I’ve spent a lot of years working in WordPress. I used it to build some early learning management systems (LMS, a specific type of CMS designed for classroom use) long before COVID made remote learning such a hot topic. I’ve used it to build hobby websites for table-top roleplaying games. I’ve used it to build simple web utilities for the family.
So, every year or so, I like to drop the active theme on my website and rebuild from as close to zero as possible. I use the underscores base theme created by the same folks behind many other WordPress utilities. It has the core pieces I need to determine layout, add some custom blocks, and keep up to date on the backend.
For the past year or two, I’ve felt too busy to keep up and I fell back on an old theme that had been gathering dust in my hard drive. As a result, the site itself gathered quite a bit of dust while I worked on other projects.
2025-2026 Goals
Between now and the autumn 2026, I’m shaking off the dust. Let’s make this blank slate something interesting to look at!
Design
First off, I need to hone some existing skills.
Build some custom blocks for portfolio pieces.
Build some automations to support a portfolio workflow.
Play around with grids and shaped divs.
Make the color scheme work for all visual abilities.
Then, let’s see if I can practice a few things that have changed or developed quite a bit since I last used them.
Complex responsiveness that listens to more than just screen width.
Real-time database interaction with jquery.
WooCommerce and ad integration.
Six goals, twelve months. Seems doable?
Content
Rather than test the design developments on some bland ipsum text, this website really needs to go back to holding some interesting content (even if it’s only interesting to me).
More portfolio pieces along each of my content management and campaign management skillsets—email campaigns, CRM work, data analysis, and more.
Some personal blogging. I’m tired of giving this content to social media companies for free!
Some professional blogging. I am living the lessons I taught as a professor, and maybe I ought to start documenting that stuff more publicly in case I return to the classroom someday.
Progress Tracking
In campaign and project management, I like to ensure that every goal, task, and outcome is explicitly defined and documented, so keep track of the New year, new css , Web design, and Content development in action tags to see how things are moving along.
In a big, big survey, researchers found that the total time savings we’re getting from jamming AI into every workflow we can find is less than 5% (or, for a typical workday, less than 25 minutes of saved time).
It’s possible that we are doing more productive work as a result of these tools, but very few people are getting bigger paychecks as a result.
Now, I’m a writer, but it’s been a long, long time since I sat with a pen in my hand to draft anything meaningful. I analyze marketing strategy stats, so I spend a lot of my workweek in Excel. I do a lot of web-based work but I grew up in the era of shareware, so I prefer to code and compile the tools I need rather than buy yet another plugin, add-on, or app to do a simple task for me.
In other words, I live in software. And, I love a good time-saving tool or hack, I really do. That said, Tangermann is spot on: my workflows have become flooded with unblockable, unstoppable “tools” that inject AI where it isn’t needed. The result? I spend unnecessary clicks, time, and mental energy trying to get my work done with what amounts to an overeager toddler at my side, making me long for the days when I could just turn Clippy off with two clicks.
Not a Luddite: AI Has a Place
I have a Statement on AI that lays out my professional boundaries for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other algorithm-based tools. I’ll restate here that I really do like AI as a method for performing certain tasks, but I don’t think it fits every task.
My feelings about AI are a lot like my feelings about my Instant Pot. It can do so, so much stuff, and it can do a lot of that stuff well. It can’t do everything, though. In fact, there are many things I see people using Instant Pots for that are wildly inappropriatebecause we already have a better tool for the same task.
What is AI good for? Pattern recognition. I loved using BERT to analyze large corpora of text samples. It saved me a mountain of time working through student feedback when I was a professor, and it helped me understand where I spent most of my time commenting on student work.
What is AI not good for? Pattern creation. Generative AI can regurgitate a decent facsimile of existing material, but it can’t really create anything new or meaningful. That’s why chatbots have the potential to be useful (so long as they are given very low volatility values and a tightly curated training set). That’s why AI image generators can create vapid, space-filling stock photos pretty well. It’s why the “generative fill” tools in audio/visual software is pretty good at removing graffiti from brick walls.
In other words, AI can be useful in the right context, and it’s the most useful when someone chooses to turn that tool on. AI, like my Instant Pot, has the capacity to really ruin the day when it turns on without my knowledge or consent.
Lost Time
But how much friction are we talking about during the day?
Well, I launched Microsoft365.com today to hop into some Sharepoint content creation to support my team, to fire up Teams, and to launch a few company apps. Before I could get to any of those things, I had to get past the Copilot screen.
Notice that the three suggested tasks (Analyze this text and make suggestions… Write some funny OOO email replies… Rewrite this to sound more professional…) are not the things I need to do. Yet, the chatbot takes up 80% of the visual workspace, more if you count the Chat and Create menus in the left sidebar. Now, I get to wait for this bloated tool to load before I click Apps, a screen that comes with its own load time.
It’s the same in Asana: loading the page brings up a happy helper offering to summarize my day for me, but I’m a professional and I already know what I need to do. Teams wants to suggest new people and projects for me to check out. Outlook really wants to offer me an AI summary of an email full of technical details that I absolutely need to read as they were written by an engineer.
At every step, I have to tell the software “no,” I really do not want this additional function to run, or I want to you ignore the output of the function you’ve already run. I do not want assistance in doing the task that I am paid to do, that I know how to do, and that I opened a page or program to do.
Even worse, more than once every day I change tabs to work on another task rather than wait for the AI tool to finish loading its happy helper message, only to realize later in the day that Item 1 on my to-do list is still unchecked and I no longer have the brainpower to tackle the biggest problem of the day.
Old Man Rants at Clouds
These tools are here to stay, and I can be as angry with them as I was when every operating system decided rounded window edges were the new thing. But, if we are just focused on saving time or being more productive with these tools, maybe we ought to really ask if the tools are doing those things or if that’s just what the product packaging promises.
