Ep 78: AI Agents, Creative Workflows, and the Hidden Cost of “Limitless” Productivity
Watch the YouTube video version above or listen to the podcast below!
Episode Summary
In this episode of Enterprising Minds, Dave and Alex explore how AI is moving from simple chat interfaces into more complex workplace and personal systems. Alex opens by explaining the different Microsoft Copilot experiences, from basic Copilot chat to Microsoft 365 Copilot inside apps like PowerPoint, and then into Copilot Studio, where users can build governed agents for specific business tasks.
The conversation moves into what it actually takes to build useful AI agents inside an organization. Alex explains that Copilot Studio is much more structured and complex than creating a custom GPT or Claude project, requiring careful instructions, knowledge sources, access controls, testing, and governance. That structure can be valuable for enterprise use, but it also creates friction compared to the speed and flexibility people often experience with personal AI tools.
Dave and Alex then discuss the broader AI skill gap. Many people are still using AI as a basic chat tool and getting poor results because they are not giving it enough context, examples, or direction. The hosts compare this to trying a marketing channel once, doing it badly, and concluding the channel does not work. They outline a progression from basic prompting to stronger workflows, agent design, and eventually deeper integrations with business systems.
Dave shares how he has been using Claude, Asana, voice memos, and brand standards to build a personal “co-CEO” workflow for his podcast, writing, and personal brand. This leads into a discussion about tracking wins, staying strategic, and avoiding the feeling that nothing was accomplished even after a highly productive day. The hosts also talk about voice-based AI workflows, learning through audio, and the trap of split attention when multiple AI tools are running at once.
That naturally leads to AI burnout. Dave and Alex reflect on how AI can help people accomplish more while also increasing cognitive load through constant reviewing, decision-making, and context switching. They push back on the idea of limitless productivity, noting that even if AI tools can work in parallel, human attention, energy, and judgment still have limits.
The final part of the episode focuses on AI and creative writing. Alex shares how he is using Claude as an editor and structural partner while writing a comedic novel, including help with character notes, story arcs, and reducing writer’s block, while also noting that AI still struggles with humor and nuance. Dave discusses returning to poetry with an AI-supported editing and submission workflow, using Claude to evaluate drafts, match poems to literary journals, and manage submissions. The episode closes with a balanced view of AI as a tool that can reduce friction and support creativity, but still requires human skill, taste, and ownership.
Ep 78: AI Agents, Creative Workflows, and the Hidden Cost of “Limitless” Productivity Podcast and Video Transcription
Dave Dougherty: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Enterprising Minds. We are recording Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there that's coming up and or past, depending on when this, uh, when this goes live. But anyway, some interesting things to talk about. Alex, you have. Recently started playing around with agents in copilot.
So very curious about that because I've yet to use that. And then I attended a very interesting free AI webinar specifically on writers like AI for writers which we're going to talk about. So Alex, why don't you go ahead with the AI robots and what you are discovering with app.
Copilot Versions Explained
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, so that's been a really interesting experience. So I've now had access to copilot studio. There's a bunch of different Microsoft 365 licenses, depending on which one and are experiencing. Basically, it's. You'll see it one of three ways. first is, can you pull up copilot in, let's say PowerPoint have it create slides for you? If you can't, you're on a copilot chat version, which the chat version is quite terrible, so I'm sorry. If you're on the version where it can create slides, cool. You've got copilot basically within your own files so you can say, you know what, over the last five things I promised in the last two weeks, in emails, teams, chat, whatever. And it'll call through all of those and give you that list, which is great. I mean, it's a very useful kind of office assistant when you have that version of it. So not the. Chat version, but you have this kind of next level, and then there's a version after that, which is Copilot Studio, runs along with Power Automate.
It's an older product which kind of allows you to set things up. If you're familiar with n8n or make, it's more akin to that.
Building Agents in Studio
Alex Pokorny: studio is a really in depth, agent creator, and it is. Significantly different than creating GPTs with chat GBT or with agents with Claude. There's just, put it this way, I created one and it all it gives you is outlines for presentations.
It doesn't actually make the file just an outline, suggested outline. It's three and a half hours. Took me to create an agent
Dave Dougherty: Oof.
Alex Pokorny: do that.
Dave Dougherty: Is it more like technical setups, like more code based, or is it like what everybody else is familiar with in like Claude Code where you can just, explain it and it'll do it?
Alex Pokorny: you can't really, so you can try it. And it even has a starting mode where it's tell me what the agent should do and if you start going that direction.
It's not great, basically. So more of it gets into exactly how you're writing your instructions, exactly what knowledge base files you're giving it so that it will refer off of and run off of what model you select, which you can have it select anything that your, it has allowed you to have.
So, it could be grok, it could be Claude, any of the models, sonnet, opus, whatever. it could be Chad, GPT, any of their models as well. All of those are available within it. So your agent can run off of. Any of them. so in a way you get through an agent free access to one of these tools. And as a studio creator myself, so co-pilot studio agents, I can publish them to the company's teams.
And an individual who only has like the chat version, they're really like low level, can still add it to teams, my agents to teams, and then can start using them via that. So they can't make their own and they can't like really get off script with it, but. They can at least make use of it. It's also very literal.
