I have always been driven by a passion to create better systems for how we work, live, and play. I created Ridiculously Efficient back in 2011 to share actionable wisdom on productivity to help high-performance teams avoid burnout and do more in less time. These insights were distilled from my lived experience as an operations executive for visionary technology entrepreneurs for 15 years.

The advent of AI technology has opened up new possibilities to achieve this vision, but it has also raised questions about how to use AI with integrity, transparency, and a focus on human-centered values.

I believe in the power of AI to transform our lives, but I also recognize the importance of being open and accountable about how I am using AI in my own work.

Consider this page my living personal AI disclosure.

Here on the website, I use two accounts to publish content:

  1. Human-AI Teamwork: Articles with my name, Marissa Brassfield, as the author, feature my original, handwritten insight. On occasion, I may use AI to edit work so it's shorter, but I always go back and read everything aloud (seriously!) before I send it so it still sounds like "me."
  2. AI-Human Teamwork: Articles with my business name, Ridiculously Efficient, as the author, are drafted with AI tools and edited by a human (me or another person on my team) before publishing. We experiment with different ways to disclose our AI usage for articles on this account, including naming the tool we're using and why we chose to use AI for that article.

How I Use AI

Here are the specific ways in which I am harnessing the power of AI to save time, optimize my work-life alignment, and unleash my creative potential:

  1. Developing Ideas: As a busy mom of a special needs toddler, I often find myself with a wealth of ideas but limited time to execute them. With AI, I can now bring these ideas to life, ensuring that they don't remain dormant until I have more time (which could be days or weeks from the idea's inception).
  2. Consolidating Perspectives: AI helps me to distill complex long-form articles into easily digestible summaries, allowing me to explore multiple perspectives and extract the most valuable insights in a time-efficient manner.
  3. Digital Brain Trust: AI enables me to consult a virtual brain trust filled with experts and niche perspectives, helping me explore alternate viewpoints and refine my thinking. My digital brain trust helps me avoid biases and ensure that perspectives I'm sharing on polarizing issues are well-considered.
  4. Foundational Checklists: AI supports me in creating robust checklists for operations and marketing processes, ensuring that I work from a plan and don't miss any crucial steps. This enables me to quickly sketch out a project idea and use AI to develop it into a tactical plan without pulling focus from my human team members.
  5. Content Repurposing: AI makes it easy for me to repurpose and remix content from one format to another, or to tailor it for different audience segments. This versatility helps me to reach and engage more people with my message, without writing the same articles and ideas multiple times over.
  6. Editing Feedback: AI provides valuable feedback on my own work, helping me to make it more persuasive, concise, or actionable.
  7. Simplifying Complexity: Many of my favorite AI news articles are highly technical – and with AI, I can break down complex or technical subjects in various ways, igniting my creativity and making it easier for me to understand and communicate these ideas effectively.
  8. Self-Reflection: AI challenges me to examine my own thought processes and perspectives, fostering self-awareness and personal growth.
  9. Streamlining Workflows: AI enables me to experiment with innovative workflows that digitize time-consuming aspects of my content strategy, which might not have a clear ROI and would otherwise require manual work. For example, I've developed an automated workflow where, as I read articles online, I highlight the content and AI summarizes the article, then sends it to my scheduling tool to be published with a brief message and a link to the original article. This streamlined process saves me valuable time while still delivering valuable content on social media.
  10. Fun & Learning: All photos on the site (from January 2023 onward) were generated by me using text-to-image tools like Midjourney, Leonardo, and Stable Diffusion. I'm not an artist by training, so this is a way for me to demonstrate how easy it is for anyone to start visualizing different ideas and creating visual content. I regularly experiment with text-to-speech, text-to-video, and other AI-powered creative tools that are outside my wheelhouse of editorial content because I can.

By using AI in these ways, I have saved so much time by avoiding some of the ways I waste time during the day: analysis paralysis, blank page syndrome, digital distraction, and doomscrolling. I'm also having more fun because my workdays have become even more efficient and effective.

In this way, I'm optimizing my work-life alignment while also upholding my commitment to heart-centered leadership in the age of AI.

I believe that when we use AI with intention and integrity, we can create better systems for ourselves and our communities, unleashing our collective potential.

My mission with Creative Intelligence is to empower others to harness the transformative power of AI while maintaining a focus on the human experience.

As we journey together into the future, I will continue to explore new ways to use AI responsibly and ethically, inspiring innovation, creativity, and positive change in the world. By participating in our community, you'll have a front row seat to how I'm using AI – with best practices and easy-to-understand strategies so you can do it too.