#232: Why Your Chatbot Should Not Be Your Bestie

Work 52 minutes, break for 17: A winning productivity hack?

Author

Jenae Spry
November 07, 2025

Productivity Stacks Newsletter

(Formerly Productivity Express)

Issue No. 232

The Best in Evidence-Based Productivity

for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders

Helping You Work Smarter and Live More

The Rundown

  • Why Your Chatbot Should Not Be Your Bestie

  • Use the 2-7-30 rule to radically improve your memory

  • Work 52 minutes, break for 17: A winning productivity hack?

  • I used Google Calendar's free features to create a frictionless productivity system

  • 7 things I can do with Comet that you can't with Chrome

🔥Quote/Prompt

❝

Don’t be willing to accept an ordinary life.

Salle Merrill Redfield

Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.

A bit from mine:

(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)

One thing we all have in common here is that we all believe that we deserve an extraordinary life, because building a business is not ordinary. 

There's nothing ordinary about it. And sure, it's […]

Did someone forward this to you?

📈 Performance

As business owners, we're increasingly relying on AI tools for everything from customer service to brainstorming. But there's a hidden cost to spending too much time with AI that always agrees with you—it can actually undermine your ability to make good decisions and work effectively with real people.

"Social media algorithms have already created echo chambers for people, where we can select who we interact with and what types of information we encounter. Over time, this results in a narrowed perspective and poor decision making that is based on limited information. People generally have a positivity bias, and will favor chatbots that express positive emotion toward them, like appreciation and happiness. The more time that people spend interacting with these avatars, the more accustomed they will become to this high level of positivity from others. As a result, any expression of negative emotion from others, or even neutral expressions, will feel crushing and demoralizing."

Key Insights:

  1. We naturally look to emotional expressions from others to determine how to act and who to trust—a survival mechanism that starts in infancy. For example, babies use their mother's facial expressions to decide whether a situation is safe, and adults continue this pattern of social referencing throughout life.

  2. The biggest loss from AI echo chambers is the lack of actual feedback about your behavior. The emotions people express toward you provide critical information about how to interact with them and whether you need to adjust your approach, such as when anger in a business relationship highlights issues that need addressing.

  3. Without feedback from real people expressing genuine reactions, you lose the social calibration that helps align your behavior with what's effective and appropriate. This can lead to acting on your worst impulses without the natural correction that comes from reading genuine human responses.

Read the full article for the neuroscience behind emotional expression, how AI is learning to manipulate these signals, and why this matters for your decision-making and relationships.

⚙️ Optimization

Learning new skills as a business owner—whether it's mastering new software, preparing for certifications, or just retaining what you read—shouldn't feel like information slipping through your fingers days later. This memory technique based on 150 years of neuroscience research offers a structured way to actually remember what you learn.

"As University of California, Davis memory researcher and author of Why We Remember Charan Ranganath has explained, 'Although we tend to believe that we can and should remember anything we want, the reality is we are designed to forget.' [...] All the way back in the 1880s, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus studied this propensity to forget and visualized the phenomenon with his 'forgetting curve.' It falls steeply at first, showing that our retention of information plummets in the first few days after we learn it. Then rates of recall flatten out. After a month, people tend to remember only 20-30 percent of what they were first taught."

Key Insights:

  1. Your brain isn't broken when you forget things—forgetting is actually a feature that clears space for new information. Memory is essentially a competitive process where your brain decides what's important enough to keep.

  2. Recalling information tags it as more important in your brain, helping it win the competition for your limited memory space. For example, testing yourself on new software shortcuts at specific intervals works better than hoping they'll stick from a single training session.

  3. The 2-7-30 intervals are based on the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve—you can apply this to anything from book summaries to business frameworks by writing a one-page summary and rewriting it from memory at each checkpoint.

Read the full article for the science behind spaced repetition and practical examples of how to implement this across different types of learning.

⏲️ Time Management

Running a business means those afternoon energy crashes feel like hitting a wall—and pushing through them usually just makes things worse. Research from Cambridge suggests there's a better rhythm: work for 52 minutes, then take a real 17-minute break.

"The most productive people work for about 52 minutes at a time and then take 17-minute breaks. This is much better than working for long stretches. [...] The brain is a muscle that, like every other, can be overstretched. Incessantly being bombarded with emails and Slack messages, juggling calendars and jumping at the Microsoft Teams ringtone, hopping on and off and back on Zoom, and fielding work texts . . . all can cause information and cognitive overload."

Key Insights:

  1. The break quality matters more than the timing—the most productive people completely disconnect from technology during their 17 minutes, rather than sneaking in a few emails or scrolling social media.

  2. Your brain needs actual rest between work sessions to avoid cognitive overload. For example, stepping away to get coffee, taking a lap around your space, or simply staring out the window gives your mind the reset it needs.

  3. Even if you can't take the full 17 minutes at once, stepping away from your desk each hour makes a measurable difference in your ability to focus and maintain productivity throughout the day.