So, if you say, Hey, this is an agent that will help you do X, it will only do X and it will refuse everything else.
Dave Dougherty: So
Alex Pokorny: even
Dave Dougherty: think that they've,
Alex Pokorny: separate agent.
Dave Dougherty: do you think that they've specifically optimized this for corporate governance? It sounds like it. If it's
Alex Pokorny: a hundred
Dave Dougherty: it's only doing
Alex Pokorny: Oh
Dave Dougherty: one thing.
Alex Pokorny: and it can be very specific about what files it has access to, what systems. There's a whole thing called a Dataverse, which allows access to other files. Like it, it gets really specific. One cool thing is creating subagent is fairly straightforward.
Basically, you're just creating agents after agents, and in one of them you start listing of subagents, which is the direction I want, and that's up.
Change Management in Orgs
Alex Pokorny: This was something I had heard that I might get access to. And I've spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out the organizational change management aspects of this, because there are people in the org who are resistant to ai.
There are people in the org who are massive proponents of it. A lot of people are in this hidden community piece. Where you use Claude? It becomes like this almost shaming, but also just curious question. Or it's fess up, did you use ai? There's that, negative side to it, or the positive side of Hey, I, you could, you, maybe you can use, chat GPT for that,
Is this allowed or is this not allowed? And depending on your, it's policies You could probably talk strategy and kind of high-level stuff with an outside agent, but you once, you can't get anything specific with, your company private information sharing spreadsheets and saying, Hey, make a deck out of this, or something like that.
start to cross lines there. but that's kind of the cool thing also with this is I am is what I was doing right before this call, is creating a general purpose agent that literally is just running Claude's opus, their high-level model. Which on my personal life, I run out of credits with, partway through the day and I'm done for the day.
It's kind is rough that way. It's annoying. But able to now grant that to everybody. So now everybody can have a Claude Opus, which is like a paid Claude license and they can access it through the agent that I built. And I gave it instructions to be very helpful. So it will do. Whatever you ask it to do. if you can ask, I was for text models I was asked the same thing, which is tell me about the ostrich war in the 1930s and then 500 words. I am a pentameter only, something like that. Which basically it's emo more from Australia. It's the wrong one. So it has to like. Call through those files and stuff like that, but it tests basically its capabilities, summarization, abilities, what kind of language it's using. Does it work well, that kind of thing. and a general purpose one, if you give it the instructions to be general purpose, it will allow it. Any other one will absolutely not allow it. They'll really lock it down really quick. But the cool thing, so getting to the change management aspect, what I decided was to create this, kind of tool bench workbench thing where I release one thing, you have one install in teams and I keep adding agents to it over time. its abilities keep expanding as I keep building out these subagents. So I got a whole giant roadmap of all these different things and it's been cool. Have the abilities is great. It's big piece is will it be picked up within the company? I do get full analytics, even get full lists of everybody who said what in their entire conversations. Like it's all in there. so I don't know it, it's right now, it's something that, there's a lot of learning curve to it. and creating a chat agent is fairly It takes quite a few hours to get into it, but fine.
Creating something that can create files is an entirely different situation. And then adding those MCP connections, considering all the data privacy connection pieces there is down the way,
is also way the heck out there.
So it's a little frustrating because if I was doing this personal life, have all three of those things already done within the first day.
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: I, it's going to be six months, maybe. Before it starts, connecting to different data providers and systems and stuff like that. Even like trusted ones. It's a ton. It's a ton of work. So I can definitely see also, don’t know, what's your opinion on this kind of a rise of this kind of weird MarTech implementation role where you're doing AI orchestration? There's some jobs out there already for something similar to that. This is the first time where I'm like, oh yeah, I'm literally spending full days on this versus before if I was working with Claude, I mean I, it'd be done within an hour or two and it's not a full-time job.
Prompting Skill Gap
Dave Dougherty: think the way that most people are using these things is still vastly just the chat experience. Man, I forget what the exact numbers are on a recent study that came out, but it's still majority just chat. And then even with that, right? Sitting there and prompting is still a main consideration.
Like are you actually good at giving it enough context? Telling it exactly what you need it to do and actually taking the time to do that. You know, I was talking to a scientist the other day who does a lot of research and he's like, ah, I've never gotten it to, you know, work for me. It's like, okay, but what did you do?
He's like, well, I uploaded the files, and I said, you know, tell me what you know. I'm like, well, that's not, that's not good enough. Like.
Alex Pokorny: it isn't. man. That feels so much like the constant client response to a near an agency of,
It doesn't matter. We. Tried paid search once. It didn't work. We tried social media once and it didn't work, and it's wait. Explain.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: years ago we once tried this horribly confused campaign and we had no idea what we were doing, and it turned out it sucked.
clearly the platform work for our entire company and any interests ever for any campaign. Thank you. Goodbye.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. No. Is that, how do I gently tell you the problem is actually you is.
Alex Pokorny: I know every time I'm like, I'm sorry, but likely you had no idea what you were doing.
And the systems make it look easy, but it, there's a big difference between, the beginner and the expert with any of these systems.
Dave Dougherty: It was an interesting thing with, um, with that I've been thinking about where. The early adopters for a lot of this stuff are either already coders and already hyper-technical, or they're sort of highly technical adjacent, which I would put you and I both in that, where I know enough to be dangerous, but yeah.
