AI is supposed to save us time. For creative professionals, it can speed up research, brainstorming, writing, editing, planning, admin, and a growing list of other tasks.

But there’s a strange side effect to making almost everything easier to start: there is always something else you could be doing.

Another prompt. Another idea to explore. Another draft to improve. Another side project you could finally get moving.

In this episode of AI for Creative Professionals, I’m looking at the other side of AI productivity: what happens when we remove so much friction from our work that we rarely give ourselves any time to do absolutely nothing.

And why I’ve started deliberately putting some of that friction back.

A few weeks ago, I started doing something incredibly simple. At around 10 PM, I’d go outside to my patio with a drink, a notebook and a pen and sit there for about 30 minutes.

No podcast. No YouTube. No scrolling. No ChatGPT.

The notebook isn’t really there for journaling, either. Some nights I write something down. Most nights the pen barely moves.

At first, those 30 minutes felt ridiculously long.

I’d check my phone. Think about going back inside. Remember something I could work on. Think about a video I wanted to watch. Eventually, I started leaving my phone inside altogether.

That discomfort made me realize how little genuine empty space I had left in my day.

I edit podcasts and work with clients. I have my own projects, including this podcast. Then there are newsletters I want to read, YouTube videos, podcasts, Netflix, messages, and all the other perfectly normal things that fill a day.

None of them is particularly overwhelming on its own. Stack them together with almost no gaps, though, and I started noticing this low-level feeling of anxiety that wasn’t attached to any one particular problem.

There’s some interesting research behind what happens when we stop concentrating on a specific task.

Researchers studying the brain often talk about the default mode network, a collection of brain regions associated with internally directed thought, including things like mind wandering and thinking beyond whatever is immediately demanding our attention.

More interesting for creative professionals is the relationship between those periods of mind wandering and creativity.

A 2025 study published in Scientific Reports looked at creative writing tasks separated by different kinds of ten-minute incubation periods. The researchers found that greater mind wandering during those periods predicted greater creative improvement when people returned to the same writing prompt.

That doesn’t mean taking a break automatically gives you better ideas. But it does suggest that letting your attention drift can be doing something useful, even when it feels like nothing productive is happening.

Other research involving professional writers and physicists has found that some of their most important creative ideas emerged during spontaneous mind wandering rather than while deliberately working on the problem.

For someone whose default response to an empty 20 minutes has become “I could get something done,” that was weirdly validating.

This is where I think AI changes the conversation for creative professionals.

A lot of discussion about AI and creative work focuses on whether AI will replace designers, writers, editors, photographers, illustrators and other creative professionals.

I’m increasingly interested in another problem: AI makes it incredibly easy to never stop doing.

Have a question about your career? Ask AI.

Wondering whether you should launch something? Ask AI to evaluate it.

Need ideas? Generate 50.

Unsure what to write? Generate an outline.

That can be genuinely useful. I use AI constantly. But some questions probably shouldn’t be answered as quickly as possible.

Do I actually want this project?

Do I like where my career is going?

What kind of work do I want to be doing two years from now?

Those aren’t necessarily prompting problems. Sometimes you need enough uninterrupted space to hear your own answer.

I talked about a related version of this in AI for Freelancers: The Pricing Math Nobody Warns You About, particularly around deciding whether the work you’re currently doing makes sense long term and whether there are less labor-intensive ways to structure your career.

And there’s a very small experiment you can try here.

Pick one thing AI could help you figure out today... and don’t ask it.

Give yourself 15 or 30 minutes with the question first. Go for a walk without a podcast. Sit outside. Make coffee and don’t bring your phone.

You can always use AI afterwards.

Sometimes the friction itself is useful.

That’s what those nights on my patio have become for me. Occasionally I get an episode idea or finally make a decision I’ve been avoiding. Other nights I think about a holiday, sit with my cats, or accomplish absolutely nothing.

I’m beginning to think those nights count too.

If you’d rather hear the whole thing, listen to Why Constant AI Use Is Making You More Anxious, Not More Productive on AI for Creative Professionals.

00:00 — Why I started deliberately doing nothing
04:11 — Welcome to AI for Creative Professionals
05:15 — My 30-minute no-input ritual
07:36 — Work, content and the accumulation of overstimulation
10:07 — Why “I’ll rest when I’m finished” doesn’t work
11:29 — Mind wandering, creativity and the default mode network
13:25 — What this means for creative professionals using AI
16:14 — One thing you can deliberately choose not to automate
17:30 — What’s coming next on AI for Creative Professionals

AI for Creative Professionals is about figuring out where AI genuinely makes creative work better — and where human judgment, taste, experience and sometimes a little friction still matter.

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