The Rundown

• 3 Brain Habits That Are Damaging Your Intelligence, By A Psychologist

• Lead in the age of AI recommendations

• Productivity Hacks That Stick All Solve This One Major Problem

• Claude Cowork handles my admin work so well that I stopped doing it myself

• Claude's Projects feature replaced my notes, bookmarks, and browser tabs overnight

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

🔥Quote/Prompt

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)

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📈 Performance

3 Brain Habits That Are Damaging Your Intelligence, By A Psychologist

You probably already know multitasking isn't great for focus. Most of us have read that somewhere. Knowing it and actually understanding what's happening in your brain when you do it are two different things. The second one is harder to ignore.

This piece from Forbes psychologist Mark Travers covers three everyday habits that research links to cognitive performance decline: heavy multitasking, passive content consumption, and always choosing the path of least cognitive resistance. None of these are surprising on the surface. What IS surprising is the mechanism behind each one and how deliberately designing against them can actually build cognitive capacity over time.

Key Insights:

1. Every time you switch tasks, the previous task stays active in your cognitive background competing for attention with whatever you moved to next, meaning multitasking doesn't just slow you down in the moment. It creates ongoing mental interference that eats into your working memory and sustained attention, even after you've stopped.

2. Passive content consumption, like scrolling algorithmically curated feeds without stopping to form your own opinion first, trains your brain to outsource reasoning. Research suggests this can gradually weaken independent thinking and information retention over time, not because of how much you consume but because of how little active processing happens while you do it.

3. Robert Bjork's "desirable difficulties" research at UCLA shows that methods like retrieval practice, spaced repetition, and interleaving feel harder and less immediately satisfying than passive review, but they consistently produce stronger long-term retention. In other words, if your learning strategy feels easy, it probably isn't working.

Read the full article for the specific daily practices Travers recommends to counter each habit and his Cognitive Style Test if you want to understand your own processing tendencies.

Note for the extra deep divers: The article's headline frames these habits as "damaging your intelligence," but the actual research shows performance decrements on cognitive tasks, not damage to intelligence itself. All major studies here are correlational, meaning we can't confirm causation. The multitasking evidence is moderate (about half of studies in the key review showed underperformance, not all of them). The gray matter study had only 75 participants with no replication. The desirable difficulties research, though, is genuinely well-established — it's one of the most replicated findings in cognitive psychology and worth taking seriously on its own.

⚙️ Optimization

Lead in the age of AI recommendations

Here's something most marketing leaders won't say out loud: the thing that made them good at their jobs — generating, building, executing — is becoming a liability. When AI can produce a hundred campaign iterations before you finish your coffee, volume is no longer a competitive advantage. Judgment is.

Jason Greenwood, CMO at Delta Dental of Arizona, makes the case in Fast Company that the modern marketing leader's job has fundamentally shifted from making to filtering. AI is optimizing constantly, and if nobody is steering, it will optimize for what's measurable right now (clicks, conversions) while quietly eroding what takes years to build (brand trust, pricing power).

Key Insights:

1. Greenwood runs every AI recommendation through three filters before acting: does it lead to sustainable profitable growth (not just clicks), can the operational infrastructure actually deliver on what the machine is promising, and does it hold up against the brand's long-term identity. Any recommendation that fails one of those three doesn't move forward regardless of how good the data looks.

2. To avoid becoming a bottleneck, he uses a tiered decision structure: low-risk optimizations like A/B testing subject lines run automatically within guardrails, director-level review handles audience targeting and brand voice changes, and anything touching core pricing or large capital allocation comes to him. This keeps the team moving without the enterprise running unguarded.

3. Greenwood calls the underlying risk "strategic drift" — when AI is empowered to optimize purely for what converts fastest in the immediate term, brand equity erodes for a momentary performance spike. The job of the modern CMO, in his framing, is to be the human filter that prevents that drift, ensuring technology stays a servant to strategy rather than the other way around.

Read the full article for Greenwood's complete breakdown of how to build a governance system that scales human judgment across an AI-driven marketing team.

Note for the extra deep divers: The article cites "recent findings from MarketingProfs" for the CMO role shift. That reference points to a MarketingProfs AI news roundup rather than an original study — they're synthesizing industry reporting from CMOs, not presenting primary research. The directional finding is well-supported by other independent sources, including Les Binet and Peter Field's IPA work, which shows measurable long-term brand damage from over-indexing on short-term activation. Worth noting that Binet and Field's work is industry research published through the IPA, not peer-reviewed academic work either. The framework still holds, just know the supporting sources are industry research rather than peer-reviewed studies.

⏲️ Time Management

Productivity Hacks That Stick All Solve This One Major Problem

Most productivity hacks have a shelf life of about two weeks. You try the new system, feel the dopamine hit of a clean to-do list, and then slowly drift back to whatever you were doing before. The reason most of them fade isn't a discipline problem. It's that they speed up execution without ever solving the actual bottleneck, which is figuring out what's worth executing in the first place.

This Forbes piece gets that right. The founders interviewed aren't sharing apps or morning routines. They're sharing frameworks that answer one question first: what should I NOT be doing? And it turns out that question is where most of the hours are actually lost.

Key Insights:

1. Ben Beavers of SmartyPlants sets 90-day success criteria at the start of each quarter and 30-day objectives each month, so that every single workday he already knows what "right priorities" look like and can skip the meta-work of figuring it out from scratch. The productivity gain isn't from the planning itself but from removing the daily decision of whether you're working on the right thing.

2. Beth Davies organizes her work around desired outcomes rather than task categories, grouping everything that contributes to a single goal like lead generation into one focused session instead of splitting it across different types of work throughout the week. This is a personal framework she developed rather than an established methodology, but the underlying logic (reduce context switching by aligning effort to outcome) is well-supported.

