#248: Why “Better AI” Is the Wrong Question

Stop Trying to Quit Bad Habits...Do This Instead

Author

Jenae Spry
January 02, 2026

Productivity Stacks Newsletter

(Formerly Productivity Express)

Issue No. 248

The Best in Evidence-Based Productivity

for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders

Helping You Work Smarter and Live More

The Rundown

  • Stop Trying to Quit Bad Habits…Do This Instead: Why Wabi-Sabi Is the Best Philosophy of Life

  • Why “Better AI” Is the Wrong Question: Perplexity and NotebookLM don't use better AI—they use better intelligence flow architecture

  • Science says superachievers don't set avoidance goals. Here's why successful people set approach goals

  • Brain Gear Is the Hot New Wearable

  • I ditched Chrome for Comet: 3 features I actually use to research faster

  • 👉Did you miss an issue? Check out previous Productivity Stacks issues anytime here

🔥Quote/Prompt

❝

We can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.

Claude Bernard

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)

How cool is this card? I LOVE this message. One thing I've started doing recently is I had just quit my one and only full-time professional job of exactly 365 days (to the day) and there I was talking to an older family member and I was dreading the conversation.

He started about as I expected. "You know I worked my way up from a minimum wage job to where I am now, right?" 

He had gone pretty much to the top of his company over the course of decades and was financially […]

Did someone forward this to you?

📈 Performance

Running a business means every detail feels like it needs to be perfect – the proposal, the website, the client presentation. But that pressure to get everything exactly right isn't just exhausting; it's actually holding you back. This Japanese philosophy offers a research-backed alternative that might change how you approach your work.

"A classic 2004 study found that maladaptive perfectionism — unrealistic self-standards and harsh self-criticism — is strongly associated with a fear of intimacy. This finding was echoed in multiple research efforts. The link, reinforced many times, also seems to reflect the same core reason: perfectionists often believe that if their 'flaws' are exposed, they'll be rejected. Wabi-sabi directly challenges that fear. By embracing imperfection and seeing beauty in brokenness or asymmetry, wabi-sabi encourages a more compassionate, accepting view of the world within and without."

Key Insights:

  1. Perfectionism creates a fear of exposure that prevents deep client relationships and authentic business connections. Wabi-sabi teaches us to see imperfections as character, not flaws – like replacing a broken drawer knob with a handcrafted pull instead of obsessing over finding the "perfect" match.

  2. Acceptance isn't giving up; it's strategic emotional regulation. A 2023 neuropsychological study found that people who habitually practice acceptance show measurably different brain networks for emotional regulation, leading to better well-being and increased openness to new experiences.

  3. Focusing on process over perfection reduces procrastination and self-doubt. When you prioritize learning and enjoyment in your work rather than flawless results, you actually get more done – and build resilience in the process.

Read the full article for five practical daily practices to incorporate wabi-sabi into your business life, including specific techniques for celebrating imperfections and embracing change.

⚙️ Optimization

You've probably seen the debates about AI-generated content – some people swear by it, others dismiss it as soulless. But here's what both sides miss: AI isn't magically producing great work any more than having a computer automatically makes you productive. The difference between "AI replaced my job" and "AI is useless" comes down to one thing - knowing how to architect the collaboration between you and the AI. This breakdown shows exactly how the best AI products actually work, and why becoming fluent in this matters more than the AI itself.

"Here's what people miss: Both products run on the same foundation — large language models, vector embeddings, search APIs, retrieval-augmented generation. Same ingredients. Completely different results. Why? Because they architected different intelligence flows — different answers to these critical questions: WHERE does AI work autonomously? WHERE does human provide direction? HOW do they hand off work between them? WHAT intelligence lives in which layer?"

Key Insights:

  1. The cognitive split matters more than the AI model. Perplexity uses a 20% human (direction and evaluation) to 80% AI (discovery and synthesis) split, while NotebookLM uses 30% human (curation and direction) to 70% AI (analysis and orchestration). Same AI models, completely different results based on how the work is distributed.

  2. Design backward from autonomous execution, not features. Instead of asking "what AI button should we add," successful products start with "what will the system DO autonomously" - like Perplexity searching, synthesizing, and citing sources without waiting for instructions, or NotebookLM analyzing documents and mapping relationships invisibly.

  3. Fast generation-verification loops beat full autonomy. Andrej Karpathy's lesson from 12 years at Tesla applies directly to business workflows - when AI generates massive outputs, you haven't saved time if verification takes hours. The goal isn't removing humans from the loop; it's making the loop spin as fast as possible.

Read the full article for the four-step process to redesign any workflow using Intelligence Flow Architecture, plus a complete example of transforming email composition from 5 minutes of manual work to 30 seconds of AI-directed execution.

⏲️ Time Management

Time and willpower are more connected than most of us want to admit. Every time you try to "stop" doing something, you're burning mental energy fighting your brain's natural patterns. But here's the thing, you don't have to paddle upstream. This research-backed approach works with how your brain actually functions, saving you both time and energy in the process.

