I’m coming up to 20 years into my career now. That’s long enough to build some serious muscle memory around what “doing work” looks like, and ‘what good looks like’ when you’ve done it.

Tools like Copilot seem to be taking my muscle memory and exploding it like a cartoon character with a comedy amount of TNT. 

I touched on this a bit in my S is for Studio post, but it’s been rattling around my head enough since that it’s earned its own letter. The short version: using Copilot (and tools like it) effectively means unlearning almost as much as it means learning something new.

Old habits, new options

About to cringe at blowing my own trumpet here, but one of my biggest strengths has always been figuring out how to get from A to Z (pun absoLUTELY intended), by breaking things down into “how do I get from A to B?” and then “Now that I’ve got to B, how do I get to C?” and so on. I poke things until I understand them fully, and can repeatedly deliver quality work by doing this. The work habit I’ve built here is ‘understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together to get to the end result’. 

Habits are hard to spot, let alone drop, because they don’t feel like choices anymore. They just feel like how work is done. 

Now, with Copilot in the work picture, increasingly you can skip from A to Z without having to learn how all the letters work in the middle.  

Here are a few of my old habits and how they’re being reshaped by Copilot. I suggest you try all of these if you haven’t already! 

Typing up handwritten notes 

Obviously, I have Copilot transcribe most of my meetings, but on the occasion that doesn’t fit the situation, I end up with good old fashioned pen and paper notes. 

Typing them up takes forever, then you’ve got to shape them into something useful by separating the notes from the brain farts from the actions. 

Unless…you take a photo of the notes and give it to Copilot, asking: “Turn this photo of my meeting notes into a tidy write-up, pull out the actions, and draft the follow-up email to the team so it’s ready to send.” 

That’s the notes, the write-up, and the follow-up done in one ask, not three separate jobs I’d have worked through one after another. (And if you want to get really clever you can have Planner agent pump the actions straight into the right plan for you, like I showed in my T is for tasks blog.)

Re-googling “how do I make a pie chart in Excel” 

I’ve definitely made pie charts in Excel before. Can I remember how to do it? Never. 

Now I don’t even really have to know what buttons to press, apart from opening Copilot inside Excel and asking it to create a pie chart for me.  

“Build me a pie chart of [column] broken down by [column], write three bullet points on what it shows, and draft a short paragraph of commentary I can drop under the slide.” 

The old me would have burned time figuring out how to make the pie chart, and then written the bullets and the commentary as two more separate jobs afterwards. Now it’s one ask, not three.

Bulk drafting emails 

After events, there are often a bunch of emails that you need to send out that follow a similar narrative. In the past I’d have written a core message, and copy pasted it into each new email, tweaking it slightly for each different attendee before sending. 

Now you can open Outlook, give Copilot your list of email addresses and your core copy for it to do all that grunt work for you: “Draft an individual follow-up email for each person on this list using this template, and put them all in my Outlook drafts so I can review before sending.” That’s not “help me write an email,” that’s “do the entire batch of admin I’d have spent an afternoon on.”

Trawling the internet for Christmas party ideas

To get from A to Z here (Z being the Christmas party) you have to understand party options B, C, D, and probably E along the way. 

Instead of getting lost in Google tabs, you can point Copilot Researcher agent at the whole brief: “Research Christmas party venue and activity options within [budget] for a team of [size] in [location], give me a shortlist with pros and cons.”  

It will come back with a report showing you some options in the time it takes you to make a tea. 

Notice the shape of each of those: it’s not “do this one small step for me as part of a wider process.” It’s “take the whole job, start to finish, and only hand it back to me at the end for a check.” 

None of these examples are particularly glamorous, and none of them are new capabilities. But I’ve found it hard to adapt to this way of thinking, as my default setting is still “work through the task step by step,” not “hand over the whole task and step in at the end.” That’s the unlearning bit.

I’m not as AI-first as I think I am

An uncomfortable truth that I’m sitting with at the moment; a lot of my prompts are still me driving. I’m telling Copilot exactly what steps to take, in exactly what order, like I’m dictating to a very fast assistant rather than entirely delegating. 

I even asked Copilot what more I should be asking it to do, and it came back with something that is fair feedback: I could stand to think more in outcomes, not outputs.

“Write a follow up email to this customer call” is an output. “Help me make sure every customer has a regular check-in.” is an outcome, and it leaves Copilot room to figure out the how instead of me pre-chewing it.

Handing over the “how” is where I’m finding the discomfort. If I want Excel to build me a pie chart, some little voice tells me I should know how to build the pie chart myself. Twenty years of muscle memory says good work means I understood, and did, every step of how something got made. Copilot doesn’t need me to understand any of it. That’s the unlearning; not a new skill, but permission to stop proving I can still do the manual version.

Is not learning a problem?

I don’t have a good answer to this question. For me, twenty years in and ‘how to get from A-Z’ competent, skipping the manual version isn’t a loss. I’ve already got the underlying skill; I’m just outsourcing the execution.

But what about the graduate who’s never made a pie chart the long way? Or drafted a follow-up email from scratch without a prompt to lean on? 

I’ve taught our graduate how to build an agent to take on what was a chunky part of work that she was spending time on. This means I’ve also had to unlearn how I teach, because “here’s how you do the task” and “here’s how you get an agent to do the task” are not the same lesson, and “what does good work look like” is more important than ever, but also a moving target. 

I don’t think the answer is “everyone must learn the manual way first, just in case.” That feels a bit like insisting people learn long division before they’re allowed a calculator forever. The answer is probably that the skills to learn now are just different ones, and that’s still taking shape. 

TLDR

Copilot hasn’t just given me new tools, it’s made me question habits I didn’t even know were habits. I’m still catching myself “driving” Copilot step by step instead of handing it outcomes and stepping back. And teaching someone else how to work well in this world is a different job than the one I learned to do. I’m not sure what “good” looks like yet, for me or for the next generation, but I’m fairly sure it isn’t what it used to be.

What’s the habit you’ve had to unlearn since starting to use Copilot, and is there a skill you’d still want someone starting out today to learn the “long way” first?