The Hidden Cost of Saving Time with AI: How to Avoid "Smoothout" Before You Lose Your Critical Thinking Skills

Speaker A: Hey, friends, and welcome to episode 329 of It's About Time, a podcast sharing stories and strategies to inspire better work, life and balance. I'm, um, your host, time management coach, Anna Dearman Cornick. And today I want to talk about a brand new term that I think every single one of us needs to hear before we open up another AI chat window in the name of saving time. Have you noticed lately, the second that something feels even a little bit hard, your first move is to open ChatGPT. Or maybe for you it's Claude or Perplexity or something else. If you're writing an awkward email, if you're trying to figure out a recipe substitution, if you're coming up with a caption for social media, or maybe you're working through a tricky decision. Lately it seems like we don't sit in the discomfort anymore. We outsource it. Or we aim to outsource it instantly. And look, I get it, y'. All. I use AI every single day. It is genuinely one of the most useful tools we have ever had for getting things done faster. But there's a journalist named Ellen Scott who recently coined a term for something that I think a lot of us are quietly feeling. And once you hear it, you can't unhear it. She calls it smooth out. Smooth out. So in this episode, I'm talking about what smooth out actually is and why it's different from burnout. I'll talk about why your brain might be craving the very friction that you're trying to avoid. I'll give you some real life examples of AI being used really well. So I don't want you to think this is a, uh, throw out your AI tools and do everything manually episode. And I also want to just give you a few questions that I've started asking myself before I hand something off to AI. And I think these questions might help you, too. And because I know a lot of you are listening to this in the car or you're on a walk or you're doing something around the house, don't worry, I've got you covered. You can find all the details from this episode, including a link to the original article about smooth out, plus anything else I mentioned today over in the show notes. And today's show notes can be found@abouttimepodcast.com 329. All right, it's about time we get started, so let's get the show on the road.

Speaker B: You're listening to It's About Time, a podcast about work, life and balance around Here, we believe that busy is not a badge of honor. Your host, Anna Dearman Kornik, is here to share tips and strategies to help you make the most of your time. Listen in on real conversations and success stories to find out how other go getters are getting things done. If you're ready to step away from the overwhelm and spend your time on what matters most, then you're in the right place. Here's your host, time management coach Anna Dearman Kornick.

