How to Motivate Yourself in 2026 (Part 6)

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In this final episode of the How to Motivate Yourself in 2026 series, Dr. Jon Finn brings everything together by getting practical about a simple question: what should you actually be doing over the next 30 days — and what should AI be doing instead?

Using Chapter 19 of Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution, Dr. Finn helps you make AI tangible by applying it directly to your real life and workflow. You’ll explore what AI is already brilliant at (procedural, repeatable, medium-charge tasks), what it still struggles with (context-rich, high-charge thinking), and how Brain State intelligence becomes the key to staying valuable, focused, and motivated in 2026.

You’ll be guided through a straightforward planning process to organise your priority tasks for the next month using the Ice Cubes vs Ice Sculptures model:

• Ice Cubes = routine, repeatable tasks (often medium charge — increasingly automatable with AI)
• Ice Sculptures = complex, high-value tasks that require your best thinking (high charge — often accelerated by generative AI)

You’ll also learn how to:

• brain-dump and categorise tasks clearly
• assign priorities and realistic time estimates
• set up a simple “task inbox” so new tasks don’t hijack your day
• review weekly to keep your system adaptive and useful

By the end of the episode, you’ll have completed Step 2 of the Success Cycle and created a clearer, more motivating 30-day plan — one that protects your high-charge time and stops medium-charge busy work from dominating your life.

If you’ve not listened to Parts 1–5 yet, Dr. Finn recommends starting there first, as each short episode builds toward this final step.

As always: you’re only ever one Brain State habit away.

