Everyone Talks About AI Tools. Almost Nobody Talks About This Skill

Email feels “quick” until you realise you’ve reread the same thread three times, mentally drafted a reply twice, and still haven’t sent it. We start with a deceptively simple productivity idea that changes that pattern: touch an email once. If you can’t take the next action right now, don’t open it yet. Pair that with a daily inbox window, smart flags, and calendar blocking, and your attention stops leaking through tiny cracks all day.

Then we get honest about another attention sink: social media. We talk practical ways to restrict access and interrupt doomscrolling, from time-limit alerts to logging out on purpose. From there, we move into a real-world marketing experiment we ran for two weeks by pushing lots of short video clips across LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. The results are not one-size-fits-all. LinkedIn seems to punish volume and bury posts, while YouTube and TikTok can reward quantity, and Instagram often lands in a messy middle where both quality and frequency matter.

We also share what changes when you onboard a remote marketing assistant and suddenly need more structure than “mad scientist” energy. With AI evolving at breakneck speed across editing, design, and even print-ready creative, we make the case that communication is becoming the edge. The clearer you can write and explain context in English, the better your prompts and the better your outcomes.

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Follow our speakers:
Charles Liu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-liu-042b9124/
Nathan Tripolone: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-tripolone/

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Transcript

Touch Emails Once Rule

SPEAKER_00 0:00

One of the lessons I was taught when I was watching it, it was a course about time management. I think the gu guy's name was Ched Holmes. He's he's passed on now, but he said emails, when it comes to emails, touch them once. So what that means is if you can't open it and action it there and then, don't open it. So reserve your time. And l let's just say it's an email from one of your staff and you've reserved from 11 till 11:30 each day, you're gonna go into your emails and hit them then. Because what I tend to find is, and I I do this all the time, is I would open my email and I'd read it and go, Oh, yeah, yeah, I should write this back, and then all of a sudden something else pops up. You've already thought about what to reply, but then something else has consumed your mind. You move on, then you come back to it again, then you come back. Sometimes you don't come back to it at all. But I found when I started actually just opening the email, actioning it there and then, it's straight off the plate, that's it, done, moved on, and it saved me quite a lot of time.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Yeah,

Flags And Calendar Tasking

SPEAKER_01 0:52

I like I like that a lot. I do I've been doing that, but there are some things that on my email I just can't action immediately. For example, I need to wait on someone else's response if I could have a response for someone. In that case, I just I flag it. I flag it and I cue the flag off as soon as I can. And also on my task, I use my calendar to constantly remind myself as a task that needs to be done, a meeting calendar.

Setting Limits On Doomscrolling

SPEAKER_00 1:15

The other one is social media, restricting social media access. So Instagram's got an alert that you can set up and you choose the interval, okay? If I've been there on there for 15 minutes, pop up a notification, tell me you've spent 15 minutes on there today. Yeah, exactly. Deactivate, log out, whatever you've you've got to do. I think that'd be really helpful for people because it's so easy to get into that doom scroll up. Yeah, and an actual thing nowadays.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

It is, it is, yeah. And it's it's become very habitual. Yeah, it's a problem for my kids. Speaking of

A Two Week Posting Experiment

SPEAKER_01 1:44

social media. So for the past two weeks, I've been doing a bit of an experiment. I've been using automated technologies and techniques, and I've been, in a way, lack of a better word, spamming LinkedIn, just with constant video clips, constant clips, just to see how it reacts and behaves. I somewhat did the same on TikTok, somewhat did the same on YouTube, somewhat did the same on Instagram. So we pushed out a lot of content out just to see how it works. Now, a lot of people out there would have a lot of gurus out there will have different opinions about, oh, they know what the algorithm is. So I'm not going to pretend to be a guru. I don't know what the algorithm is, but I can share my experiences.

What Each Platform Rewards

SPEAKER_01 2:20

For sure. LinkedIn has a very, very wicked filter. The more I put out, the more it buries my content. And I could see from the amount of engagements, and I was very surprised about that.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

So so in the age where there are people out there that are saying post 10 times a day, not on LinkedIn. You think there's got to be nuance around it, don't you say?

