Level Zero

Exploring what AI can unlock for an operator

It was Friday afternoon and I’d just wrapped a full day of meetings. I needed to pull some numbers for a follow up. I opened Cursor and asked it in plain English to query and pull the data I needed. It took just two minutes that might normally take me twenty. That feeling of speed and ease took me back to the first time I used ChatGPT. That same sense of “wait, this actually works.”

The nature of my role is a fast-moving environment with constant context switching. We’re often in back to back meetings discussing different projects at different life stages. Decisions get made, alignment happens, and things move. But the rhythm of it means the topic, audience, and dynamics are changing every 30 minutes. By the end of the day, a lot of ground is covered with real progress, but there’s also little time left for anything that requires deep thinking.

Deep work and focus time for me usually happen in the mornings. It’s in the quiet before the meetings begin where I’m able to prepare for the day, review dashboards, execute on strategic decisions, draft documents, and get valuable heads down time. It’s in that deep work time where you sit with a problem long enough to actually see and learn something new.

This past week, I managed to block off an extended period of focus time. I carved out a few hours for longer-term strategic thinking and to set up some AI tooling. The data pull on Friday was a direct result of that choice. When I tested it briefly after setting up, it truly felt like magic.

I’ve been thinking of this as the new Level 0, the baseline. Pulling data faster, drafting updates more efficiently, and automating workflows – that’s all real. But it’s just the floor.

Level 0 is just the start.

The goal isn’t just to do work faster though; it’s to trade those efficiency wins for the thing I actually care about: more space and time to build and learn.

I want to spend more time learning about agents, how they work, and what they can do, and more time thinking strategically in terms of long-term frameworks and vision for partnerships. The part that excites me most is that this will have a compounding effect.

The idea is that each efficiency win will buy back time. That time then goes toward learning AI more deeply which can build better systems, which buys back even more time. And somewhere in that loop, I know I’ll also start seeing bigger picture strategic possibilities that aren’t visible yet from where I’m standing today.

I can’t fully articulate what’s on the other side yet, but it’s work that I’m excited to dive into.

There’s also something else I haven’t fully figured out yet, which is the idea of a Second Brain and how AI changes that. The concept of a Second Brain is essentially an organized system to systematically store ideas and inspiration that can be more easily recalled in the future to improve creative and strategic thinking. Between Cursor and Claude being able to connect to my Slack, email, docs, and meeting notes, there’s an AI that now has the full context of things I carry around in my head. The memory function that existed with ChatGPT can now be built in a pervasive way that requires even less hand holding and explanation for context each time.

So I find myself asking the question – “if AI can build out and be my Second Brain, what does this unlock?” I think the answer is that it changes the nature of what I need to hold in my head. There’s less retrieval and more synthesis. Less remembering and more decision making.

This is all very early though. For now, all I’ve done is set up some tools and saved some time. Level 0 is just the beginning. And I can already feel the flywheel starting to turn.