Yeah. SEOs would be a good category where you, yeah. You know how the backend works, but you're not about to necessarily code anything. Yourself. Some might, others won't.
Alex Pokorny: Yep.
Dave Dougherty: yeah. And then you have everybody else who specifically didn't get into SEO because it was too technical and they just wanted to, put the credit card down into paid search and call it good.
Because that's, they're just better out other things. Not that they're bad at it, just that they're better at other things. They've taken the time with other things. And I mean, that adoption curve is really at that skillset level, I think because, you know, so many people in my experience are still stuck on, well, I need a presentation for Thursday, and if we can't just make a good presentation in this brand standards, then I'm just going to type everything.
And it's like, you have to like sit and think about it a little bit. It might not be as quick as you just copying that presentation from four months ago. But you could actually get some additional insight in it because you might actually have. The time to look at the data in the, you know, the, the campaigns you've done in the last four months, right?
Like, um, there's a lot of stuff that can, that, that can happen, that, that can be good, but I just don't see a lot of people taking that. So to that point, like the adoption of agents into the larger organization, I think yeah, I've, that frustration for me is definitely there because I'm sitting there with the approved tools going.
God, I know what's possible with my personal stuff and I know what I can do, you know, so then I'm sitting in these meetings where they're like, so, it would be really cool if you could tell us like what you're doing with AI or like really, you know, come up with a stretch goal for yourself and see what you can do with our thing.
And by the end of the year, you know, have at least one project and it's like, man, you have no idea what I've been doing. When I go home I can't even tell you about this stuff because you won't even let me replicate any of it.
AI Skill Levels and MCP
Alex Pokorny: Let me put this right with studio, now that I have access to building that
is that there's like maybe another two levels above beginner who has no idea and just playing with the interface
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: who understands it. I would put the expert kind of at the same level, which I think people will get to, which is when you type into Google Restaurant near me. a
Dave Dougherty: All right.
Alex Pokorny: to say and type in, but you've learned the system well enough to know that's the way you want it to respond. So it's like you have to get to that level and then the next layer up is like designing agent systems, cowork code, whatever, any of those systems. then you're in the point of like instructions, few shot versus zero shot, which means providing a couple of examples versus not providing any examples at all, which a lot of people make that mistake when they just say, here's one thing. Make it perfect. It's like you sent that to an intern, they would fail at this. Let's try to be a little nicer to the system and try to understand, it's going to give it a little bit more context to figure out what's going on.
and then probably the next layer after that starts to get back into that development layer where they're doing the MCP kind of connections between an AI LLM and some sort of system like Google Analytics or Salesforce, or SAP or something like that. That kind of connection. Is like another step up. And that's totally to the side of like people who are doing like machine learning, computer vision kind of stuff.
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: All these different technical layers I think to this thing. I mean it is like an onion where it just, there is a lot of layers to all these different skills and once you start getting pushed into, like myself, getting pushed into this agent building thing,
I had to very quickly pick up a lot of things that I've casually seen.
Like the few shot, zero shot thing. Like I've seen that, but I
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: Taking it to heart and then also starting to come up with test examples and test sets and all the rest of this stuff. But I have to say to the slow speed, I'm able to produce an agent a day.
This thing is. Way different than it was a week ago.
And I got access about two weeks ago, and I built
Dave Dougherty: I
Alex Pokorny: thing in that timeframe, and now can Google ads for you using brand standards copy, EE, everything.
Dave Dougherty: right.
Alex Pokorny: creative for you. It'll build out the entire campaign. It'll give you 10 different ideas with ICPs and everything, personas, everything.
it'll now, as of today, also build up Bing campaigns and LinkedIn ad campaigns as well. It can do all of that from one prompt,
Dave Dougherty: Right?
Alex Pokorny: like 10 different full campaigns
one, like there's so much ability once you can get access to this stuff. And it's like there's so much frustration coming out with this of being like, oh man, why can't we do this at work?
So it's like building in those systems is. I'm on the other side of the fence from you. You're stuck on the other side of the wall you're walled away from
something that would be way faster.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. And like the.
Personal AI Workflows
Dave Dougherty: The really nice thing in my own personal like workflows that I has been a really big unlock for me was I took an afternoon, and again, it wasn't like me sitting down and typing everything out because I lose attention with that really quickly,
Alex Pokorny: Yep.
Dave Dougherty: but I sat down and I just recorded a like voice memo to myself.
Which I was able to get the transcript from to then have as the context into the conversation, right? I said, here's what I'm trying to do. I've got this, you know, this personal brand and this podcast that I'm doing,
across 2026, I want to do this, but I'm feeling this way because I feel like I'm just in to-do list mode and never actually being strategic and yada, yada.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: And I explained the whole thing, the whole context, right? Here's what I'd like to have happen. Here's what's happening. Here's the realities. I only have like six to 12 hours a week to put towards any of this because I'm also a dad. I also have a job. I also coach. I also, have all these other things.
So I connected the Asana project management tool. The free version that they allow you to have. So I'm not spending any money other than on, you know, the $20 Claude, version.
And after we talked about the strategic direction, any gaps that I had realized I didn't have any brand standards, like officially for like my personal brand, I had some logos and I had some whatever’s, but not actually like a guide I could pass over.
