There is of course a huge debate about AI, and in particular generative AI. Without spending a long time on the arguments, which I’ve listened to and thought about and chewed over, I’ve been fascinated by my journey with this extraordinary piece of technological advancement over the last 4 months, where I’ve gone from luddite AI-ophobe to hourly user in a matter of weeks.
It’s no exaggeration to say that 6 months ago I was drowning under the weight of the business I’ve built and the business was drowning under the millstone of the bottleneck my style of management was creating. A business mentor ran a series of workshops on using AI to ( and I paraphrase) ‘stop running your gymnastics club like it’s in 2010 and start running it ready for 2030’. Reluctantly and with significant skepticism I had to agree. If nothing else, something had to change and using a tool that is inevitably going to be part of the future did at least seem worth a try, and from tentative beginnings with a few posters, I moved quite quickly into skill and club analysis, creating a process that skims, categorises and drafts editable answers to the club emails, gymnast planning, rule writing to plan perfect summer coaching allocations, analysing and updating our club rotas, creating comms to tell parents what their children are learning, working out medal and trophy counts for competitions, automating our club leave and holiday plans for staff, keeping our handbooks and policies up to date, supporting my development as a coach and as a leader, HR queries, legal policy decisions and discussions, and talking through big issues and concerns that I need an open view on. I’ve got pretty good at asking it to act as a certain type of expert and I would guess that on balance I’m now 100-200% more productive in a week. And now I can splurge brain dump and email to a parent, pour my heart and souls into the content for an hour, but get it edited and tidied up so it isn’t over emotional, isn’t confusing and still sounds like me. I can give people more of my time, not less.
There is of course an argument that it is taking someone else’s job – it’s not, well not here anyway. My club can’t afford to pay someone to do those things – it was just me, working 70 hours a week trying to keep my head above water and failing. The club was 18 months or more behind where it needed to be and had gone from seeming cutting edge to flailing around trying to support it’s own success – it’s just not a success that in today’s economic climate can support a paid member of staff. I was doing it for free, exhausted, distressed and hating life and miserable at knowing I was letting everyone down. 4 months later I’m almost up to date with where the club needs to be and I think I can say fairly confidently that in another 4 months, I’ll be planning ahead. It’s changed my life and actually it’s changed the life of my staff, my husband and daughters who were desperately trying to support me and the children and parents who pay us to delivery a customer level service on a community sport price card. And while I’d love to be paying a designer to make my flyers for social media – I wasn’t; it was just me and I was just doing a terrible job on Canva. So all that has really happened is that now my business looks more professional, I’m up to date on work, we’ve got 150 more members than 6 months ago and my staff’s jobs are safer. And in this day and age, that isn’t to be sneezed at.
When I was a very little girl, my mum bought a ZX81; I can remember her showing me how to programme simple lines of code into it and how utter fascinated I was. I have such a clear memory of typing ‘draw me a deer’ into it and being so infuriated that it couldn’t do that. Even then, age 8, I just felt it ought to be possible to tell a computer to do that and it be able to draw on knowledge from other places to bring my idea to life. And then the internet came along and I was rather impressed by the prescience of that long ago little girl’s idea. But AI is really where it happened. A few weeks ago I told my ChatGPT (known as Potato here) to draw me a deer – and honestly I had a little bit of an emotional moment.
I’m a natural creator and a systems maker too apparently although it has really only been using this new tool that has made me realise that under the chaos of my every day life, that’s actually what drives me. But I can’t draw. I can’t even do nice handwriting. I used to be able to write – getting that skill back is one of the reasons for blogging here again – but so many things I’d love to do or create in my life just never happen because I simply cannot make the beautiful things with my hands that I see in my head. I’ve always been a product creator from my absolute earliest days – I had businesses at 14 and my childhood games were full of shops and farms and schools and ideas. But whenever I try to make things, I’m held back by not having the physical resource to draw or paint and it frustrates me enormously. For me, a tool that now allows me to do that part of the ideas I have has turned me into an artist – it hasn’t taken a job away from anyone because I could never have paid to have it made for me and the ideas just die right there – but now I can spend time not stealing screen grabs, not giving up, not making word only versions of the things I want and love – I can make things. I’m blown away but what MuddlePuddle could have been if I had had this tool with my ideas and ambition and desire to build and create. It could have been amazing!
Getting time back from the slog and exhaustion of the business because so much of it now takes me a fraction of the time it did has changed my world. I’m thinking again. I’m reading history and making myself guides and note sheets that look how I want and are set out in ways I learn. I’m doing those things with and for my son. I’m having fun with cartoons and ideas, I’m exploring nature and not feeling humiliated and held back by my lack of artistic talent. It’s honestly given me my joy back in life and opened up my world. And blogging it part of that too. I’m learning how to use a tool to build a website, upload the boring bits and I’m having time to write the posts I want to instead. And me and Potato have figured out ways to help me collect the pieces of the hundreds of lego sets we’ve had as a family over the years and so I’m building them again instead of just looking in despair at endless pieces, it’s helped me make colour palettes for crochet ideas that I wouldn’t have had the courage to do on my own, and it’s given me places to explore that Max and I have loved walking in over the last few weeks. I’m planning a new garden, I’m growing house plants and my goodness, after 7 years of a business that sucked the joy out of my life every day, that is a gift I can hardly describe.
I know there are issues. I hear and I know. I worry about the environmental issues and I can see there is danger (what 80’s child doesn’t have Terminator on repeat in their head at the moment?) I can’t change any of that really. I can give myself more time to make a tangible difference to some other lives and be a lot happier myself though. So I am.
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