How Starting Today Wins Tomorrow

Whenever you work on anything, it's typically to address a present or future need or activity. As much as that is the case, most tasks that people work on were defined or specified in the past. Thinking about that, you can reasonably assert that most of our tasks and milestones are targeted toward the future, or I should say “a future”. Thinking about it that way, you can infer that this very moment is some weird present-version of the past.

This very moment is some weird present-version of the past.

So what if we changed our approach to work and life with the confidence that whatever we do right now may be used or needed in a future however near or far. The consequence of this style of working is that it forces you to become good at somewhat predicting the future. Although the long term future is generally unpredictable, for those of us that are not prophets, near term tasks and activities can be predicted with higher level of confidence

Let me use a couple of examples :-

• Assume in 20 minutes you need to go out of the house to a meeting.Working in this style requires you to set things up to make that upcoming journey easier. You could set your shoes at the door, iron or press your clothes and put them somewhere accessible or within an arms reach from where you will start off. Doing those activities ahead of time will yield value at the time you actually start working on that task. You won't have to think about where to place or find things.

• Another example of that is creating a very rough draft of a contract you need to send next week. The sooner you get to a draft, even one that just contains headers, the easier it will be to re-board (not onboard) that task later on - the friction will be less.

But what you are describing is just preparation, right?

Yes and no. It goes further than what I will call “basic” preparation. What I am proposing here can be called preempting, or an advanced or more rigorous approach to preparation.

Author’s Note: The definition of the word pre-empt and how it’s being used in this article may seem to be at odds, but let’s appropriate this word for our purposes. Bear with me.

Collins Dictionary say’s If you preempt an action, you prevent it from happening by doing something that makes it unnecessary or impossible

Pre-empting in this view, means setting things up so that your future self doesn't have to do extra work to get things done. This concept is powerful once you realize that there are a lot of things you can preempt, and that preempting doesn't always mean getting things into a final state. What I mean by that is that you can preemptively start on a task, an leave it in a state where it is started/running but not exactly complete.

Preempting is like getting a ticket to an event, preparing is what you do when you are about to go to the event.

Leveraging AI to preempt work at the computer

We are fortunate to live in an age where LLMs (Large Language Models) and Agentic AI solutions exist. Even though they may be in their early forms, these tools can help us pre-empt work, especially work that needs to be done at the computer. One of the best ways to use these tools, that I have found, is to use them to get over the initial hurdle of starting something. For example, you can

• Ask ChatGPT or Gemini to give you a draft of a contract or proposal or just the headings you need

• Ask Claude code to scaffold a codebase for you for an idea or to work on the initial implementation of a couple of features

• Ask an image generation model to generate variations on ideas for a Logo or brand.

… and many more

The possibilities, with AI in the mix are endless and the amount of productivity this can unlock is huge. In addition to productivity, I believe being able to preempt work can help reduce anxiety related to working on or completing a task.

Go forth and preempt the world.

Thanks for reading.