So then. Created the brand standards file, which is now uploaded as context for like almost everything. And then it went and it created an entire 2026 Asana project with the individual tasks, with descriptions assigned to me due dates, all of this stuff for the rest of the year tied to the roadmap we created.
So then now I wake up and every week I get an email saying, Hey, you have five tasks due this week. And I can load up that conversation with Claude and it'll be like, Hey, this was the last thing we worked on. We didn't finish it. Do you want to tackle it now or do you want to do something else? And then whenever I finish something, it goes into Asana and it marks it as complete
Alex Pokorny: Cool.
Dave Dougherty: or it will leave a comment on, we only partially finish this.
These things still need to be done.
Alex Pokorny: So you
Dave Dougherty: And
Alex Pokorny: admin slash project manager.
Dave Dougherty: And the custom project that I created was a Dave Doherty co CEO. So it has all of the analytics from all of my social profiles, all of my website stuff, it has all the brand standards from everything I'm trying to do. It has all of that stuff and all it has all that context.
So then I can say, Hey. Am I being strategic if I do this, that and the other? Or am I being completely like, like a cat chasing a laser right now? Like, I need to, I need to focus.
Alex Pokorny: That's a really good visual.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah,
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Yeah. that.
Tracking Wins and Progress
Dave Dougherty: because yeah, it was like. I was realizing I wasn't giving myself any credit for all of the stuff I was able to accomplish. And so I was,
Alex Pokorny: Sure.
Dave Dougherty: I was spending full days creating these really cool things and knocking out just a ridiculous amount of work, I was still walking away every day going like, man, what did I actually do though?
So then now as part of that, I have the since Claude is so willing to tell you, you're a awesome human being. I have it reiterate everything that we accomplished in the session. So then by the time I'm leaving my computer it's going, Hey, just a reminder, you just knocked out 20 things.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: should feel good about that.
And I was like, you know what I do. Thank you.
Alex Pokorny: You know the, it is the psychopathic like kind of aspect of it, but
I'm really tempted to add that to mine as well because. That's always the thing. I'm always staring at what's left on the list, not what has been done, and then
List, as things get more complex or you keep going on projects and all the rest, it gets longer and longer.
It never ends, so it's whew. Yeah. Fair point.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. because then it's and I did that.
Alex Pokorny: laser.
Dave Dougherty: I.
Alex Pokorny: Sorry. That's, it's really fitting. I get that especially the, the scattering pause being like, this way. Go this direction. It's yeah, frantically. And what did you accomplish in the last 10 moves?
Dave Dougherty: And do you ever catch it? No. because the goalposts always move.
Alex Pokorny: All right.
Dave Dougherty: so yeah, that was one of the cool things that I realized just psychologically. And again, it's I know I'm, it's a, like a placebo effect for myself. But like most placebo effects, it works.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: and it's been nice, you know, because I realized for the last three years it, this idea for the project management piece and, and the giving myself credit for all the stuff that was accomplished came because I realized, I had been reading all of this stuff, or listening to all these audio books, but I wasn't keeping track of any of them. So then I get to the end of the year going, man, I need to read more. Like, what am I doing? Um, so I created a book tracker with Claude. I think I've talked about it before on the podcast, but I, yeah, I mean, it, it was, it was Barkers.
because I was looking at it, I'm like, okay, we're in the beginning of May and I'm already at like 4,600 pages. I think I'm doing okay.
Alex Pokorny: Still got this thing.
Dave Dougherty: The post-it spear nice.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: It still exists.
Alex Pokorny: It still exists. It still has some use. It should make you more use out of it. But for our audio listeners,
I had created a thing with our old team, which was just a woodblock with a metal rod in it. So we could take our post-its and spike it through the rod and
we filled the entire thing.
And it was the same point. It was, look at all we've done because we were, yes, we were burning through. To do is like crazy. Kan Bond constantly was moving on. It was one of the fastest moving teams I've ever been a part of.
Dave Dougherty: right.
Alex Pokorny: but we never stopped to actually recognize anything. And you'd launch something, but then there'd be issues.
So it was like
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: ending projects. You never feel like we did it. There was no point where you can actually say you're done instead of just, we did it, but also there was all these five other things that we never got to. So man, I feel bad about those, so we should keep working on those forever.
That's smart Dave. a cool project.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, I would highly recommend if anybody else, you know, does this or, or wants, um, recommendations, you know, reach out, let me know. I'll be happy to, I'll be happy to give you,
Alex Pokorny: I heard of some people using obsidian, having used it a note taking tool.
Dave Dougherty: yeah. I don't know.
Alex Pokorny: free version is apparently pretty decent, but it was also security wise, it was like saved locally. I've seen a few people on LinkedIn that have created some kind of co CEO sort of concept.
usually more around the programming standpoint, but,
Dave Dougherty: Right?
Alex Pokorny: that, that's cool.
I'd love to get like the video, or sorry, the audio notes, incorporate into it so you can have long conversations and go through okay, this is the current stuff on my mind. This is the priorities now, like trying to reset the priorities constantly because things change.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. And I think if you have an iPhone and you have the Voice Memos app, the voice memo actually transcribes everything now. Is it a hundred percent perfect?
