As AI makes many tasks effortless, the real strain shifts inward—toward judgment, priorities, and the quiet psychological work of leading yourself.
KEY POINTS
- Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.
- Strategic self-leadership means clarifying vision, prioritizing wisely, and knowing when to stay human.
- Operational self-leadership requires delegating to AI, coordinating tools, and quality control.
You wake up at 5:30 AM. Before your feet touch the floor, you’ve already made 17 decisions.
Should you answer that late-night email now or should you wait? Can the dentist appointment wait another week? Who’s handling school pickup? Do you have the mental bandwidth for that difficult conversation with your colleague, or should you postpone it again?
By 9 AM, you’ve orchestrated a small logistics operation: coordinating schedules, sequencing tasks, allocating your limited attention across competing demands. You’re prioritizing, delegating, planning, and adjusting on the fly.
This is management work. And whether or not you have a manager’s title, you’re doing it every single day. It’s just part of the overhead of adult life. And as with so much else, AI is going to change the way we lead ourselves as well.
Being Efficient Is Not the Same as Being Effective
AI promises liberation from the management burden. And this promise is very real. AI can help you draft your emails, schedule your meetings, and analyze your data; it can handle a thousand small tasks that used to consume your day. And all of this assistance has the potential to create substantial efficiency gains and free up considerable time and energy.
But that’s only one side of AI’s impact. As I pointed out in a previous post, the fact that AI will be able to take over many tasks for us does not eliminate the need to manage our work; instead, it simply changes what our needs are.
And one crucial change is this: While AI removes some of the burden of doing, it increases the often much heavier burden of deciding.
Imagine a parent managing family life. AI can now draft emails to teachers, suggest meal plans based on dietary preferences, coordinate calendar conflicts, and even help with homework explanations. Suddenly, this parent has time available to volunteer for the PTA, sign the kids up for another activity, and take on that home renovation project.
But someone still has to make the ultimate decisions. Which activities actually serve the children’s well-being? Is the AI-suggested meal plan scientifically accurate? Is it aligned with the family’s feelings and values around food? Which AI-based tutor helps promote real understanding as opposed to just helping the kids check the done-my-homework box?
The management thinker Peter Drucker made a distinction between efficiency and effectiveness that is useful here. Efficiency, Drucker observed, is about doing things right: finding the quickest, cheapest, least resource-intensive ways to complete a given task. But what is the point of becoming better at doing a task that is fundamentally meaningless? This is where effectiveness comes in: Effectiveness, Drucker pointed out, is about doing the right things.
Now, there is no doubt that using AI increases our efficiency for a wide range of tasks. But effectiveness— doing what is worth doing—remains stubbornly in the hands of humans. And to be truly effective requires that we do something most of us have never been trained to do: We have to learn to lead ourselves.
Of course, the challenge of doing the right things isn’t new. Humans have always faced more choices than they can pursue. What AI changes is the velocity and volume: When you can do 10 times as much, the cost of doing the wrong things multiplies accordingly. Effectiveness was always important. Now it’s urgent.
The Skills of Self-Leadership
When it comes to leading ourselves in our lives, we can split up what’s required into two distinct but interconnected skill sets:
The first skill set is strategic, and involves grappling with the big-picture questions:
- Vision: What actually matters to me across work, relationships, health, and growth?
- Prioritization: Given limited time and energy, what deserves attention today?
- Judgment: Where does this situation require my uniquely human insight versus where can AI handle it?
I watched a friend demonstrate strategic self-leadership recently. An AI tool offered to handle her entire email inbox, drafting responses to everything. Super efficient—but not necessarily always effective.
My friend realized that how she responds to people—the tone, the care, the reading between the lines—is where her relationships are built and maintained. She needed to decide which emails were transactional (delegate to AI) and which were relational (keep human).
The second skill set is operational, and gets applied where strategy meets daily reality. This involves skills such as:
- Delegation: Prompting AI to get the outcome you actually need
- Coordination: Learning to orchestrate multiple AI tools working together
- Quality control: Implementing systems to review, refine, and take ownership of what AI produces.
So how do we actually develop these skills?
Developing Self-Leadership
We develop self-leadership not through grand gestures but through small, repeated practices that build the muscle of self-leadership over time:
Start with awareness. At the end of each day, ask: “What did I choose to do myself, what did I delegate to AI, and why?” Notice whether you’re defaulting to AI out of habit or choosing it deliberately.
Practice delegation consciously. Pick one task this week and delegate it to AI. But do it deliberately: Brief it clearly, review the output critically, and ask yourself what you learned about both the tool and your own judgment.
Build reflection into your rhythm. The most effective leaders I’ve worked with share one habit: They carve out protected time to think. Not to do, but to think about their doing. AI can help here: Journaling tools can prompt deeper questions and track patterns. But be wary: Reflection that’s entirely AI-guided can become another form of outsourcing your judgment. The goal is to use AI as a mirror, not as a replacement for looking.
Don’t Just Move Faster—Move in the Right Direction
Self-leadership is not another item on your already crowded to-do list; it’s the meta-skill that determines whether all those to-dos add up to a life you actually want. And so, tomorrow morning, when you’re lying in bed at 5:30 AM and the first decisions of the day start queuing up, that’s your inflection point. You can drift into reactive mode, or you can lead: Choose your priorities, direct your tools, and treat yourself as someone worth leading well.
This is only going to get more important as AI develops. Because AI will only keep getting better at doing. That means your real work is learning to decide.
[Photo: Source: Best/Abobe Stock]
Original article @ Psychology Today.
