To gain a macro perspective, Melanie Perkins does an "AI walk." She goes for a walk and dictates all her thoughts on her phone using a notes app. Later, she uses AI to summarize the brain dump, helping her filter ideas, identify action items, and think more strategically.
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To maintain performance over the long term, Canva's CEO deliberately creates strict boundaries between work and life. By removing email from her phone, she can be "all in" when working at her laptop and "all out" when she's not, allowing for true mental separation and recovery.
Constant productivity keeps the brain in a high-frequency "beta" state, which stifles creativity. To solve complex problems, you must intentionally shift to a slower "alpha" state by disconnecting. This is achieved through simple, non-distracting activities like walking in nature without your phone.
A powerful workflow is to explicitly instruct your AI to act as a collaborative thinking partner—asking questions and organizing thoughts—while strictly forbidding it from creating final artifacts. This separates the crucial thinking phase from the generative phase, leading to better outcomes.
Top creators don't wait for inspiration; they engineer it through structured rest. Activities like taking multiple showers (Sorkin), aimless boating (Einstein), or problem-solving walks (Darwin) look unproductive but are crucial for high-quality creative output. This contrasts with the modern tendency to brute-force solutions at a desk.
Canva CEO Melanie Perkins plans using "Column B" thinking: envision a perfect, magical future state without constraints, then work backward to build a ladder of small, actionable steps to get there. This contrasts with "Column A" thinking, which starts with current resources and limits vision.
The high-volume feedback during a mastermind "hot seat" can be overwhelming. A simple solution is to record the audio, run it through an AI transcription service, and generate a structured document. This creates an actionable summary, ensuring valuable insights are captured and not lost after the event.
Canva operationalizes big ideas using a "chaos to clarity" framework. An initial chaotic idea is progressively clarified through small, tangible steps—starting with writing it down and culminating in a vision deck. This process makes amorphous concepts real, shareable, and easier to build.
Instead of manually rereading notes to regain context after a break, instruct a context-aware AI to summarize your own recent progress. This acts as a personalized briefing, dramatically reducing the friction of re-engaging with complex, multi-day projects like coding or writing.
Go beyond using AI for research by codifying your North Star, OKRs, and strategic goals into a personalized AI agent. Before important meetings, use this agent as a 'thought partner' to pressure-test your ideas, check for alignment with your goals, and identify blind spots. This 10-minute exercise dramatically improves meeting focus and outcomes.
Treat generative AI not as a single assistant, but as an army. When prototyping or brainstorming, open several different AI tools in parallel windows with similar prompts. This allows you to juggle and cross-pollinate ideas, effectively 'riffing' with multiple assistants at once to accelerate creative output and overcome latency.