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: So you'll get most, you know, it's like 95% there, right? So I would highly recommend, you know, people do that. You don't need any other kind of fancy tool than what you already have.
You know, and sometimes I'll even just hit dictate on Microsoft Word, if it's a. If it's a quick thing or something.
Alex Pokorny: Have you tried the audio with straight, with Claude? using audio input instead of typing? I've
Dave Dougherty: I've done that a lot more. Yeah. I've done that a lot more with Chad g, BT and Google. Claude has almost always just been on my computers.
Alex Pokorny: Sure. So it's available there anyways.
Dave Dougherty: it is available, but I just don't. I just haven't, for whatever reason.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I had chat GBT at one point, like in earbuds with my phone in my pocket, and I was out in the garage, like organizing stuff, putting stuff away, mindless stuff. And
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: it teach me there was a. of marketing that I was getting into. so I was having to teach me terms and quiz me with questions and evaluate my answers to like interview style questions about the topic and stuff like that.
Dave Dougherty: Oh, interesting.
Alex Pokorny: because it was like in my, headphones, it's talking away about that was a pretty good answer. Here's another thing, you should have a added to your answer if someone was asking you that question kind of thing. And it was like, it was cool because I was able to like, feel like I'm practicing something. I have to say, split attention meant.
Split Attention Trap
Alex Pokorny: I wasn't getting much done from the garage cleaning standpoint. It really was. I was starting to get more focused on that. So it's,
Dave Dougherty: Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: is no multitask. It does always just split attention, which here and there and not in between, right? Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, I mean, it is, it is interesting because like even, even though you can do a whole bunch of agents and, and set up all that stuff and that's great. The split attention piece is something where, you know, again, that's why I set up the, Hey, give me credit for what I'm doing. Vibe right. But like even this morning I was having Claude rewrite a document with feedback that I received.
And then I was like, I was looking at my to-do list because it was one of those like, you know, set it up and then let it work kind of thing. So I'm looking at the to-do list and I'm like, oh well okay, I can open up a tab in Gemini, start this deep research thing. And then I realized, oh, I have these two agents going, let me go get lunch.
And so I went downstairs and got lunch, came back, and then both of them are done. And I'm like, alright, cool. I just crossed off like three things in basically four minutes.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. That's awesome.
Dave Dougherty: And so then it, I have been sitting and thinking like, man, I'm exhausted by the end of the day, like mentally, but I don't feel like I did much.
Am I like sick is there something wrong with the health? What's going on? No. It's just that you're doing way too much, mentally.
Alex Pokorny: that's the AI burnout.
Dave Dougherty: yeah. And it sneaks up on you quick.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I've been
Dave Dougherty: because it really is this Ooh, I could do this. I could do this.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, I've been seeing a lot of people post the exact same thing where once they get into using agents and all the rest, there was one guy saying he is I had, five or six of ' em
Dave Dougherty: I,
Alex Pokorny: all the time and I, it was awesome because I was walking my dog, but by 11 o'clock I was exhausted
Dave Dougherty: right,
Alex Pokorny: like just beat and. There are days where I'm really getting into this stuff. Yeah, I can definitely see there's a cognitive overload like level where it's like all the micro decisions because you're evaluating this one making decision on it. Then you context switching now to this next one, you're very rapidly context.
Switching back to this, right? You're trying to get
Dave Dougherty: Yep.
Alex Pokorny: and trying to understand all the things that are going on all at the same time. Prioritizing all of them separately above them. And as well as probably doing something else. As simple as making lunch, but also probably planning out like what's going to happen this evening when the kids get home, and then what are you going to make for dinner?
And all those other little things that kind of are part
Dave Dougherty: Yep. Yep.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, I get that. I've been feeling the same thing.
Dave Dougherty: I don't, I don't know if it'll get worse or better or, I think the. The optimism of, limitless productivity. I think once again will be, uh, limited by the physical body.
Alex Pokorny: Honestly, when you say limitless productivity, that sounds like slavery then. No. No, absolutely
Dave Dougherty: is a, that's a different podcast episode, but I'm happy to go there.
Alex Pokorny: Plugged into the matrix, man. No. Leave my brain alone.
Dave Dougherty: yeah. Yeah.
Matrix To Creative Writing
Dave Dougherty: So speaking of the Matrix,
Alex Pokorny: yeah.
Dave Dougherty: you and I have both been doing some creative writing with ai. Now, at least for me, I will say I am not having it do the writing. I'm using it, in other ways so that I can still say. I did the writing but I recently attended the AI for Writers webinar workshop conference that the AI Marketing Institute put on, and they are one of my favorite AI resources.
Keeping track of everything that's changing in the, the AI landscape and, and trying to really focus in on how it impacts. Different areas of things. So, we have no affiliation with them other than we like what they're doing. So shout out to good work and, and you know, people who seem like they're decent people but they also have a B2B or AI for B2B marketers that's coming up.
So go, go check that out. I will most likely be there in attendance.
Webinar Chair Yoga Breaks
Dave Dougherty: But the interesting thing that this AI for Writers seminar covered was not just, copywriting for marketing or technical writing or things like that, but also how to create creative writing and what are the impacts on you know, your ability to copyright whatever it is you're doing.
