A System, Not a Hack - Notes from Thailand
What a week offline taught me about how I actually want to work with AI.
I’m currently in Thailand, Phuket to be exact.
I booked a remote island with no big plan, just the intention to slow down and detach. Less noise, less input.
I thought switching off would be the hard part, but it wasn’t. By the third day the distractions faded and the silence got louder.
What surprised me was what came after that. When the usual stimuli disappeared: Slack, meetings, constant dopamine loops, my mind didn’t go blank. It got clearer, fast.
The last year moved quickly. Managing, hiring, shipping, scaling. I was productive but disconnected. Ideas landed but didn’t always stick. I had more tools than ever but less clarity.
AI was part of that. The noise, the endless tools, the urgency to adopt. It was too much, too quickly. I didn’t need another app. I needed a system that fit how I think, not just what the market was hyping.
This trip made that clear.
I’d been using AI daily. Writing with it, planning with it, bouncing ideas into it mid-scroll. It was everywhere in my workflow, but I hadn’t asked myself if I was actually using it well. Was it helping me think better, or just helping me ship faster?
That’s what this piece is about. A reset. A reframe.
I think we need to start approaching AI differently. Not as a hack but as infrastructure. Not as a gimmick but as a partner in how we think, create, and build.
This is the first entry in a series that documents how I’m using it, what’s working, what isn’t, and where I think all of this is heading.
Context, for those who care.
I’m a marketing lead at a global fintech company, focused on organic social. I look after the content that goes out across all our global channels. It’s a role that brings both challenge and energy, something I genuinely enjoy and don’t take for granted.
But it wasn’t always the obvious path. I came from a background where social wasn’t considered strategic, just something junior people did at the bottom of the ladder. For a while I even thought about pivoting into something more ‘serious’ like consulting or banking. It looked good on paper. I’m glad I didn’t.
I bet on social at a time when it was seen as low impact. Now it’s front and centre.
Over the past decade the narrative has flipped. Brands are funnelling spend away from paid and into organic. More and more people are quitting white collar jobs in consulting and banking and moving into something more creative. The bet I placed on myself is finally paying off, and we’re only getting started.
I bring this up because I see the same pattern unfolding again. But this time it’s bigger. Existential, even. We’re on the edge of a shift not just in marketing or media but in how we understand work itself.
We’ve already lived through the farming era, the factory era, and now the information era. Each shift changed how we lived, how we worked, and what we valued.
Now we’re entering the next one. To me it’s not just about automation. It’s bigger than that. I see it reshaping the relationship we have with work entirely - how we define value, where we spend our focus, and what we choose to build.
AI won’t just replace tasks. It’s going to change what we believe is worth doing in the first place.
My theory is that we’re heading into an era where clarity, creativity, and direction become the differentiators. Where your ability to think, distill, and build becomes more valuable than where you studied or who you work for.
I call it the age of Passion Work.
Not in the romanticised sense. I’m not talking about quitting your job to become a digital nomad or writing threads about Ikigai. I’m talking about work that’s clear, creative, and sharp, where leverage comes from how you think, not just what you do.
It’s about building systems that match how you actually work. Removing friction. Cutting the noise. Using AI to speed up the process without losing your tone or clarity along the way.
And part of that shift means cutting the nonsense. The layers of modern work that don’t serve much purpose anymore. The back-to-back meetings, performance cycles, status updates, and endless managing of people, energy, and emotion.
When all of that disappeared out here in the quiet I finally noticed what had been weighing me down. It wasn’t overwork. It was fragmentation. My time was fine. My tools were fine. But my attention was constantly split. Too many tabs open, too many micro-decisions.
What gives me hope is knowing that in the not-so-distant future this might change. If used right, AI could remove a lot of that noise. And for those of us who want more time to create, think, and build, we might finally get the headspace to do it properly.
If you’ve been feeling the same, like you want to build something sharper, more independent, and more aligned with how you actually think—this series might land.
I’ll be sharing how I’m using AI to make that shift: the tools, the workflows, the parts that still feel clunky. Nothing polished. Nothing packaged for engagement.
Just a real-time log of how I’m building a clearer, more deliberate way to work.
First entry down. More soon.