SPEAKER_01 2:38

You do it, but not on LinkedIn. LinkedIn's the things that do well for me on LinkedIn is inexplicably, they love events. I'm not I'm sure if you notice that. No, every time I post a message about me being at an event or a function or a party, it invariably reaches a lot of eyeballs. I get a lot of people that engage with it, a lot of people see it. When I'm talking about things, even simple like this podcast, it gets buried. Because I was trying to do the Alex Homozy strategy that he showed me, which was I think Alex Homozy posts 80 YouTube clips a day. And he's not aiming to have 80 viral clips. He's aiming for maybe he should have 50,000, 100,000. Of those 80, one of them may go viral, in which case he wins. But even if the one doesn't go viral, just a combination of the 80, 80 times, maybe 100,000 views per clip. It's an incredible volume. So he's not aiming for that one bang, I'm here. Grand Majestic. So I was trying that strategy. And using that strategy, yes, it works on YouTube. I could definitively say holistically it works on YouTube. So YouTube posts as much as you can. Instagram is a bit of 50-50. I find that some of the volume matters, but quality also matters and it kind of levels itself out. TikTok is also quantity once again. So TikTok and YouTube, quantity, LinkedIn, don't bother. Just go for the high quality piece and then stick it maybe once or twice a day. Anymore, uh the law of diminishing averages just comes out very dramatically. It's a very good advice. I

Fitness Mindset And Paid Ads

SPEAKER_01 4:06

like it. How have you found your social media uh hosting and engagements with you and your clients?

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Yeah, well, when we do social media, we're doing mostly, you know, we've done Instagram and Facebook posting, and we're doing that sort of three times a week, I think. It's I think it's one of those things where it's like physical fitness. You need to keep exercising it. Certainly on certainly on Instagram and Facebook we found you've got to keep exercising in a building, otherwise use it or lose it. The algorithm doesn't like you jumping in and jumping out for extended periods. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we they want the audience to be engaged, which means that they're they're after the content creators to be engaged and making sure that they're regular in terms of what they're posting. So we definitely found that for us, three times a week, yeah, yeah, sort of two or three times a week wasn't enough. So we've sort of switched more to paid advertising rather than that. Yeah. LinkedIn, we haven't done very much posting on there. So yeah, not a lot of data to share on that. But yeah, definitely on definitely on Facebook and Instagram. Volume's the key. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then paid ads where you can't, you know, we're not in a position to be able to produce that much volume.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Very good, very good. Good, good. All right. What else has been on your agenda the past two weeks?

Onboarding A Remote Marketing Assistant

SPEAKER_00 5:13

On my agenda. Okay, so I'm onboarding a new staffer. So we've just hired a marketing assistant in our office in Vietnam. And that's been interesting because I haven't had staff for probably 10 years, I think, reporting to me. So definitely, definitely a different setup in terms of being organized. I'm a bit more like generally a bit more like the mad scientist. There's a whole bunch of balls being juggled in the air, and there's all whole all sorts of marketing experiments going on. I've got to be a lot more organized and a lot more structured about my day. So virtually everything is now plugged into the diary. So if it's half an hour for this, if it's 15 minutes for that. If it's five minutes to prepare for the podcast or an hour, I've plugged it all into the diary so I know when everything's due and when everything needs to be touched or when it doesn't. I found that very, very helpful. I'm just falling behind a little bit on it. So I've got to just adjust the timings, I think, a little bit, which is okay. That happens.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

So this sounds like more like a personal assistant as opposed to a marketing assistant.

SPEAKER_00 6:04

No, marketing assistant, definitely a marketing assistant, but I probably need a personal assistant as well. Just in terms of what's going on. Yeah, just to be very organized.