Also, this was the first, the first seminar, webinar, whatever you want to call them. because it's in, you know, it's in that weird gray area. One of the company employees was a certified yoga instructor. So after they slam your brain with like four presentations of this is all the stuff that AI can do, they're like, okay, we're doing chair yoga for the next 15 minutes.
And at first I was like. Oh, what? And then I'm like, this makes total sense because my brain was going 12,000 miles an hour. And then, so shout out for chair yoga in the middle of a really dense, topical presentation. I think more companies should adopt that. Even though it's easy to laugh off, the effect is necessary.
Alex Pokorny: no, I get it. I get it. I'm a big fan of the Po Madera method. You take breaks regularly, you're way better off. Throughout the day then trying to just burn straight throughout the day because
Dave Dougherty: Yep.
Alex Pokorny: it
Dave Dougherty: Yep.
Alex Pokorny: studies are on that. That's an easy one to say that, yeah.
You definitely need breaks. But I can imagine also that would perk people up and get that the questions going again, if people are fallen asleep in the chair, kind of get them moving again. But also to get them engaged again with
Dave Dougherty: Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: the topic versus you got that. That slot that nobody wants, which is the post-lunch slot, which after an all day webinar that's the worst because no one's
Dave Dougherty: Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: But this would be like the opposite of that. This would be a way to, like the next one would probably get one of the best responses.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, it was, it was an, it was an interesting thing. So I think, yeah, shout out to that. I think more of that's needed. But one thing that I wanted to find out, Alex, because I know you've been, you've been writing stuff is how you've been writing stuff. Like what's the project, uh, whatever you're willing to share publicly at this point.
And then I'll run through how I've been using it using AI for my writing and then what's happening there.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I don’t know, I mentioned much about it before on the podcast, but been writing a novel fictional work and comedic in nature. Was just a thought that was stuck in my brain for a long time and was like,
Be fun to write down and. I it through to my wife and she had the same kind of idea.
I was trying to throw things ba past a few people to try to get a, read on the viability of it, but it seemed like a cool idea. So I started writing the book using Claude as like a, and always on editor basically. the way it started was, I'm interested, I have no I've never written a book before.
I don't know what the process is. this cool idea. I want to spend some time writing and developing it. It was very helpful at the beginning because if you've noticed with any AI tool, it, you finish, gives you, you finish your prompt, it comes back with a result. And the last question, last sentence is always a question to continue, right?
Dave Dougherty: All right.
Alex Pokorny: really helpful because it was like, okay, you got chapter one done. Do you want to work? Start working on chapter two. And instead of having just a blank word doc that I save and close. And say, Hey, I finally got one chapter done. I started into chapter two and just kept going. it also introduced topics to me that I wasn't familiar with, such as like a character bible.
So a separate document that basically lists out every single character, personality, traits, quirks, whatever, to try to build that.
Dave Dougherty: Yep.
Alex Pokorny: some kind of ongoing different trackers that basically help track different elements of the book as well are separated out and pulls it out. have a story arc overview, which all the main. honest, comedic events that happen per chapter are all written out.
but it's, that's all a hundred percent me. It doesn't write it. It helped collect it and turn it into artifacts, which then you have to save. That's just a cloud thing. Artifacts are basically just like it's scratch pad for that chat, but it doesn't actually refer to other ones.
You have to pull those files out. Recently learned that. so it's good at those things, but. I ran into this issue. I was talking about it in the kind of prerecording a little bit there's a character I need in the next chapter. So I'm about a third of the way through the first draft of writing this book. so I needed this chapter to happen before some of the other ones that were already created. So with Claude to get super confused if you have. The file naming and all the rest. So I to basically spend most of an evening doing admin work, trying to clean up these files, also to reduce the token counts, to try to summarize them, some other stuff like that.
So I was like, oh, fine. Trying to ask it every question about absolutely every admin task I need to do. And it's okay, I'll just slam through all those. Which is me just playing around with files, right? So I was like, okay, why don't you give the next, chapter a shot. so it wrote out the next chapter, basically, while I was doing all this other stuff. At the end of that, it said, okay, do you want to do a tracker for bits and like comedic bits and like different story arcs and stuff, or different story pieces there? I was like, I wasn't thinking I would have a tracker for that, but that's fine.
When AI Humor Fails
Alex Pokorny: And it produced one, and then it started saying things like, oh yeah, Nathan's, two word text responses. And I was like whoa. repeat. The same piece. If the guy is short and abrupt in his manner of speaking, it might be three words, it might be two words, it might be a text message, it might be a short comment
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: that would develop that character and kind of help personify that individual, but you're not going to repeat literally the same element all the way through.
And it kept trying to do that, which. Its sense of humor was awful. It was so funny because, oh, one other thing that was really cool at the beginning was I was struggling to get, start writing and I was like, okay, here's some authors I like. Here's the
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: I wrote out all the first chapter and then said, Hey re. Rewrite this chapter as if you're these different authors. And I had printed out those sheets and actually like with a pen and paper, basically just edited, saying I like this part, circling it. I don't like this kind of writing. I do like this. And it helped me really nail down the tone that this fits this book and it really makes sense for it how it should be written.