3. Starting the day with revenue-generating work before email, admin, or updates is a timing strategy, not a motivation hack. Davies does the first one to two hours exclusively on outreach and lead-generating content before anything reactive enters her day, which means her best cognitive hours go to growth instead of maintenance.

Read the full article for the full breakdown of all three founders' systems, including Harriet Meyer's Claude morning briefing workflow that scans news and surfaces priorities automatically each morning.

Note for the extra deep divers: Two quick things worth knowing. The 36% admin time statistic comes from a survey commissioned by Time etc, a virtual assistant company whose founder also wrote this article. The numbers are plausible and widely cited, but the source has an obvious commercial interest in the finding. Also, the Claude morning briefing described in the article implies a seamlessly automatic cloud-based workflow — the current technical reality is that scheduled Cowork tasks run locally, meaning your computer needs to be awake and Claude Desktop open at the scheduled time. Worth knowing before you try to replicate it.

💻 Tools & Technology

Claude Cowork handles my admin work so well that I stopped doing it myself

If your file system is the digital equivalent of "I'll deal with it later" — screenshots dumped into one folder, downloads never sorted, notes scattered across three different apps — this one is for you. Not because it's going to fix your organizational habits. Because it'll just run without you.

Full transparency: this isn't a tool I've installed on my own computer yet. I'm still working through the security implications and exploring options like virtual machines to protect my files. I'll let you know when I get there. I still think it's worth covering what's currently possible even when it's not in my own workflow yet. More on that in the note below.

Nolen Jonker at XDA tested Claude Cowork for local file admin (no Gmail or browser integrations) and found it genuinely handles the boring stuff well enough to stop doing it manually. The key is a feature most people miss: every folder you connect to Cowork gets a CLAUDE.md file with the rules for that folder (naming conventions, sorting logic, what goes where). Every time you point Cowork at that folder again, it loads automatically. You explain it once. Then it just knows.

Key Insights:

1. Cowork's CLAUDE.md system means you set the rules for a folder once and never rebuild that context again. Different folders can have completely different instructions and Cowork handles them correctly each time, which is what makes it genuinely useful for recurring admin instead of just a one-time cleanup tool.

2. The writer deliberately skips the Gmail and browser integrations for a documented security reason: prompt injection is a real attack vector where malicious instructions hidden in a webpage or email can manipulate what the agent does without you realizing it. Anthropic's own safety documentation flags this. Local-only use sidesteps the risk entirely and is still plenty capable for file work.

3. Cowork supports scheduling so file-sorting tasks can run automatically on repeat without you initiating anything. Nolen runs a nightly sort of his screenshots folder before shutting down his PC. The barrier to setting this up is lower than it sounds — it requires Claude Desktop and at least a Pro subscription, but no coding.

Read the full article for the comparison between Cowork and the regular filesystem connector in Claude Chat, how the CLAUDE.md setup actually works, and why the writer says this is a legitimate use case even if nobody's making YouTube tutorials about it.

Note for the extra deep divers: Before you install Cowork, it's worth understanding what you're actually giving it access to. Cowork is a desktop agent, meaning it runs on your computer and can read, rename, sort, and move your local files. The writer deliberately avoids connecting it to Gmail and browser integrations because prompt injection is a documented attack vector: malicious instructions hidden inside a webpage or email can manipulate what the agent does on your behalf without you realizing it. Anthropic's own safety documentation flags this. Local file access carries less risk than web or email access, but you're still giving an AI agent real write permissions on your machine. Go in with clear boundaries about what folders it touches, and read Anthropic's safety docs before connecting anything beyond local files.

🤖 AI

Claude's Projects feature replaced my notes, bookmarks, and browser tabs overnight

Most people use Claude like a search engine with better answers. You open it, ask something, get a response, close it. Every session starts from zero. Projects is the feature that changes that, and it's surprising how few people have actually set one up properly.

Nolen Jonker at XDA describes how Projects quietly replaced the three things most of us have a complicated relationship with: notes we create but never revisit, bookmarks we optimistically save and never open, and browser tabs we're afraid to close. Not because Projects is a better version of those tools, but because it solves the actual problem underneath them, which is that you need somewhere to put half-formed thinking that has enough context around it to still be useful later.

Key Insights:

1. Projects give Claude persistent memory across conversations within a workspace: your custom instructions, uploaded documents, and context all carry over automatically, so you stop re-explaining yourself every session. For any ongoing project (a client, a content series, a business initiative), this alone is worth the setup time.

2. Anything you'd normally save to bookmarks or open a new tab to "remember later" can go into a Project's knowledge base instead as pasted text or a URL reference, where it's actually findable and contextualized when you need it rather than buried in a folder you never open.

3. Free users get five Projects, which is genuinely usable for most people. Paid plans unlock unlimited Projects and smarter retrieval when the knowledge base gets large. The ten-minute setup investment pays off quickly, but only if you write real custom instructions — it's easy to skip the parts that actually matter, like writing real context about what you're working on and how you want Claude to respond.

Read the full article for the honest caveats (no full-text search across conversations, knowledge base is static and requires manual reuploads, the five-project free cap hits faster than expected) and the writer's specific workflows for design references, novel writing, and research.

🎉 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!

• I reached two of my goals from the past few month!

• Completed the business objectives and accelerated the billables!

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: 2️⃣ Process & Productivity  RSVP here

• Tuesday: Work ON Business. Theme: 2️⃣ Process & Productivityn RSVP here

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

• Accelerators: May 8 is your Office Hours  RSVP here

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Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)