"Just about every avoidance goal can be turned into an approach goal; simply determine the positive behavior or habit that you want to have replace what you want to stop doing, and focus on doing that. If you want to watch less TV, make it your goal to read 20 pages every evening. If you want to spend less time in your office, make it your goal to walk the shop or office floor first thing in the morning. If you want to spend less time on social media, start an activity that makes it hard to engage."

Key Insights:

  1. Approach goals are significantly more successful than avoidance goals because it's more satisfying to do something you want to do than avoid something you don't. Research published in PLOS One found that people who set approach goals were far more likely to stay the course compared to those who set avoidance goals.

  2. The simple formula works for any habit. If you want to stop doing one thing, choose another thing you want or need to do and make that your goal. For example, instead of "stop ignoring employee conflicts," set a goal to "spend time each day working in the department where issues exist" or "create collaborative projects that build teamwork."

  3. Replacement naturally crowds out the unwanted behavior without requiring constant willpower. When you take a nightly walk with your phone left at home, you automatically get more actual social time and less social media – no mental battle required.

Read the full article for more specific examples of turning avoidance goals into approach goals, including the author's personal story of breaking a decades-long Diet Mountain Dew habit.

💻 Tools & Technology

Fitness trackers told us how many steps we took. Smartwatches added heart rate and sleep tracking. Now there's a new category of wearables that skip past your wrist entirely and go straight to reading your brain waves. If you've ever wondered exactly when during the day you're actually focused versus just pretending to work, these devices have an answer.

"If you're the type to work smarter rather than harder, you can buy a $500 pair of headphones from Boston-based Neurable to hack your productivity. Equipped with EEG sensors, the headphones track brain activity associated with concentration—namely, beta waves—to tell users how focused they are. When I tried them out last year, they confirmed what I already suspected: My most focused working hours are during the morning. The device also nudges you to take the occasional break if it thinks you've been deeply focused for too long, a feature I appreciate as someone who spends a lot of time in front of a computer screen."

Key Insights:

  1. EEG wearables are moving beyond tracking to actual intervention. Elemind's $350 headband doesn't just monitor sleep - it detects your brain signals and delivers pink noise to move your brain from wakeful patterns to delta waves for deeper sleep. In a trial of 21 participants, more than three-quarters fell asleep faster.

  2. Apple is getting into brain tech with a 2023 patent for EEG-sensing AirPods and a new Vision Pro accessibility feature that allows the headset to be controlled with brain waves instead of physical movement. Companies like Cognixion are already building apps that run on Vision Pro using custom headbands that detect brain signals.

  3. The privacy implications are significant - while these consumer devices can't read your private thoughts yet, brain wave data reveals a lot about your mental and emotional state. Nita Farahany, law professor and author of Battle for Your Brain, predicts these will become ubiquitous, eventually integrated as "little tattoos behind your ear" seamlessly connected to all your devices.

Read the full article for details on Flow Neuroscience's FDA-approved headset for treating depression, the "open internet of brains" network where developers can create neuro apps, and what this means for the future of privacy.

🤖 AI

I’m still not sponsored by Comet or Perplexity, but definitely obsessed. 🙃 Every week I discover more ways this tool is an actual game changer for my workflow. This week brought even more revelations. Check out this breakdown of features that solve the exact research problems most of us deal with daily.

"Every time I had to do research, I found myself with dozens of open tabs. I would open tabs with the information I need now and many others with information I might need in the near future. All of that made the browser slower and wasted time searching for what I needed. When I decided to try the Comet browser, it made research easier: the assistant was right next to what I was reading, not in a separate app I had to open."

Key Insights:

  1. Cross-tab awareness eliminates re-reading the same information across multiple sites. The author tested this by comparing phone prices across open tabs - instead of manually checking each site, they asked the assistant which had the lowest price. You can refine this by using @ mentions to compare specific tabs, such as "compare @Amazon and @Best Buy" to ignore random tabs you opened.

  2. Voice mode keeps your workflow moving when typing would break your focus. Press Alt + Shift + V and ask questions without losing your place on the page. The author used this while reviewing phone specs - when encountering an unfamiliar feature, they asked for explanations without typing or switching tabs.

  3. File upload and search saves you from digging through multiple documents. Upload PDFs, spec sheets, or press releases (up to 10 files), then ask filter questions like "Does this file mention anything about the Comet browser?" or "Pull the paragraph that talks about the summary feature" to extract exactly what you need without reading everything.

Read the full article for step-by-step instructions on using each feature, including how to group research tabs into collections and close the ones you don't need to clean up your browser without losing important work.

🎉 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!

  • Achieved all set goals and wrapped up the month with greater ease.

  • Caught up on income goals and got back on track with client work.

  • Received positive client feedback.

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

🔒Inner Circle: Events & Announcements

  • Monday: {EU Time} Work ON Business. Theme: 3️⃣ Sales & Marketing  RSVP here

  • Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: 3️⃣ Sales & Marketing RSVP here

  • Wednesday: Doers Book Club — The Grieving Brain RSVP here

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

  • Accelerators: January 9 is your Office Hours  RSVP here

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I hope you found this valuable!

Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)

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