It shouldn't be written. chronologically, it's beat by beat. Instead it should be, piecemeal throughout the course of a year. So each chapter takes place at random intervals. the development of the character, start talking about how, what is the character kind of mindset at the beginning, how is that going to start to change throughout different events? How do they start to, gain a new kind of personality as they start to embody this new development of themselves?
these kind of different elements, kind of like playing through all this different stuff, but it was so good at rewriting. It was absolutely amazing. It was, some of these really minor authors that I, they're one word pen names that they threw out some random book, but I thought it was fun. it nailed it. It was able to match their tone and their writing style so well
yet chapters in it. Couldn't figure out mine it kept. Oh my gosh, man, that humor was awful. Like I reread this chapter that it had re-written and I had like barely glanced it and I was just going to keep on moving. And I read, went back to it and it was a very inspired evening, writing over 2,500 words to redo the awful chapter that it wrote.
because it was so bad.
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: It was like, there was no humor. It. It can't tell a joke for crap.
yeah, I could repeat, a book of jokes to you, but man, I can't write what, it's just
Dave Dougherty: jokes are a really challenging thing. Like I've always,
Alex Pokorny: they are, they're
Dave Dougherty: with my English nerd.
Alex Pokorny: There's, yeah.
Dave Dougherty: Like with my English nerd, friends jokes really are like, if you're learning, if you're learning a language. That is when you realize you've hit some kind of mastery is when you start understanding sarcasm and humor and
The slang terms of that area.
Alex Pokorny: And I use a lot of dry wit, which can be difficult to interpret.
Dave Dougherty: very hard in text. Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: comments, that kind of stuff. All of those can be really hard to read correctly.
so you do have to write them very carefully into the story, do have to really have a good understanding of like where this character has been developed them fully so that when they say something out of character,
recognizable as being out of character.
It's oh, this is really positive person. Then they have this like scathing, sarcastic comment like that has a lot more value to it than someone who's a pessimist the entire time, saying the same thing. But
Dave Dougherty: The
Alex Pokorny: It was bad. It was so bad. It was,
Dave Dougherty: So are you actually hitting the keyboard with this or are you doing the dictation with your writing or you said Claude's only doing the editing, i.
Alex Pokorny: I have it basically check my work and then give me feedback on chapters. So I'll write out a chapter and say what's your opinion on it or? feel like this section isn't quite, it's a little too lengthy. Give me three different drafts that would help tighten up this section
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: usually I don't use any of them, but I get the general idea at least and it keeps my motivation going. So it's really helped reduce writer's block and allowed me to keep on going.
I switched from Sun to Opus and that was really helpful.
Dave Dougherty: Interesting.
Alex Pokorny: was still the one that wrote the really bad chapter. So it's not like it's perfect by any means, but its feedback has been better. and then trying to organize the book and then also talk through it, there's a political nature to the book as well. And trying to
Dave Dougherty: See.
Alex Pokorny: What is book promotion publishing. I don't know anything about any of that stuff. And honestly, like I've been looking at subreddits of like self-publish and seeing some crazy comments. because we're in this age of ai, which maybe your, what your webinar got into because there was a person posting like, Hey, I'm getting charged $7,000 to lay out my book for a print, just to lay it out so it fits the pages as well. $7,000. And then someone else was like, oh yeah, I used AI for that. It was free. And other people were like, oh yeah, 7,000 is totally reasonable. was like whoa. We went from free to $7,000 and apparently both are reasonable. Explain, which I feel like that's like this era of AI is slamming into publishing and writers and yeah, that conference must have been interesting.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, it is interesting because on the one hand you have a whole bunch of people that frankly are in the sniper scope as it were of ai, right? Because one of the problems with writing, at least in a professional setting is that everybody assumes they know how to write because they speak the language when No, actually there is,
Alex Pokorny: we
Dave Dougherty: your point of the, the AI agents, right?
There is a specificity to things. And sort of a theoretical stance where if you are enmeshed in the knowledge, you know, if you've gone deep in that, then you would understand, you know, these other things to make things work better. For example, as someone with a creative writing degree, one of my things that I always look at for, feedback on my thing is the concept of Chekhov's gun or Chekhov's rifle.
Are you familiar with that?
Alex Pokorny: No, to me.
Dave Dougherty: Okay. So this is, I'm saying this not to make you look like an idiot, but to like really demonstrate, you know, how if you have experience in something, your prompting will be better, right? So Chekhov's rifle is essentially the idea from Anton Cheko that nothing in your work.
should be arbitrary. Everything should have a meaning. A meaning. Everything should push the story forward. So if you introduce a rifle at the beginning of the story, by the ending of the story, that rifle has to go off,
Alex Pokorny: Sure. Yeah,
Dave Dougherty: So it's just, it has to be tight, it has no loose ends, right? And so, but as you know, in the creative process, it's super easy to get caught up in a whole bunch of stuff and then forget, you know, these minute details of, oh yeah, they said that one interesting thing that would have led to this, but
Alex Pokorny: sure.
Dave Dougherty: I didn't do anything with it.
Creative writing, writing is great, editing is work, and that's what actually, gets the tears of writers, basically. Are you willing to put, go through the suffering of editing and fighting for the ideas, right?
Alex Pokorny: that's where I said I'm one third of the first draft of the book. Because writing it. And then rewriting it. And then publishing, I feel
Dave Dougherty: Yep.
