Week 6: Try it first: the 15-minute habit that keeps your judgment in the work
Week 6 · Using AI without outsourcing your thinking
Try it first: the 15-minute habit that keeps your judgment in the work
2026-10-29
Your first attempt isn’t wasted time. It’s what makes the AI’s answer worth something.
The habit in one line
Before you ask AI, try first.
Fifteen minutes on your own. Then ask the tool. Then write two lines:
- What did it do better?
- What did I catch that it missed?
That’s the whole habit. It’s small on purpose, so you’ll actually do it.
Step 1: Fifteen minutes on your own
Set a timer. Draft the email, outline the plan, sketch the code, or write the rough answer. It doesn’t need to be good. It needs to be yours.
Fifteen minutes is long enough to find out what you already know and where you get stuck. It’s short enough that you won’t skip it on a busy day.
If you can’t get anywhere in fifteen minutes, that’s useful too. Now you know exactly which part to ask about.
Step 2: Ask the tool
Now open the AI. You’ll notice your question is better than it would have been. You’ve already met the hard parts, so you can ask about them directly: “Here’s my draft. The second section feels weak. What’s missing?”
A tool working from your attempt has more to go on than a tool working from a blank page. Your draft is context. It tells the model what you mean, not just what you typed.
Step 3: Write two lines
This is the step most people skip, and it’s the one that does the teaching.
- What did it do better? Maybe it organized your points more clearly, or found a simpler word. Name it. Now it’s something you can learn, not just something you accepted.
- What did you catch that it missed? Maybe it got a detail about your team wrong, or sounded confident about something you know isn’t true. Name that too.
Two lines. A sticky note is fine.
Why this builds judgment
When you ask first, you can only approve the answer. It looks fine, so it ships. Over time you get faster at accepting and slower at thinking.
When you try first, three things change:
- Your attempt makes its answer more useful. You’ve given it something real to work with.
- You see where your thinking is stronger or weaker. The comparison shows you, every time, without anyone grading you.
- The final work carries your judgment, not just your approval. You can explain why it’s right, because part of it came from you.
It’s the same habit good classrooms build: teaching, not typing. A student who tries before seeing the answer remembers more than one who reads the answer first. You’re giving yourself that same advantage.
An example
Say you need to write a short update for your team about a delayed project.
You spend fifteen minutes and get three honest but clumsy paragraphs. Then you ask the AI to tighten it. Its version is shorter and opens with the new date, which is clearer. That’s your first line.
But it also promises “no further delays,” which you never said and can’t guarantee. That’s your second line. You keep its structure, drop the promise, and send something that’s both clearer and true.
Without your draft, you might not have noticed the promise at all.
Your move this week
Pick one task you’d normally hand straight to AI. Before you open the tool, set a fifteen-minute timer and try it yourself. Afterward, write your two lines.
Do it three times this week, and look at your second lines together. That list is a map of where your judgment is already stronger than the tool.
Where this comes from
This lesson follows Chapter 4 of Elastic Intelligence by Zafrullah Khan, Ed.D., now on Kindle and in paperback. The book page has free worksheets for this habit and others. → About the book
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