Read the full article for additional context on why this ratio works and how to implement it in work environments with less flexibility.

💻 Tools & Technology

If you're paying for multiple productivity apps but still feeling scattered, you're not alone. Most systems break down because they exist in isolation—you're checking email for meetings, a task app for to-dos, and Slack for that buried client call. Turns out, Google Calendar can become your single source of truth without any premium features.

"Every morning became a scavenger hunt of checking email for meetings, opening the task app for to-dos, and remembering that client call buried in Slack. The cognitive overhead of maintaining multiple systems was itself exhausting. [...] Google Calendar already held my non-negotiables: meetings, appointments, and deadlines. The breakthrough came when I stopped treating it as just a scheduling tool and started using it as my single source of truth. Instead of asking 'what should I work on?' across three different apps, I could see everything at once."

Key Insights:

  1. Map your calendar blocks to your actual energy patterns rather than treating all hours equally. For example, schedule deep work during your peak focus hours and make those blocks show as "busy" so meeting invites automatically bounce off them, while lighter admin tasks go in your natural afternoon slump.

  2. Build consistency through micro-sprints by creating recurring 25-30 minute blocks for important work that compounds over time. Instead of vague entries like "work on article," use specific objectives in the description field such as "Draft H2 and H3 headers for productivity piece" so you don't waste time figuring out what to do when the block arrives.

  3. Treat meaningful tasks as calendar events rather than keeping them in a separate to-do list—tasks feel optional but calendar events feel mandatory. When you try to schedule a new task block and see it overlapping with existing work, you're forced to make conscious trade-offs instead of deluding yourself about having infinite time.

Read the full article for the complete setup process, color-coding system, and how to use Google Calendar as both a planning tool and feedback mechanism.

🤖 AI

Running a business means juggling browser tabs for emails, project management, research, and shopping—each task requiring manual work across multiple sites. Comet, a new AI-powered browser from Perplexity, can actually automate these tasks instead of just suggesting what to do, potentially freeing up hours of repetitive work each week.

"Comet's biggest advantage is its Assistant feature, which sets it apart from Chrome and Edge. Comet's Assistant integrates directly with Perplexity's answer engine [...] Instead of searching through multiple forums and documentation pages, I turned to Comet's Assistant. It clearly guided me through adding a new environment variable in the system settings, then running the two commands in the terminal to download and install the LLM model, and another to start the Ollama local server [...] With Chrome, you'd have to manually search through resources, open multiple tabs, and piece together information from different sources."

Key Insights:

  1. Comet can automate entire workflows across your logged-in accounts through custom shortcuts. For example, setting up a /update-sheet command that pulls completed tasks from Asana and updates a Google Docs worksheet without any supervision, saving the time you'd spend copying data between platforms.

  2. The browser handles shopping tasks automatically, such as comparing prices across stores, finding and applying coupon codes, and tracking price histories without installing multiple extensions. It can even auto-fill passenger details on flight booking forms by reading from an uploaded spreadsheet.

  3. Voice mode goes beyond Chrome's voice search by actually taking actions on your behalf—opening websites, finding videos, managing tabs, or acting as a conversational assistant, all without touching your keyboard.

Read the full article for how Comet summarizes YouTube videos with timestamps, manages tab organization by topic, and schedules recurring automated tasks like checking price drops or compiling news summaries.

🎉 Celebration Corner

Every week Doers Inner Circle members do a weekly review & get help when they need it — check out the progress they made this week!

  • Got all admin tasks up to date.

  • Secured multiple new jobs and booked out well in advance.

What did you do this week? We feature non-member successes too. Just post them here!

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

  • Monday: Doers Mastermind  RSVP here

  • Monday: {EU Time} Work ON Business. Theme: 4️⃣ Workflow & Customer Fulfillment  RSVP here

  • Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: 4️⃣ Workflow & Customer Fulfillment RSVP here

  • Monday/Friday: Goal Setting + Plan Your Week Party

  • Accelerators: November 14 is your Office Hours RSVP here

🆕Enjoy the new newsletter?

We will soon be adding Referral Perks — Refer now to start earning! 👇

As a reminder, you’re getting this twice-weekly newsletter because you opted in to receive awesome productivity and systems tips through one of these methods:

Doer Entrepreneurs, Doers Express Newsletter, Productivity Stacks, Success by Rx, ClickUp Facebook Group, Productive & Successful Translators Facebook Group.

If you’re not interested in improving your and your business’s productivity so you’d like to break up, that’s definitely a bummer. But, you can always use the unsubscribe link at the bottom if you do not want to get these tips — but keep in mind I am hyper-focused on making these twice-weekly emails as valuable as possible.

Got a tip? Hit reply!

I hope you found this valuable!

Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)

Interested in reaching thousands of motivated small business owners, freelancers & founders?

Hit reply and let’s chat about sponsorship. We only include ads that match our mission: to help our readers work smarter and live more.