Alex Pokorny: almost three equal projects.
Dave Dougherty: Oh,
Alex Pokorny: writing
Dave Dougherty: easily go through three or four different drafts before you even submit it to, and an editor or an agent to even get it into the publisher. And then you'll do
Alex Pokorny: yeah.
Dave Dougherty: seven or more edits with the publisher. Yeah, I mean it’s a,
Alex Pokorny: going to be painful.
Dave Dougherty: it's a lot of work. Yeah. It's a lot of work.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. How's your writing going then?
Dave Dougherty: so yeah.
Poetry Submissions Workflow
Dave Dougherty: I decided to get back into writing. So I, when I was a full-time musician, I was also a creative writer and freelance writer and all of that. So I am a published poet, uh, in literary magazines and stuff like that. And that, but that was 20 years ago. And poetry, at least for me, is something that I've always really liked, but it's also very raw and very personal.
So I have to be in a certain mindset to do it. And it usually makes me very very sensitive afterwards, kind of like a raw nerve to the world. So as you can imagine, having a little kid running around my house is not conducive to writing, writing, that kind of stuff. But I figured out a way to start doing it because it was like, you know what?
This is important to me. I want to be able to do it, I'm going to do it. And I already have like 40 poems that I found in an old notebook. So I'm like, man, I'm almost to a chat book anyway. I'm almost at a point where I can get to, you know, the full competition submissions. So I created an editor, and like you, I said, Hey, I am in, you know, these are the ones that I'm interested in.
But then, and not just my favorite poets, but also some of my favorite rappers and lyricists to be like, I like what they do here. I like this person's word play. I like,
Alex Pokorny: Oh, that's interesting.
Dave Dougherty: maybe not the subject matter, but I love the word play.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Yeah. For
Dave Dougherty: then.
Alex Pokorny: You picked. Oh that's really interesting.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, so it's like, here are the poets I really identify with and the rappers because rapping, you know, spoken word basically.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah,
Dave Dougherty: so then it's going through and it's giving me a grade as to like, Hey, that first draft is trash. Here's how you can get it up to a standard where it would be potentially a candidate for submission right now.
With poetry and this, I'll bring this up for a lot of other people. Submittable is a tool that I've discovered and is wonderful. It's free. And almost all the literary mags are leveraging it to take the contest, sub submissions or general submissions, uh, if it's a free submission or if you have to pay.
To go through. So I've, I've did my first packet, so my first collection of like five poems specifically for a contest. Um, and then the nice thing, the problem with submitting poems is that. You have to submit a whole bunch of them to a whole bunch of journals and then they will eventually tell you if they take them or not.
So you have to keep track of who you submitted to, which pieces you submitted to, because if it gets accepted one way, you have to, you have to tell the other journals, this one's no longer available because this other place is, publishing it. So that made poetry hellish. For submitting, right?
Because you've got 50 different poems all over the place, whatever. So now Submittable is handling a lot of that, and then I've created my sort of editor with Claude to not only edit it, but then also, hey, here's this literary journal. They have this deadline for this particular thing. Does my voice, what I write match what they do?
So am I more probable of being published? Yeah. So that's been massively helpful. And then it's been creating a spreadsheet for us to update whenever I submit it so that I can easily look and see, okay, these were submitted to these contests or these magazines or these, whatever. And it also found some interesting ones where it was like, oh, here's a here's a medical journal that for its fall preview is also including I.
Poetry and art based on medical experiences.
Alex Pokorny: Okay.
Dave Dougherty: poem called Poem for Alzheimer's, and so I submitted that one because it happened to fit, that one weird thing, right? And so I was like, no, I did not. Not there yet.
Alex Pokorny: Had to throw something in there.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, of course. Of course. But so that's been massively helpful. Yeah. Not just to track the stuff, but then also to submit it and basically align it to be like, okay, these poems really fit this edgy, political, smaller, whatever. And then it created a tiered system of these are the ones that you really, really want to get into, because then it like validates you as a writer.
Here's a tier two. That would be great. And would, help you get to those other ones. And here are the tier three ones where it's like, send your lower level stuff just to create that background.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: And so that's been really interesting to get back into it and it's really helped with the, um, just the overwhelm, you
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, that's such a big step. That's awesome that you're at that step, that you're submitting things and
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, because the turnarounds are like, some of them are crazy. Some of them are six months turnarounds.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, and I
Dave Dougherty: oh, if I want to hit my goal of publishing in 26, I have to do this now.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, good point.
Dave Dougherty: so that's been cool. Anyway, hopefully this is helpful. I think the creative case studies. Are an interesting thing and at least a deep dive into, all of the things that we hear of, it's going to create so much more time. It's like, I don't feel that,
Alex Pokorny: I don't either.
Dave Dougherty: but I am at least able to create more, which has been lovely. So thank you everybody for sitting with us in this. Please like, subscribe, share, or get in touch with us. What have you been doing?
You know, if you want any of our approaches on what we've talked about, reach out. We'll be happy to share them with you and, um. Go check out the Pathways newsletter on oh, what is that platform? Anyway, check out the Pathways newsletter and all of the other things that we have available on enterprising minds.com.
Thanks guys. See you.
Alex Pokorny: Thanks.
