, and then they stop interrogating it. They upgrade their tools, never their coordinates.

But positioning is not a mood you fall into. It is a skill you practice. And in an AI era where the landscape shifts every quarter, it needs to be exercised constantly — the way you exercise judgment.

Here is the framework I use. It has three coordinates, and you have to be honest about all three:

1. What are you uniquely good at? Not what you wish you were good at. Not what your title says. The actual, demonstrable stack of things you do better than most people around you. Ask people who have watched you work. The answer is often uncomfortable and clarifying.

2. What actually energizes you? Separate this from what merely looks impressive. Energy is the thing you would do even if nobody paid you to. It is the reliable compass — and it is the one coordinate AI cannot press you on.

3. What does the world actually need from you? This is the boundary that keeps you from building a beautiful castle on an abandoned island. The market, the audience, the people who depend on you — what genuine problem can you solve that they are willing to pay attention to, or pay for?

Position is the intersection of these three. If you only optimize your output before you find that intersection, you are polishing a vessel pointed at the open ocean.

The AI-era positioning question

Here is the brutal, practical test I run whenever I feel the urge to automate something new:

"Will this make me faster at something I want to be faster at — or will it make me faster at something I'm doing just because I haven't questioned it?"

That single question filters out most of the noise in my workflow.

Because in an AI-accelerated world, the real scarcity has shifted. It is no longer time. It is attention direction — the ability to decide, deliberately, what deserves your compounding.

AI gave us infinite capacity to do. It did not give us infinite clarity about what to do. That still has to come from you.

How I actually locate myself

Positioning is not meditation. It is a practice with artifacts. Here is what I actually do, on a week-to-week rhythm, and it takes far less time than automating a single workflow:

Every week, I write down three answers:

1. What did I understand deeply this week that I was blind to before? — this keeps the knowing fresh.
2. What did I ship into the real world that got a response? — this keeps the doing honest. Silence is data too.
3. What did I deliberately refuse? — this is the invisible one. What you say no to defines your position as much as what you say yes to.

These three questions are the operational form of what the Chinese philosophical tradition calls 知行合一 — the unity of knowing and doing. Not knowing about things, and not just doing things — but a continuous loop where your understanding informs your action, and your action sharpens your understanding.

In an AI era, this loop is the moat. Because AI can know about everything. It cannot know — it cannot have the lived, tested, expensive understanding that comes from acting on your own position and learning from the real response.

A warning about the shiny lever

Let me be specific about the trap, because I hit it myself.

It is 2026. I can now generate a polished draft of almost anything in minutes. I can automate tasks that used to take me hours. I can benchmark tools until I'm fluent in every comparison.

Every one of those capabilities is real leverage. I use them.

But I have learned to ask one question before each one: is this the right problem to be solving — or just the easiest one to make progress on?

That is the heart of it. AI makes the easiest problems effortlessly easy. It does nothing for the right problems — those still require you to see clearly, decide, and commit.

If you outsource your direction to "whatever AI makes fast," you will be fluent in tasks that are becoming commoditized, and empty in the work that is becoming more valuable.

The weekly test

So before you optimize anything else, run this five-minute audit. It is uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the point.

• Where am I right now, honestly? Not where my title says, not where my bio says — where my actual recent actions point.
• Is my current speed carrying me toward my position — or away from it?
• What am I optimizing that I haven't actually chosen?
• What would I do with this tool if I weren't trying to look productive?

That last question is the one that keeps me honest. Strip away the performance, and your real direction appears.

The real advantage

Everyone is racing to be faster. That race is about to get very crowded, very cheap, and very commoditized.

The advantage that does not depreciate — the one that compounds and cannot be copied by a model — is knowing where you are going, and why it is yours.

AI will not build that for you. It cannot. It is the one thing that belongs entirely to your own awareness.

So by all means, get faster. But first, know what you are trying to reach.

Optimize your direction before you optimize your speed — and the tools you already have become enough.

Not because they move you faster. Because they finally move you somewhere you chose.

Did this article help you? If you're working through career direction, or want to use AI to work smarter, let's talk — I'm happy to help you think it through.