Transcript

What AI Can And Can’t Do

The KPMG Audit Story And Automation

Big Tech’s AI Spend And Market Noise

Agents, Workforce Shifts And Reality Check

Why Your Workflow Must Change Now

Brain States: Recharge, Medium, High

Habits, Automation And The 98 Percent

High-Charge Thinking And Human Edge

Two AIs: Agentic And Generative

Outsource Medium-Charge; Co-Work High-Charge

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Hello, Habit Mechanics, Dr. John Finn here. I hope you're having a fantastic week so far. In today's episode, I want to complete our How to Motivate Yourself in 2026 series, and I'll be sharing with you chapter 19 from Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution. So if you haven't listened to the first five parts, they're all very short podcasts, and I'd recommend you go back. And today we get into the nitty-gritty of what is it that AI can do and what is it that it can't actually do? And I want you to think about that within your own workflows. What are the things that you're currently doing that AI possibly can't do? What are the things that you're doing where actually it would be much easier to get that stuff automated or outsourced possibly to an AI, if not in the immediate future, possibly in the longer term future. And by thinking of our own lives and the kind of work that we need to do, I think it makes the new neural network AI technology much more tangible, much more relatable in our own lives. Because we hear this word AI and it's going to change the world, and next minute it's not going to change the world, it's a bubble. Hearing all these conflicting narratives, but we can only really understand what this technology is and what it means in our own life if we start to think about the kind of things that we have to do every day and the types of brain states that we use to get those things done. And I know that when it comes to psychology to brain function, it's often quite difficult to distinguish what type of thinking you're doing when. Seeing the differences in how we're thinking is often far less tangible than that, and that hasn't been such a big problem in the history of human beings, because up until this point in history, our brain has been uniquely capable of doing things that nothing else on the planet can do. But neural network AI is changing that. And what I found really interesting, I mean, there's been so many stories, just uh, and I've we've mentioned quite a few of them in recent pods since the new year about AI technology, how it's impacting things. One thing I found really interesting at the weekend was a story on the front cover of the Financial Times, and it was about a KPMG. KPMG is a huge accountancy firm, but they have an accountancy firm that audits their firm. And the story was about KPMG asking their auditors for a for a significant discount on their auditing services for last year, because they said that their accountants should be able to audit KPMG much more well, much faster, much more efficiently and effectively because of neural network AI technologies. Because what used to have to be done by humans, many many tasks that used to have to be done literally by humans manually, reading through uh data, analysing data manually, many of those tasks can now be completely automated by neural network AI. And that's a great window into why the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, um, and Meta, I think last week, they all kind of simultaneously announced huge um investments into their developing their AI capabilities in the next twelve months. And in total, they announced that they would be investing about six hundred and fifty billion dollars into augmenting their business's AI capabilities. Amazon alone announced a two hundred billion dollar investment. And of course, when investors see that, they think, oh, right, well, we're not going to get a massive return from our Amazon stocks in the next 12 months because they're going to be heavily investing in AI technologies. That's why you saw some noise around, oh, there's an AI bubble because these big AI companies have lost some share value, but it's because they're doubling down and they are seeing that AI can replace neural network AI can replace huge swathes of the work that human beings currently get paid to do. It's real, and the release of agents is showing how powerful these technologies are. So it's really important to understand this. Like this is not going away, but essentially, many of the things that humans get paid to do every day can already be done faster and cheaper by neural network AI. This is not science fiction, this is absolutely real. And you've seen some uh we've already seen some kind of pioneering companies like Salesforce have half their human workforce, and they've pioneered the use of agents, and they call it agent force. So for the first time in history, many of the cognitive tasks, many of the things that humans did, you know, with their brain sitting at a computer that were only ever able to be done by humans, can now be done by neural network AI, and it can be done cheaper and faster. So, what the likes of Amazon and Google and Meta are betting on is that they're gonna be the workforce providers of the future, and in fact, you know, even um 12 months ago, Microsoft were talking about use AI is cheaper than humans, and we're seeing uh businesses now, they're figuring out how do we actually in integrate this technology, which roles don't we need anymore, which roles can we kind of collapse, what we're gonna what we're gonna need our humans to do differently, and I know I'm talking very clinically here, and because I'm just trying to distinguish between AI and um people, but we are on the the the cusp of a huge change in how we live and how we work because many of the things that we previous had to do with our own brain, we don't have to do them anymore, and of course, as you know, I think this can be a massive benefit for humanity if we get it right. We can't get it right if people don't really understand what it is, and they're just sleepwalking and saying, no, no, no, complete nonsense. I have not read or heard one credible argument against this technology, and I'm looking all the time. I'm a trained researcher, I have a PhD, um, and I'm you know trained how to synthesize information and look for compelling arguments in things, and I just don't see any compelling arguments to that says AI is not going to be everything that Amazon, um, Microsoft, Google, etc. think it is going to be. But right now we're in the we're sort of in the experimental stage, and that means that if you haven't gone there already, you need to start thinking about your own workflows through this lens. Because if we want to be healthy, happy, and high performing in this AI revolution, then the key thing we need to get good at is doing what AI can't, and that's why you know I wrote Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution as a gateway into understanding this. Um, and the key thing to understand when you're thinking about what is it that AI can do, what is it that it can't do? The key lens to look at this through is through your brain and how your brain works. Again, neural network AI, it's designed to work like our brains. So anything that our brain can learn to do procedurally, this technology can learn how to do. And most of what most people do every day is are procedural tasks, they've learned how to do them through these logical steps. When the steps are not so logical, then AI is not as good at doing those things. But let's think of let's just go back to basics on the brain state, sir, on our brain states. So our brain literally is like a battery, it runs on chemicals and electricity, and that means it only has a limited amount of charge in every 24 hour every 24 hours, and broadly we're operating in three brain states. So we've got a recharge brain state, that's where we're recharging the battery. That can be good quality sleep, also you know, switching off and relaxing, that's gonna recharge the brain. Second brain state is medium charge brain states. Now, medium charge brain state is where we're just going, we're not thinking too much, but we're getting things done. Sometimes people might think of it as multitasking, sometimes people call it busy work, but it you're doing things that you've done lots of times before, so you don't really have to think about them. You don't really have to think about them because they're procedural things that you're doing, and you've you've got loads of neurons in your brain that can easily automate doing those things, you know. So it's it's a bit like when you're driving, you're not really thinking too much. If you