What do we want to outsource? 

My first report card read, “Rachel asks too many questions, she should be quiet and let other people have a turn.” Imagine a teacher saying this today!

For the next year, I was really quiet in class. I didn’t speak up, even though I learned best by asking questions. But once I got a new teacher, I went back to asking questions. I’m proud that this trait remains a core part of who I am and how I work. Even when I was 5 years old, I was curious and didn’t always accept the first answer I was told. 

For the next little while, I’ll be asking a series of questions through this newsletter. 

To me, being a designer means being a strategic thinker who cares deeply about your business, with the unique benefit of coming in fresh, so it’s easier for me to ask the questions that insiders might overlook or perhaps feel uncomfortable questioning.  

Here are two questions that I recently wrote about: 

• “What problem are you trying to solve?”
• “When did you last use your own website on your phone?”

So, back to this big question, what do we want to outsource in life?

The hidden cost of outsourcing

For some people, hiring a gardener is an ‘essential’. They don’t have the capacity to do it themselves – whether that be due to desire, enjoyment, time, headspace, knowledge, energy, health, skills, etc. They’re happy to trade money for a beautiful garden. 

For others, hiring a gardener is unthinkable. It would mean losing their hobby, enjoyment, satisfaction, exercise, strength, outdoor time, skills, knowledge, etc. If you’ve ever talked to a passionate gardener, you will know how deep their pride and knowledge go. 

I remember my husband telling a friend how happy he was about having so many strawberry flowers in his garden beds that year. The friend asked why. Turned out they had no idea that flowers became fruit. One person’s joy is another person’s idea of the worst way to spend their weekend.

But there is a subtle cost for those who choose to outsource – you lose first-hand knowledge and experience. If you don’t know, it’s harder to judge whether or not a gardener is doing a good job, making sensible decisions, or working at an expected pace. The longer you remain detached from the process, the less likely you are to notice problems or even know the right questions to ask.

Now it’s AI

We always gain and lose things when we outsource. Trading manual labor for modern inventions is nothing new. Machines often do a faster, more reliable job than we ever could. But I know that I’ve lost skills as a result of these time-saving trade-offs.  

Now, with AI, we need to be incredibly intentional about what we outsource to the machines. What are we good at? What do we love? What makes us human? What doesn’t need to be optimized for speed?  

The danger is in outsourcing our thinking and our voice, two of the very things that make us unique humans. If we stop wrestling for hours to figure something out ourselves, we don’t instill the character we need to face other challenges. 

And, like the gardener analogy, if we outsource our thinking, how will we know if the AI is doing a good job or is confidently making stuff up? Will the time spent checking its work outweigh the time it would have taken to just do the thing ourselves in the first place?

When our lack of firsthand knowledge applies to the machines handling critical aspects of our lives, a subtle loss of skill can be a massive liability. Where the stakes are high, like safety, health, or finances, the risks of blindly outsourcing our critical thinking and expertise are scary. 

I’m still figuring out my boundaries, but for now, here are some things I’m happy to outsource to AI in my design work:

• Using Photoshop’s generative fill to expand backgrounds or remove stray objects saves hours of tedious cloning.
• Asking AI questions (of course) to ruthlessly critique my grammar, spelling, and argument after I’ve written a first draft. I explicitly instruct it not to write the edits for me.
• Handling manual digital labor. I loved getting Gemini to take a list of events from a PDF and automatically add them to my calendar. 
• Doing initial research, like I would have done with Google. I assume all references are potential fakes until I double-check them myself. 

But here is what I don’t want to outsource to a machine:

• My words. I will not outsource my authenticity to a prompt. I don’t want our conversations outsourced to machines. 
• Our relationships. When I say something to you, I want you to know that it’s coming from me, Rachel. Trust is so, so easily broken and much harder to repair. 
• My strategic design work, my love of asking questions. I suppose that’s why I’ve always been wary of templated solutions. They homogenize everything into a humanless formula rather than honoring the uniqueness of the people involved.
• Productivity for productivity’s sake. We are not machines. If we optimize everything for speed, we lose the space to just be, the ability for our brains to get weirdly creative through boredom.

I want to optimize for genuine connection, because that’s always how human business has worked… and it’s the most meaningful way of living. The world is flooded with more and more noise from the machines. I want to connect with real people.

I hope that’s you too.

Let’s talk?

PS, I also wrote this: The loneliness epidemic will not be solved by more machines.