Everyone talks about what AI can do that’s impressive. Write code. Analyze data. Generate art. Make whole videos. Get your presentation done while you’re out to lunch. Those are the capabilities that make for good demos and good headlines. But I’ve been living with an AI assistant for a while now, and the thing it does that has actually changed my daily life is none of those.
It finds jobs for me.
I lost my job a few months ago. Applying for jobs is the thing most people absolutely hate. It’s also, as far as my brain is concerned, a form of torture. You search through listings. You read descriptions that all start to sound the same. You get emails from LinkedIn that don’t apply to you. You try to figure out if your resume matches what they want. You fill out forms. You do this over and over and over. And my brain fights it at every single step.
My ADHD brain doesn’t do tedious, repetitive, low-stimulation tasks well. It wants novelty, interest, a problem to solve. Scrolling through job boards is none of those things. So I avoid it. I procrastinate. I find literally anything else to do. And then I feel guilty about avoiding it, which makes me avoid it more.
Here’s what changed. I set up an automated job search. My resume goes in, my assistant has a memory of what I like and what I know, the system matches it against listings, and I get a clean list of jobs that fit my criteria. That fit me. I look at the details, pick the ones I want to apply to, and send them off. The thing that would have taken me hours of fighting my own brain takes maybe ten minutes.
And the thing I keep coming back to is this: the AI isn’t doing anything I couldn’t do. It’s doing something I wouldn’t do. There’s a difference. I have the ability to search job boards. I don’t have the capacity to make myself do it consistently without it draining everything out of me.
That’s what I think a lot of people miss when they talk about AI. They frame it as a capability question. Can the AI do X as well as a human? But for me, it’s an energy question. Can the AI do X so I don’t have to spend the energy forcing myself to do it so I can do the things I truly care about?
My energy is finite. Probably more finite than most people’s, honestly. I’m often kept up at night because of Restless Leg Syndrome. There are some days where I fall into a focus for six hours a day and some where I can’t focus for 15 minutes on anything, both of which make it harder to get things done. Every boring task I have to power through costs me something I could have spent on stuff that actually matters. On the business I’m building. On creative projects. On the people in my life. Hell, on eating. Energy I spend on things I struggle with drain me and that leaves me with less energy for the things I really want to do. When I spend two hours fighting my way through a task I hate, that’s two hours of real thinking I don’t get to do later.
So I’ve started looking at my life through this lens. Where am I spending energy on things that drain me? Where could someone (or something) else handle it? The job search was the obvious one. But I’m starting to see others. Keeping up with friends, for instance. That’s something I want to do, something that matters to me, but it also requires a kind of tracking and follow-up that my brain is bad at. What if something could handle the tracking and just trigger me to actually reach out?
Here’s what I think is actually going on. People like me have been told our whole lives that we just need to try harder. Be more disciplined. Push through. And that advice is not just unhelpful, it’s actively wrong. My brain doesn’t work that way. It can’t. Telling me to power through a boring task is like telling someone with bad knees to just run faster. The problem isn’t willpower. The problem is that the task and the brain are fundamentally mismatched.
But what if instead of forcing my brain to do things it’s bad at, I can offload those things to a system that doesn’t get bored, doesn’t get tired, doesn’t need novelty to stay engaged. Then I get to spend my energy on the things my brain is actually good at. The creative leaps. The connections no one else sees. The hyperfocus that lets me build something for eight hours straight when I actually care about it.
I finally feel like I’m building a life where the boring stuff is handled and my energy goes where it actually matters. That feels like a revolution to me. A completely new way of living.
I think most people are spending energy on things they don’t need to be doing. Not just people with ADHD. Everyone has tasks that drain them disproportionately. The opportunity here isn’t to use AI for the flashy things. It’s to use it for the boring things. The things you’d avoid if you could. The things that take more from you than they should. The things that take you away from the things that make you you.
Find those things in your life. Offload them. Then see what you’re capable of when you’re not constantly fighting against yourself.