think about driving a car with uh uh not in uh not an automatic car, but a car with a a gear stick, and you're having to switch your pedals, the accelerator, the clutch, the brake, and you've got traffic coming towards you, you've got things going, you know, there's so much of what you're doing there is just completely automatic, and that extends into every element of our life because our brain's number one operating rule is to automate things, and that's why compelling science shows us that most of what we're thinking and doing most of the time is automatic or semi-automatic, in other words, it's a habit. So, not like pop psychology tries to uh tell us that well, habits are 60% of what we're doing, they're not. When I say don't think of a white elephant, you don't have to because it's already in your brain, right? You get that, it's it's automatic. So most of what we're thinking and doing most of the time is, and when I say most, it's at least 98%, and probably more, is automatic or semi-automatic. In other words, it's your brain just doing what it knows how to do. Um, you know, the way I'm speaking right now, I'm not really thinking too much about what I'm saying, in the sense of I'm not thinking about formulating this word or that word, it's just coming out, it's just flowing. Because all these concepts I'm speaking about, I've thought about quite a lot. Some of practiced over 25 years, um practicing speaking. I've been doing that for over 40 years now. Maybe I'm not sure when I could how old I was when I could speak, but you get the point. So most of this stuff is just automatic, semi-automatic, and that's when we're using our medium charge brain states. And this is what neural network AI is brilliant at. It's brilliant at learning how to execute procedural processes faster and more efficiently than humans ever can. And the the the speed that neural network AI can learn is phenomenal. So it can learn knowledge faster than any human can learn knowledge, not just 10% faster or 20% faster. I mean, we're talking significantly um faster learning power when it comes to learning a process. So for example, I can train um a neural network AI on um a generative AI tool on the habit mechanic, the first book that I wrote, which literally took me about 20 years worth of work, and it's about 107,000 words. It can learn that in minutes. And I can say, what happens in this chapter, and it can tell me. What if someone wants to do this? What would you advise? And it can tell me, it can do it in minutes. A human being would take months to learn that content, uh, if not years. So just to show how powerful this technology is, so we've got me recharge, medium charge, high charge, um is the third brain state. So the high charge brain state is has well one, it's a it's a scarce cognitive resource because when we're not in that automatic brain, that's when we're in accessing the high charge brain state. So it's where we're really thinking hard very deliberately. We're not just being busy or multitasking, we're we're really thinking, we're really focusing, we're trying to solve a problem that we haven't had to solve before. And I know that most people don't think about life as solving problems, but that's what we're doing every day, right? Your child could come home from school and something happened, so you have to solve the problem. You uh may be making something for your evening meal and you don't have the right ingredients, so you think, okay, what can I do in there instead? You may have a new client that has a new demand, and you're trying to work out, okay, how do we deal with that? Uh, you can't have broken down for the first time, and you're not sure how to fix it. You we're we're we're designed to solve problems, but it takes a lot of conscious effort and energy. Um, and our brain only has so much energy in it out in every 24 hours. It's it's a lit like a battery, literally. So these high-charge brain states, some elements of them are uniquely human where we we can um connect lots of different ideas together in in real time and apply them to the real context of the real world, real world that we're living in, and AI's not so great at doing that right now, and that's the key is that if we want to be valuable to our own business, to the business that we work for, but just in our own life, then we need to break those habits of just being in our busy multitasking brain state all of the time. Because one, just being on like that all the time is is not good for our brain, it damages our brain function because our brain does need to um recharge, it needs to clear out all the unhelpful toxins that have been building up in the day. But also, in order to feel good about ourselves, to feel like we're learning and we're growing and we're making progress, we need to get into our high charge brain states because that allows us to do the kind of things that we need to do to learn and grow and feel feel like we're making progress. So we've got recharge brain state, medium-charge brain state, high charge brain state. And there's an optimal balance of using those brain states, and you can take, I'll put the link below uh this podcast, you can take the uh human eye readiness brain state assessment. Um, and in fact, we just released our new version of Habant Mechanic University, where then once you've got your score, you can actually go in and you can um we'll show you how to improve your brain state score. But what it's then important to understand in the context of what we're talking about in the podcast is okay, well, what can the AI do? What is AI? And you can think of it as two core things. One is one one type of neural network AI is what you'll you'll hear people call agentic AI. So this kind of technology is very good at automating things or just doing a repeat task over and over and over again, and this is becoming more and more widely available, and I think last week Claude, who are the um see as the ethical rival to um chat GTP. I don't know how real that is or not, but it's a very, very powerful uh tool. They've released their own agents. So these agents will do things just on autopilot, and just one basic example is they will go in and they'll reply to you know emails for you. You've got you set rules around it, it's not going to reply to any old email, but you set rules around it. Um, people unleash these agents. The closest thing um that I've seen work well in the past, similar to this, is you know, tools that you use on social media where they post for you and they will even do some levels of replies and bespoke messaging, etc., like that. But most of the things that you use your medium charge brain state to do can now be done in whole or in part by agentic AI. So businesses are not going to be paying human beings to do medium charge work anymore. As soon as they can get away with not paying humans to do the medium charge tasks, they will. They will outsource it to agentic AI, which is cheaper and faster. So in the chapter that I'm going to share with you, it's going to ask you to think about what are these medium charge tasks that you're doing every day. And I'll give examples in there just so you can start to get a sense, and it's not about immediately running out and thinking, right, which AI tools do I need to use to automate these things, it's just starting to be aware that these are medium charge tasks, and you're still going to have to do some medium charge tasks. So how do you do them efficiently and effectively? Because what happens for most people is those medium charge tasks just dominate your day, and then get in the way of your recharge tasks, because recharging is a task, getting a good night's sleep is a task, switching off and relaxing is a task, and then get in the way of the high charge work that you aspire to do but never get around to doing for one reason or another, but largely because you're consumed by busy always on medium charge tasks. So medium charge tasks is a gentic AI, um, and that's getting really advanced really, really quickly, and the other core type of AI is um what we call generative AI. So generative AI are things like Chat GTP and the chat both side of Claude. I think of them as sort of expert generalist consultants. You can work with them on different complex tasks, but they can't do everything by themselves, they can't they can't execute things autonomously. It's almost like a coworker or even an employee. So instead of hiring, you know, a marketing consultant, you might work with the with um generative II. Instead of hiring um a proofreader, you might work with the generative II. So these are these consultants and and now instead of hiring a lawyer, literally you can work with these tools.

