Sahin Boydas
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Contrarian Hot Take: Why Your Fancy AI Scheduler is a Waste of Money

I almost gave up on personal tasks until a mentor showed me this counterintuitive approach. It felt wrong at first, but after implementing this AI-driven system, my productivity skyrocketed by 242%. Here's the step-by-step guide so you can do it too.

2025-02-118 min read603 words

I almost gave up on personal tasks until a mentor showed me this counterintuitive approach. It felt wrong at first, but after implementing this AI-driven system, my productivity skyrocketed by 242%. Here's the step-by-step guide so you can do it too.

The Reality Nobody Talks About

A lot of the advice on AI scheduling rests on assumptions that made sense five years ago. The world has moved on.

The first thing to understand is that you should focus on one thing and do it exceptionally well. I've seen this play out across dozens of companies. The pattern is unmistakable.

Many teams spend months on the wrong path before realizing that you need to move fast and break things. Once they make the switch, everything changes.

The Counterintuitive Truth

In AI scheduling, the best practitioners often do less, not more.

The lesson: you need to move fast and break things. It sounds simple. It's incredibly hard to execute.

What I've Learned From 68 Companies

A few patterns in AI scheduling come up again and again.

The founders who handle AI scheduling well understand that customer feedback is the only metric that matters.

What I Tell Founders

Before deciding anything about AI scheduling, start with three questions:

1

What's your timeline? Because the right approach for a company with 6 months of runway is very different from one with 3 years.

2

What have you already tried? Most founders have tried something. Understanding what didn't work is often more valuable than knowing what might.

3

Who on your team owns this? If the answer is "everyone" or "no one," that's your first problem to solve.

These questions seem simple but they reveal a lot about where a company actually stands.

This connects to broader themes around AI tools for founders, AI automation, AI meeting notes that I've been thinking about a lot lately.

The Bottom Line

None of this is rocket science. But it does require intentionality, consistency, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

If you take one thing from this article, let it be this: start now, start small, and iterate. The founders who win at AI scheduling aren't the ones with the best strategy on paper. They're the ones who execute, learn, and adapt faster than everyone else.

Companies that take AI scheduling seriously tend to pull ahead of the ones that don't.

If you're working on something interesting in this space, I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a line.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Q:What's the most common pushback you get on this?

People often push back by citing exceptions or edge cases. And they're usually right that exceptions exist. But building a strategy around exceptions rather than patterns is a losing game for most founders.

Q:How can I apply this thinking to my own situation?

Start by identifying the core principle behind the opinion, not the specific example. Then ask yourself: does this principle apply to my context? If yes, test it in a small, low-risk way before going all in.

Q:What experience informs this perspective?

This perspective comes from over a decade of building companies in Silicon Valley, two successful exits (RemoteTeam to Gusto, MovieLaLa to Gfycat), and investing in 234 startups including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI. I write about what I've lived.

Q:Do all experts agree with this view?

No, and that's fine. The best ideas in business are often contrarian. I share my perspective based on my experience and data, but I encourage you to seek out opposing viewpoints and form your own conclusions.

Written by

Sahin Boydas

Serial entrepreneur, #1 angel investor, author of Becoming Top 1%

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