Stop Filtering Your Thinking

Most people use AI wrong. Not because they're lazy or uninformed, but because they're bringing old habits to a new tool.

Here's what it usually looks like: you have a task, you think about it for a while, you organize your thoughts, and then you go to AI with something semi-polished and ask it to make it better. By the time AI sees your idea, you've already filtered out half of what you were actually thinking.

That's the mistake. You're doing AI's job for it.

The real unlock

AI is best when you give it the raw, unfiltered version. The messy brain dump. Everything you know about the task, the problem, your instincts, your half-formed opinions, the constraints you're working with. All of it.

Because AI is genuinely good at compressing, structuring, and finding patterns in a pile of unstructured input. That's the job you should be handing it. Not polishing. Not editing. Organizing raw thinking into something clear and actionable.

When you filter your thinking before sharing it, you're making decisions about what's valuable before everything is on the table. You're cutting ideas before they've had a chance to connect to other ideas. You're solving the problem in your head while simultaneously trying to articulate it, and those are two different tasks competing for the same mental energy.

AI removes that tension. You think out loud. AI organizes.

What this actually looks like

Every task I work on now starts the same way. I brain dump.

I get the task, and I just start talking about it. What I think the objective is. How I'd approach it. What feels tricky. What I already know. What I don't know. I don't worry about structure or whether something is relevant. I just get it all out.

Then I work with AI to narrow that dump into a plan. Clear objectives, defined approach, specific next steps. AI is looking at everything I said and pulling out what matters. It catches things I would have filtered out on my own, things that turn out to be important once they're sitting next to other ideas.

From there, I go wide again. But now I'm exploring with a clear plan behind me. If I'm creating a one-pager for marketing, I'll make three or four versions because AI makes that realistic. In the past, I'd make one version because of the time it takes to create each one. Now the cost of exploring is low enough that I can actually explore.

Then I narrow back to a final solution. Pick the best version, refine it, ship it.

Brain dump. Plan. Explore. Solution. That's the loop.

Talking is even better than typing

Here's something that took this further for me: voice-to-text tools like Wispr Flow.

Typing is still a filter. It's slower than thinking, and the act of typing takes energy that competes with the act of thinking. You lose things in the gap between having a thought and getting it into the chat.

Talking removes that gap. You sit there and just talk through the problem. The brain dump gets wider, faster, and more natural. You capture more of what you're actually thinking because there's less friction between the thought and the input.

This isn't a small improvement. It changes how much raw material AI has to work with, and more raw material means better output on the other side.

Systems make this stick

This workflow works with any AI tool. You don't need anything special to start brain dumping into ChatGPT or Claude and getting structured plans back.

But it gets significantly better when you have a system in place. Encoded methodology that tells AI how to approach specific types of work. Frameworks for how to structure the output. A context layer that holds your business information, your voice, your positioning, your users.

Without that, you're brain dumping into a blank chat every time. AI gives you something generic and you spend time molding it into something that actually sounds like you and fits your business.

With a system, the brain dump lands in a structured environment that already knows how you work and what you're building. The output is tailored from the start. That's what I built Baseline Core to do. Not to create this workflow, but to make it dramatically more effective.