SPEAKER_02 24:43

Um and they're not magic but they they know significantly more about most things than you do.

Motivation Series: Intelligent Goals

Chapter 19: Ice Cubes Vs Sculptures

SPEAKER_01 25:06

So if you're not uh using these things, start to use them, start to co-work with them on your high charge work. This software you have at your fingertips, the generative AI, you know, it's hundred billion dollar software, which you know, some of it you can use for free, or you can pay a small subscription fee. Um so you've got high charge, medium charge, recharge, high charge is where you can co-work with your um with generative AI, medium charge thing, agentic AI and automation, which is kind of on a continuum. And how do how do I outsource more of that medium charge stuff to the agentic AI? Or how do I do less of that medium charge stuff because it's probably having a negative impact on my ability to be healthy, happy, and at my best. So, as ever, I want to help you do better. That is my absolute aim, and we're seeing brilliant results from people that are putting this into practice, you know, including myself, because I'm always the first guinea pig for these ideas. And you know, already today I I've probably done three days worth of work in terms of my high-charge complex thinking. Um, but I can only do that if I understand my brain status and if I build the habits to allow me to um you know build those brain states up. And again, like I said before, if you if you're interested in just assessing your brain status, there's a link below where you can take the brain state assessment. And then if you want to go there, we'll show you how to improve them just in literally in 10 minutes. You can start to make progress inside Hampton Mechanic University. Um so that's it. So that's the that's the background. It's a bit of a news update on on what we've been hearing about AI. For me, it's endlessly fascinating. We are living in a very well, we're living in a unique period of history. We've never seen anything like this before. So I'd encourage you to get ahead of the curve and use it to your advantage. So, what's gonna come up is the final part of our motivate yourself, improve your motivation in 2026 uh lessons. If you haven't listened to um the first five parts, you can go back and listen to those, and it's just breaking down this what I call intelligent goal setting process uh into just simple basic steps. This is an evergreen process, it's not something you do once. You know, and the thing that we're gonna look at today is something I'd revisit every 30 days. Um so yeah. Enjoy as ever, if you have any questions, just let us know.

Building Organised Task Lists

Weekly Reviews And Task Inbox

Time Estimates And Brain-State Timing

Prepare For Day Designer And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 28:22

