Make a List of What You Refuse to Automate

A birthday card lies open on the kitchen table, blank inside, with the pen beside it and its cap off. On your phone are three lines the AI wrote for the card. They're warm and correct, about as good as anything you'd have managed.

You copy them in and miss, a little, the five minutes of staring at the card and thinking about the person, though not enough to go back.

Nobody told you to stop writing your own. It was one small step from "it could do this" to "it does this", and you took that step without deciding to. It's the same way you stopped working out the route, and stopped planning the week on paper on a Sunday night.

Big handovers get argued about, but these go quietly.

Ross Stevenson writes the newsletter Steal These Thoughts. He has two lines for this, and both are his. Keep "a list of what you refuse to automate", and treat "joy as a cognitive safeguard".

Hand the task over and the pleasure goes. The attention goes with it, and the attention was doing work.

A list like this draws a line once, on purpose, so "it could do this" stops meaning "it does this". Everything off the list is open. Everything on the list you keep, on the tired days too, when the AI is right there.

Making the list

AI helps with one part, which is remembering what you've already handed over, because most of that is invisible by now. The whole list takes about twenty minutes.

1. Start by seeing what's gone.

   I want to make a list of things I refuse to automate. But first I need to see what I've already handed to AI without deciding to. Ask me about my week, one area at a time. Cover messages to people I care about, planning, reading and learning, writing for work, decisions about money, cooking and the house, and anything creative. For each one, ask what I used to do myself that AI or an app now does. Don't suggest answers. Just ask and wait.
   

2. Ask two questions about each answer. Did you decide to hand the task over, or did it drift? And do you miss it? The ones that drifted and that you miss are your candidates, while the ones you chose and don't miss are fine where they are.

3. Write the list by hand. Use paper, or a note you'll see again, away from the chat. Keep it to five to ten lines, each one a plain refusal, like these.

   • I write the birthday messages myself.
   • I read the whole book, not the summary.
   • I plan the week on paper.
   • I make the first call to a new client without a script.

4. Put the list where you'd break it. Stick it above the desk, or at the top of the app you use most. A list only works at the moment you're about to go against it, and that moment is usually late, when you're tired.

Then let the list change. Every few months, add what you've noticed slipping and cross off what you've decided to let go. A refusal you thought about and reversed is a decision, but a refusal that quietly stopped being true is what the list exists to catch.

Keep the list short, because a list can harden into a rule you follow without thinking. That rule can become a way of not getting things done. If the whole week is on it, you've written yourself reasons to be slow.

There's a fair case against the whole idea, because most people don't miss what they stopped doing by hand. Nobody mourns long division. Some of what feels like loss is only a habit changing, and in a year you'll wonder why you kept it.

That can be true, and what decides it is what the task carried. If the attention that came with the task was doing something for you, keep the task. If it wasn't, let it go without feeling you've lost anything.

Both the list and the right to cross things off it are yours.

Next year there'll be another card.

I write the birthday messages myself.

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The phrases "a list of what you refuse to automate" and "joy as a cognitive safeguard" are Ross Stevenson's, from his newsletter Steal These Thoughts. Read his piece for the original.