- Productivity Stacks Newsletter
- Posts
- #242: AI & Privacy: Trust this AI tool with your personal info
#242: AI & Privacy: Trust this AI tool with your personal info
Brain Automation, Psychology, and What You Can Do
Jenae Spry
December 12, 2025
Productivity Stacks Newsletter
(Formerly Productivity Express)
Issue No. 242
The Best in Evidence-Based Productivity
for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders
Helping You Work Smarter and Live More
The Rundown
Brain Automation, Psychology, and What You Can Do (Toward a Grounded Depth Psychology)
Why small businesses must go narrow (extremely narrow) to survive
Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why time accelerates as we get older and how to slow it down
NotebookLM and Gemini are great together, but unstoppable with this app
Trust this AI tool with your personal info (I compared the privacy of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity — here's the one you should trust most with your personal info)
👉Did you miss an issue? Check out previous Productivity Stacks issues anytime here
🔥Quote/Prompt
Follow what you love and it will take you where you want to go.
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)
I actually have a really big issue with the saying "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life". Sorry, that's bullsh*t. Following that advice is part of how people end up burning out -- because they […]
Did someone forward this to you?
📈 Performance
Your brain is constantly automating patterns - both helpful and unhelpful ones. Those automatic reactions when someone criticizes you? That's not just "who you are" - it's what your brain learned to do, probably years ago. This article from Psychology Today breaks down how to identify which automated patterns are actually serving you and which ones are keeping you stuck.
"Think about driving a car. When you first learned, every action required conscious attention. Now, if you're an experienced driver, you can navigate complex traffic while carrying on a conversation. The driving has become automated—unconscious in the functional sense. The same process applies to psychological patterns. We learn how to relate to others, how to manage emotions, and how to think about ourselves. These learned patterns become automated. They feel like who we are rather than what we learned."
Key Insights:
Your unconscious reactions aren't mysterious - they're automated patterns your brain learned and then kept running on autopilot, often from childhood experiences you can't even remember.
Making the unconscious conscious means catching yourself in the act of following old rules. For example, if you automatically suppress anger, it doesn't feel like you're following a learned rule - it feels like anger is dangerous.
Psychological health isn't about suppressing parts of yourself - it's about getting all the parts working together. Your drives, emotions, and rational thinking should inform each other, not fight for control.
Read the full article for a practical framework based on brain architecture and five specific techniques you can use to identify and revise automated patterns that aren't serving you anymore.
⚙️ Optimization
Running a small business means constantly fighting the urge to be everything to everyone, especially when things get tough. But here's the reality: big companies can copy anything mass-market you do, and they'll do it faster and cheaper. This article from Fast Company goes beyond the usual "niche down" advice to explain why radical specialization isn't just good strategy - it's your only real defense. And in the age of AI, the human connection you build through that specialization becomes even more valuable.
"The point is that while generalist businesses compete with everyone, specialists compete with almost no one. An accounting firm serving all small businesses faces constant price pressures from the commoditization of services in their sector. The same firm focusing exclusively on assisting craft breweries as they navigate excise tax regulations, inter-state distribution challenges, equipment depreciation schedules, and seasonal cash flow patterns can add value in ways that a large firm selling generalized services never could. They are not competing on price anymore—they are competing on irreplaceable expertise."
Key Insights:
AI is commoditizing general knowledge fast - ChatGPT can generate basic marketing advice, but it can't replicate 15 years of navigating a specific industry's regulatory environment or knowing which suppliers in your niche are actually reliable today.
Radical specialization creates natural communities - when you go narrow enough, your customers aren't just buyers anymore, they're people who share a deep interest in the same specific thing, which becomes the foundation for building genuine loyalty.
Small businesses can afford to have personality in ways big companies never can - when you serve millions of diverse customers, you have to be bland and inoffensive, but when you specialize, being authentically yourself becomes a competitive advantage that can't be replicated.
Read the full article for three concrete steps you can take this week to start specializing, including how to identify which offerings to stop providing and practical ways to show up as a real human in your marketing. Worth the read but reminder that Fast Company limits free articles.
