Disconnect Before Sleeping, Overemployment and AI Generation of Newsletters

1. Disconnect Before Sleeping

One of the most important things we can do is to spend 1-2 hours unwinding before we go to sleep every night.

But what most people do is they remain connected, skip the downtime, and then try to get to sleep — often tossing and turning, and waking up somewhat groggy.

It is better to disconnect, pick a downtime activity, do it for 1-2 hours, then sleep. You’ll sleep better, and wake up with your willpower, motivation and other reserves better restored, and feel much, much better.

And what are the best downtime activities?

The ideal is no screens at all.

But that isn’t realistic in 2024. Chances are, downtime is going to be some streaming series, reading on a Kindle, playing a video game, or scrolling social media.

And all of those are fine with one big caveat:

NOTHING in any of these activities should relate to work.

You already know not to check email, Slack etc in those 1-2 hours.

But if you say, do social media for work, then you shouldn’t be doing ANY social media for downtime — because your brain won’t be able to help itself, and will start thinking about work when you’re meant to be winding down.

2. Over Employed Team Members

There is a newish trend in the business world called over employment.

This is the practice of an employee holding 2+ jobs, usually remote, doing well at them, and then taking home 1-2x their normal salary.

It started with software engineers employed at big tech, and then the COVID years really accelerated this trend with a lot of knowledge work going remote.

At a societal level we could dig into why this has happened — cost of living increases, companies not paying employees enough, remote work letting people deliver better results in less time, and so on.

My take as a business owner is this — so long as you are aware that your team is doing this and their results are commensurate with their compensation… there is no real issue.

In fact, it’s good on them for being motivated and driven, and holding a second job is no different than having a talented team member start a side hustle.

Plus as a smaller business, you will be able to recruit more highly talented people at a fraction of their actual market rate.

The important thing here is that results are delivered. It becomes an issue when team members are doing multiple jobs and not actually delivering results.

3. AI Generation of Newsletters

I’ve always been cautious with the hype surrounding AI.

But it’s starting to become more reality and less hype, at least some of the time.

The 2 latest models I’ve been playing with are ChatGPT 4o and Claude Opus.

Using these, I recently helped a client develop a process to turn their YouTube videos into long-form email newsletters.

It took some good prompt engineering, some iterative processes and manually writing some example newsletters.

But now they have a process for consistently generating great newsletters that only require a bit of manual editing and assembly. What would normally take 2-3 hours to produce… can be done in less than 30 minutes.

And the newsletters are of immense value to their customers too, because well, not everyone wants to watch a 20-minute YouTube video.

If you’re not using AI in your workflows yet — it’s time to start. Even for people like me who have been wary of the hype :)

— Aaron

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