The P/PC Balance: Is AI Secretly Harming Your Productivity?

This blog is not written by Chat GPT. And no, I can’t really prove that. Although hopefully the less than grammatically impeccable writing here proves it for me.

So, why in the world, would a guy who wrote a blog on “3 Game-Changing AI Tips to Boost Your Productivity (and Save Your Sanity)” suddenly do anything but write his next blog with AI? Well, mostly because of this new study, called “Your brain on Chat GPT”, which shows that using AI weakens our mental muscles.

Essay writers who used Chat GPT and then went back to boring old ways of DIY writing, showed significant declines in neural connectivity. Most could not remember what they just wrote. Pretty scary stuff.

Which brings me onto the point of this blog. The P/PC balance introduced by Steven R. Covey in the book “7 habits of highly effective people”. P stands for production. PC stands for production capacity, as in your ability to produce in the future.

See now AI would have explained that better, but since I am just a silly human, I will have to settle for the same tale that Steven used to demonstrate the point:

There was once a farmer with a very special goose.  A goose so special that it laid eggs made of solid gold. At first, the farmer couldn’t believe his luck. He started to make some serious bank using this new employee of the month.  Eventually the farmer got impatient. I guess one solid gold egg per day just wasn’t enough for him anymore. So, he devised a plan to get all the eggs out at once. He would murder the goose in cold blood, a serious HR violation, and cut it open to get them all right now.

Now you may be thinking “that’s not how eggs work” and you would be right. The farmer found no eggs and he just murdered his star employee.

There are many ways to skin this goose (may she rest in peace). The obvious one? As a leader of yourself or others. By pushing too hard, too fast, you will cause burnout. Resulting in the loss of production capacity for short-term production gains. An all too often occurrence in the era of hustle culture.

On the other hand, if you don’t push yourself hard enough then you dull the skills needed to uphold your production capacity. Like getting AI to write all your blogs and losing the ability to write coherently.

This is not an issue if you must write blogs at an unreasonable pace to satisfy your goose murdering boss. However, if your goal is to help cement ideas that you write about in your spare time. It might be useful to remember what you wrote.

In summary, I still think generative AI is a great tool for boosting your productivity and saving your sanity. Not learning to use it well would be like refusing to use the internet. Although over reliance can really steal the soul out of our passion projects.

So, will I still be using AI at my job to write code and calm my heated emails? Absolutely. Will I use AI for personal projects? Probably. Just not before I give it a good go with my human brain.

References

• Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. Free Press.
• Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X. H., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I., & Maes, P. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. arXiv preprint. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872