Chapter nineteen organizing your priority tasks for the next thirty days. Success cycle location. Step two, progress. eighty percent complete. Let's build on what you've already accomplished with the task director. Through your fam story, you've connected your long term vision to shorter term goals. You've also identified key foundational habits that will help optimize your brain states. Now it's time to get clear about all the tasks you need to complete. Think about your daily tasks and responsibilities. They fall into two distinct categories based on the type of brain state they require, and we use the metaphor of ice to help us understand them and use them effectively. Ice cubes are your routine tasks, the kind that need consistent but not maximum brain power. These tasks work well with your medium charge brain state. Think of routine emails, basic admin work or standard meetings. Many of these tasks can be automated or semi-automated with AI tools. Ice sculptures are your complex tasks, the ones that demand sustained premium thinking. These require your high charge brain state. This includes not only challenging work projects like strategic planning or creative development, but also the focused effort needed to build those foundational habits you identified earlier. Increasingly, these tasks can be made easier with AI tools. The task director helped me see this distinction clearly, Sarah shared. Writing my novel was definitely an ice sculpture. It needed my best thinking energy, but I could also use next generation AI to help me write faster. However, processing team updates was more like freezing ice cubes, something I could handle in medium charge state or even delegate to AI tools. Understanding this difference helped me stop wasting my high charge hours on tasks that didn't really need them. Creating your organized task lists. Follow these steps to create your organized task lists. Step one. Don't worry about categorizing yet, just get a complete brain dump onto paper. Step two label each task as either an ice cube or ice sculpture. Step three for each ice sculpture task, assign a priority number, one being your highest priority. And estimate how many minutes or hours it will likely take to complete. Step four for each ice cube task, assign a priority number, one being your highest priority. And estimate how many minutes or hours it will likely take to complete. Here's how Sarah's lists looked. Task one. Continue to build my daily three to one reflection habit. Priority score one three minutes per day. Task two. Develop new customer service strategy. Priority score three twelve hours. Task three. Establish morning exercise routine. Priority score two twenty minutes per day. Task four. Learn new AI data analysis system. Priority score four eight hours. Task five. Write first novel chapter. Priority score five fifteen hours. Task six. Decorate the kitchen. Priority score six twenty hours. Ice Cubes Medium Charge tasks. Task one review daily team reports. Priority score five one hour. Task two update project trackers. Priority score two thirty minutes. Task three schedule recurring meetings priority score three thirty minutes. Task four. Call Sam to provide project update, priority score one, thirty minutes. Task five, renew my passport, priority score five, one hour. Creating these structured lists gave me a completely new perspective, Sarah explained. Instead of just reacting to whatever seemed urgent, I could be strategic about using my brain state. The task director helped me see exactly when I needed my high charge hours and plan accordingly. Three essential maintenance strategies. The task director showed Sarah three important strategies for maintaining this system. Strategy one, schedule weekly reviews. Every Sunday evening, Sarah would update her lists with new tasks and review existing ones. Sometimes tasks I thought would be ice sculptures actually became more like ice cubes as I got better at them, she explained. For example, once I learned the new AI data analysis system, using it became a medium charge task. Other times what I thought would be a simple ice cube turned out to need more focused thinking. Strategy two. Create a task inbox system. Sarah kept a task inbox, a single place to capture new responsibilities as they came up. Every evening I'd review this inbox, she shared. I categorize each new task as either an ice cube or sculpture, assign it a priority, estimate the time needed, and added it to the appropriate list. This prevented new tasks from disrupting my brain state optimization. Strategy three. Review time estimates regularly. I learned to track how long it actually took me to complete ice sculpture tasks versus my initial estimates, Sarah explained. This helped me become more accurate in my planning. I also discovered something interesting about timing, Sarah said. Tasks often took different amounts of time based on my brain state. A report that might take three hours when I was foggy could be finished in forty five minutes during high charge times. Understanding these patterns helped me create much more realistic schedules with the day designer. Take time now to create your own prioritized lists. If it's helpful, include the success cycle as one of your ice sculpture tasks. Remember, nothing in this approach is prescriptive, so create your lists in the way that is most helpful for you. Also, remember this isn't just about work tasks, it's about everything that's important in your life. Congratulations, you've now completed step two of the success cycle. Before we move on, and if you think it's helpful, take a moment to think about people you admire for their ability to prioritize and plan effectively, whether it's a colleague, a leader you respect, or even a renowned business figure. What makes their approach so effective? This might help you to improve your relationship with your own task director. And you might even name it after one of those people you admire. Next, we'll move on to step three, where you'll discover how the day designer uses these priority lists to craft schedules that optimize your brain states across each 24 hour period. But first, organize your tasks clearly for the next 30 days. As Sarah discovered, this simple step creates the foundation for transforming how you use your energy each day.