Quick Sponsor Break

SPEAKER_01 6:11

A very quick word. My name is Charles. I run an agency called Cubic Promote. We are the leading supplier of promotional products and uniforms in Australia and also in New Zealand. We supply it to 3,000 organizations on any given year. If you're looking for a reliable partner to supply you with merchandise for your office or uniforms for your organization, trust us, Cubic Promote. And now back to the show.

Weekly Training And AI Whiplash

SPEAKER_00 6:35

So onboarding them, making sure that as part of their role, there's a Friday afternoon hour where it's plugged in every single week, and that is for marketing training. So I'll find something on the internet which I've already watched maybe a few times. I'm not the fastest learner, and I'm not the fastest unlearner as well. So if there's something that has struck a chord with me and I go, okay, that's fantastic from the perspective of might be talking about marketing principles, psychology, or skill-based, something that's skill-based. How do we edit videos on CapCut? How do we make things look amazing on Premiere? We're plugging that in, we're doing an hour each week. So upskilling is very much part of their role. I understand that. And then we're actually going to bring on a couple more next week.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

So education is such a pain point because I'm trying my best to keep up with AI. And it changes literally by the day. And it's not that it's start to slow down because I've been doing this, kind of keeping up with the Joneses, if you like, for the past two years. And originally it was very quick, you know, every two days a new announcement. And then for uh I don't know, for some strange reason, a couple months, it just kind of slowed down a bit. I was saying, okay, good. This allows me some time to actually get good at these tools. Breathing space. I start to use these tools, um, but I'm not an expert at it. I start getting good at it. And I thought, okay, this is like any other technology is going to slowly mature. And then bang, towards the end of last year until now, it's just release after release after release. And once again, the race is on at an intensity higher than ever before. Like the leaps and bounds that I'm talking about is the increase in quality and everything. They're touching upon all aspects of digital marketing from figure designs when it comes to web designing and a wireframe framework through to granular changes to print media, through to having AI create print media and then putting it through a specific app that could make it print ready for application. To give you some examples, if you generate maybe an image from Gemini GPT, sorry, nano banana Gemini and GPT, you have a file that might be 300 KB, 400 KB. It's good for your online browsing, but if you want to print that into a postal building, blow it up. Yeah, not a chance. And so now they are to have that enhanced so that it's print ready, billboard ready. Which tool is doing that? I forgot the name, I'll find out. Yeah. And I'll post it at the bottom of the clip as well. And so that's just um a small sample of the amount of exponential increases. Even uh we're creating an agent up until a couple months ago until Clot released the co-work piece, which is an agent that allows people to use natural language. It was a piece that was reserved for programmers and developers where they would create and program and develop a uh working agent for you. I can imagine all those people signing up for those courses only for their skill set to be replaced a matter of months. It's really non-stop.

Why Communication Becomes The Edge

SPEAKER_01 9:25

But I I have a have a theory as to what type of education and skill set that's required for. I think for my kids, the number one skill set is not going to be mathematics, history, geography, science, or any of those skill sets. It's actually going to be English. Because there is one unfair advantage if you're really, really high-level communicator in English, is that the prompts require what? English. And what does it require for you to be incredibly articulate? What else does it require? It also requires you to paint a picture. Not just a normal, oh, tell me how a pen works. But it wants you to paint a vivid picture of the context around it. And the only way to achieve that is English. And if you're articulate. And articulate. Yeah. So yeah, so I see the future as being very, very much skewed towards those people who are incredibly articulate, very communicative. That's not even a word, so fairly unfailing. And those who are not. And so that's kind of what I'm gonna be pushing my kids to be doing. Very interesting.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Well, I think because I I know mathematics isn't a mandatory subject in our school, or at least it wasn't when I stopped doing it, but English was.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Unfortunately for mathematics, as useful as problem solving is, in the context of AI Well, what does AI does is problem solving.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Yeah, if if you're not if you're not using AI for most, I mean most mathematical applications, there's there's probably things that are outside outside of my world, but anything that's in my my world and what I'm problem solving, it's gonna slow me down to try and figure it out on my own.