Speaker A: Let's get right into it because this is one of those concepts that's so simple it kind of stops you in your tracks. So Ellen Scott is a journalist who's been covering the world of work for over a decade, and if her name doesn't quite ring a bell, her work probably does. She was actually the first person to write about quiet quitting. Remember that one, quiet quitting back in 2022, before that phrase took over every news outlet on the planet. And at the end of last year, end of 2025, she published her predictions for the workplace trends that will define 2026. I'll be sure to include the link to the Substack article where she goes through these predictions over in the show notes, but one of her predictions is Smooth out. Smooth out. Just wanted to make sure I say that really slowly so you can hear what I'm saying here. Smooth out. So here's how she describes it. Smooth out is the mental impact of increasingly over relying on AI. I'm going to say that one more time just to let it sink in. Smooth out is the mental impact of increasingly over relying on AI. It's rooted in the same language as burnout or bore out, but it's a totally new flavor, unique to this exact moment in time when more and more of us reach for AI the second we face anything even remotely challenging. And here's the line that stuck with me the most from her the smoother the path, the softer the skill. Because here's the thing our brains actually crave challenge. For real. There's a term for this. It's called eustress, which is good stress. It's the kind that shows up when you're pushing through something mentally difficult, working toward mastery. You know that really good feeling when you solve a problem or you work a puzzle, or maybe you're like me and you still play wordle or connections, the New York Times games, night before bed. And working through those little puzzles, it's a fun kind of difficult. So that's eustress and that friction, that challenge that we like to feel it's not a flaw in the system. The challenge is the whole point. Challenge is how we build confidence, sharpen our judgment, and grow. And when we smooth that out every single time by letting AI do the hard part before we've even tried, we don't just save time, we quietly lose our abilities. Now, I want to be really clear about something, because I don't want this episode to feel like an anti AI rant, because it is not. I love using AI to even refine this podcast script once I put all of my initial ideas and thoughts and positions on the topic. And I recently used Claude to put together a packing list for my two girls to spend some time at their grandmother's house. And I think that a lot of you are also using AI not just at work, but in your personal lives. And honestly, some of the best uses of it I've seen are genuinely inspiring. So there's a mom on Instagram. Chances are you even follow her. And she goes by upgrading Katie. I'll link to her Instagram over in the show notes, but she's been spending a year building her dream life, one AI generated to do list at a time. M Recently she tried out this beauty prompt that was making the rounds and I tried it myself too, just to see. And it was really cool. And I love what she's doing. I think it's a really great example of using AI exactly the way that it's meant to be used as a launch pad into something that you don't know much about yet. A way in, but not necessarily a way around. That's not what Smooth out is about. Smooth out is about the stuff that we already know how to do or the stuff that we could learn how to do or improve upon if we just sat with the discomfort for a minute. So this is like the hard email that we really could write ourselves if we just thought it through. Or it's the decision that we could make if we trusted our own judgment. It's getting help from AI, solving a problem that we could solve ourselves if we just let ourselves get a little stuck first and work through it. And I know what some of you are thinking, but Anna, isn't saving time the whole point? And y' all know I am all about saving time where we can. Obviously that's basically my entire job, but I. I don't want that time savings to come at the expense of the critical thinking skills, the creativity, the problem solving that we actually need. Here's how I think about it. Let's Say that you learned Spanish when you were in college and maybe you even, uh, studied abroad where you used your Spanish speaking skills daily. But now your job never requires you to speak Spanish. So you stop practicing, you stop reaching for the words, and that's fine day to day, nobody at the office needs it. But then you take a trip to a Spanish speaking country and suddenly you need that skill and it's just not there anymore. At least not as strongly, as fluently as it was before. And it's not because you couldn't do it at some point. It's because you stopped practicing, you stopped getting the reps in. And very slowly, you started to lose your edge. Without practice, the skill just kind of fell to the wayside. That is Smooth Out. So it's not that AI is bad for the task sitting in front of you right now. It's that the skill you're using at work or, you know, whenever you're using AI, it might be a skill that you need somewhere else in your life. Okay, so have you ever seen the movie Wall E? If you haven't, I'll try to find the clip that I'm about to describe. But basically, in the movie Wall E, there's this entire civilization of people that live in a space station, and they are floating around on these little motorized chairs. They're all wearing the same outfits. They're all drinking, basically smoothies every day. Biggest thing I remember is that they're all floating around on these little motorized chairs. No one walks anywhere. And somewhere along the way, they basically forgot how to walk. Not because anything was wrong with them, but just because they never had to use their walking skills. And that's the risk with Smooth Out. It's not this dramatic shift where there's one big moment where you suddenly lose a skill. It's not like you're gonna go from having problem skills to zero problem solving skills, or you're going to go from being artistically creative to having zero creativity. It's not like that. Instead, it's a thousand tiny moments where you didn't have to use the skill. So you didn't. You outsourced it to AI and ever so slowly over time, the muscle goes a little soft, it atrophies, it kind of stops working. Ellen Scott actually lays out what she thinks the fallout looks like if this trend continues and it doesn't sound great, it's complete disengagement from work, low mood, a sense of meaninglessness. Because AI is doing it all for us, there will likely be a dip in self Belief and a decline in core skills like problem solving, and even a fear of making mistakes. And let's be real, the fear of making mistakes is already pretty high, but an even larger fear of making mistakes because we're so used to AI getting it right and doing the thinking for us. And that's a heavy list. Disengagement from work, low mood, sense of meaninglessness, lower self belief, decline in skills like problem solving. And you already heard me say, I don't think the answer is to swear off AI, but I do think the answer is to become a lot more intentional about what we hand over and what we hold onto. So here's what I want to leave you with. When it comes to this episode. I'm not sharing a framework. I don't have a method. I don't have five, uh, steps to teach you. I just want to give you something to sit with this week because I don't have this all figured out. I'm still using AI in some way, just about every day for plenty of things, and I'm not going to stop. But lately, before I hand something over, before I click over to Claude, I've started quietly asking myself a few questions. And maybe you'll find them useful, too, especially if you're like me and you don't want to use your edge like you want to maintain your humanness and your authenticity. Because when it comes down to it, that is the only thing that separates us from AI from anyone else doing the work. So those questions are, is this something I actually know how to do? Or am I just avoiding the discomfort of figuring it out? Am I using this to get unstuck or to avoid starting in the first place? And then this is a big one. If I were to let AI handle this every single time, what skill would I be quietly letting go? Rusty, I don't think there's a clean right answer here. Some days the honest answer is, I just don't have the bandwidth today, and that's okay. You know what? I could have made that packing list for my girls by hand, leading up to them spending some time at my mom's house this summer. But it was the end of a long day, and I just remember thinking it would be so helpful if this were already just created. And you know what? That's okay. Other days, you know, you might ask yourself these questions, and the honest answer might be, I think I'm avoiding something I'm actually capable of doing. I mean, I think for me, the biggest example is difficult emails. Is. Is answering a difficult client question or something about, you know, a billing question or a late, uh, payment or those types of emails that just, they're just uncomfortable, you know. But what happens if we never allow ourselves to feel that discomfort of figuring it out? And here's a really big reminder that I want to give you. It's that the goal here, especially when you're looking at, you know, what do you typically use AI for? Uh, when is it truly helpful versus when is it just being lazy? The goal is not to get it perfect and have some kind of chart or some kind of. I'm not asking you to log every single time you use AI and give yourself a score. No, I just want you to notice. I want you to stay a little more awake to the choice that you're making instead of just letting it happen on autopilot. And I think we can do that. So there you have it. A brand new term smooth out for something that a lot of us have probably already felt without having a word for it. The idea that our brains actually need a little friction, a little challenge to stay sharp. And instead of a checklist or a framework or a, uh, three step method, I just want to give you those few honest questions to carry into the next time you open up that AI chat window. Do I already know how to do this? Am I avoiding starting or am I genuinely stuck? And what skill might I be letting go soft? As always, all of the details from today's episode, including a link to Ellen Scott's substack Working on purpose. All of that can be found over in the show notes@abouttimepodcast.com 329 and I'd love to know where do you notice yourself reaching for AI the fastest? Send me a DM on Instagram nadcornick and let me know what resonated most from this one. M. All right, my friends, I'll see you next week. And until then, keep making time for what matters most.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening to It's About Time, a podcast about work, life and balance. Head over to www.abouttimepodcast.com to join the conversation. Check out the show notes and dive into bonus content so you can start living your best life today. Love this episode. Be sure to share it with a friend. Subscribe and leave a review. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you in the next episode.