⏲️ Time Management
I don't usually share articles like this because they tend to be clickbait, but this one actually delivers. Just today I reminded a Doers Inner Circle member how terrible humans are at estimating time - it's not a personal failing, it's how our brains work. This article from Upworthy not only explains why we're so bad at time perception, but shows how to use that quirk to our advantage. So let this be your reminder: you aren't supposed to be good at estimating time. It's human nature, and here's how to take control.
"When you're young, everything is new. Your brain is constantly recording fresh memories, and the more memory your brain stores, the longer the experience feels. But then something changes. As you get older, routines take over. Your brain stops saving so much detail. It switches to autopilot because everything feels familiar and predictable. And when your brain stores fewer new memories, your perception of time compresses. That's why childhood feels long, and adulthood feels like a blur."
Key Insights:
Time speeds up because your brain stops recording details once things become routine - when your surroundings feel familiar and predictable, your brain switches to autopilot and stores fewer new memories, making time feel compressed.
Breaking routines literally slows down your perception of time - when you travel somewhere new, learn an unfamiliar skill, or change up long-standing habits, your brain has to form new memories, which stretches your experience of time.
This isn't about age, it's about novelty - the blur of adulthood isn't inevitable, it's the result of falling into predictable patterns, which means you can actually control how fast time feels by deliberately seeking new experiences.
Read the full article for the neuroscience behind why childhood summers felt endless and practical strategies to "reboot" your brain's time perception as an adult.
💻 Tools & Technology
If you're using AI tools for research or content creation, you've probably hit this wall: NotebookLM is great for understanding your documents, and Gemini helps you think through ideas, but where do you actually store everything so you can find it later? This article from Android Police breaks down a three-app system that solves that problem by adding Obsidian as the missing piece that connects everything.
"The moment I started saving the output into Obsidian, everything changed. Instead of losing ideas to chat histories, I now had a place where everything could go. It included summaries from NotebookLM, research ideas from Gemini, notes I'd made while reading, and connections I didn't want to forget. Obsidian became the layer that glues everything together. Its vault structure means every note stays in the same ecosystem. Backlinks and tags help me link concepts that would usually get saved in separate chats."
Key Insights:
NotebookLM excels at deep research with sources you upload, giving you cited answers from your actual materials, but it becomes a sealed chamber after a few days with no way to connect ideas across different notebooks.
Gemini fills the gaps when you need quick comparisons or want to explore angles not in your uploaded sources, such as explaining new methodologies or brainstorming concepts you haven't saved anywhere yet.
Obsidian turns temporary AI outputs into a permanent, searchable knowledge base where backlinks and tags connect concepts across different conversations, so you're not constantly rebuilding context when you revisit a topic.
Read the full article for the complete workflow showing how to move information between all three apps, plus practical tips like creating an Inbox note to prevent clutter and using Obsidian's Daily Notes feature to capture thoughts from audio overviews.
🤖 AI
If you're using AI chatbots for anything sensitive - finances, health questions, business strategy, or client work - you need to know what's actually happening to your conversations behind the scenes. This article from Tom's Guide breaks down the privacy practices of the four biggest AI chatbots, and the differences are significant. Spoiler: the chatbot you might assume is most private probably isn't.
"Claude is the only mainstream chatbot that doesn't train on your conversations unless you explicitly opt in. That means your chats aren't quietly used to improve the model, and they aren't fed into large training pipelines unless you choose otherwise. If you delete a conversation, Anthropic removes it from their systems within roughly 30 days. There's also no routine human-review pipeline for your chats. Unless you manually submit feedback, your data stays private."
Key Insights:
ChatGPT uses your conversations to train its models by default unless you actively turn on Temporary Chat each time - your chat history is saved indefinitely and requires manual deletion, making it the least private option for sensitive conversations.
Gemini's biggest concern isn't just data retention - some chats are routinely sent to human reviewers and these reviewed interactions can be retained for up to three years, even if you disable data saving or delete your history.
Claude is the only major chatbot that doesn't train on your data by default and has no routine human review process unless you manually submit feedback, making it the clear winner if privacy matters to you without requiring any settings adjustments.
Read the full article for detailed privacy rankings, specific settings to adjust in each platform, and when you might still want to use ChatGPT or Gemini despite their privacy trade-offs.
🎉 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!
Streamlined admin with improved updates, automations, and article uploads.
Made progress on big projects, even while taking on extra work.
What did you do this week? We feature non-member successes too. Just post them here!
🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements
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.