Productivity tools, AI-assisted building, smart glasses, and a clearer direction for Site Nitro
Somehow it’s already the month of March, and a lot has changed since my last post. I’ve been in the middle of building things, rethinking things, and continuing the slow work of simplifying my life — which, as it turns out, is never really finished.
In this issue I want to cover three things that have been taking up significant mental real estate lately: why I finally walked away from Notion and complex productivity systems for good, where Site Nitro is actually heading and why I’m more energized by it than I’ve been in a while, and how AI-assisted coding went from a frustrating experiment a year ago to something that has genuinely changed how I work.
The App That Stopped Serving Me
It’s been about a year and a half now since I liberated myself from the over-complex system I had created for myself in Notion. When I first started using it in early 2019, it was solving a real problem: trying to keep on top of all the different things I was doing, from client marketing projects to my own YouTube content. I fell in love with being able to create my own systems and connect things in ways that no other tool was allowing at the time.
It wasn’t until a year and a half ago that I realized my systems had become more time-consuming to maintain than they were worth. I had been meticulously collecting data for years — client interactions, project notes, even my coffee shop spending — and had done almost nothing useful with any of it. While it was occasionally impressive to scroll through, it was not useful information.
Even when Notion integrated AI tools into their platform, I still didn’t feel like what I had built was going to take me anywhere sustainable. The core problem was friction. Any friction point in data entry was always going to be a problem, and my honest assessment is that Notion has still not completely solved for that.
What I’ve come to believe is that we’re approaching an age where we can simply speak into an app and AI will sort, connect, and contextualize our data for us — without manual entry or maintenance overhead. We could already approximate something like this in ChatGPT or similar tools, but I’m not sure I want that either. There’s something worth preserving about the slowness of reflection.
About a year and a half ago, I made the switch: Apple Reminders and Apple Notes. Not perfect systems, but simple and free. They work beautifully across all my Apple devices. I’ve had brief detours when testing Android phones — jumping to something like Todoist temporarily — but I always gravitate back.
Here’s what surprised me: Apple has added more useful features to both of these apps in the last year than I think they added in the previous five years combined. And yet they still feel lightweight. There are no extra steps required — just quality-of-life improvements that show up without demanding you learn a new system.
I’ve also made peace with the fact that not everything needs to be remembered. If I had access to every thought I’d ever had, I’m not convinced that would be good for me. Some ideas that feel brilliant in the moment need to fade, because they weren’t good enough to stick. Some things that feel important are emotionally charged and lose their urgency within a day. The things I genuinely want to capture are the ones that might otherwise quietly disappear:
- Something important a friend told me over coffee
- A shared family moment
- An important thought or insight
Those are the things that, if not captured in the moment, fade away as the relentless demands of life press immediately back in. No productivity app needs to be the container for everything — just the right things.
I’ve also been honest with myself about subscriptions. If I’m not using a tool to its potential, I’m not getting the value — and that tends to leave me more frustrated than if I’d never had the premium features at all. The bundled apps I already own are often more than enough.
Over the past year and a half, I’ve definitely had moments where the more feature-rich apps pulled me back. But in nearly every case, it wasn’t because I needed those features. It was because I was struggling with motivation or focus — and no app is going to solve for that. The challenge we face is maintaining motivation at a level that’s honestly hard to sustain. I’ve found that other factors improve this far more than any in-app purchase ever could.
Where Site Nitro Is Actually Going — And Why I’m Excited About It
I’ve written before about Site Nitro and how I was building it as a managed website service — something I’ve offered clients at Hill Media Group for over a decade. The premise was sound: most businesses know that a static brochure website doesn’t generate leads anymore. The internet requires new information, regular updates, and a living content presence to stay relevant.
The problem was that I couldn’t get myself excited about building something that was going to require employees to scale. That’s not a knock on that business model — it’s a legitimate and proven one. But I don’t live a life right now that’s conducive to managing a team. I’m involved in too many different things, and I value having a flexible schedule during this chapter of my life. I know that getting Site Nitro to a point where I could maintain that flexibility would require first sacrificing it to build the infrastructure. There will be a time for that. This isn’t it.
But here’s what happened through the process of building Site Nitro and working with clients: I kept bumping into a problem I’ve been slowly solving for people for a long time. Helping small businesses with physical locations reach customers beyond their immediate area.
Many of my clients serve customers not just in their own city, but in surrounding towns and communities. There are really only two effective ways to do that:
- Pay for ads — which is why Google and Facebook are among the most valuable companies in the world.
- Build out an elaborate content campaign so that search engines have localized information to rank your site in those areas.
I’ve been providing both of these services for years, and both can work. The problem is that both are expensive. Ads keep getting more costly. Building content campaigns manually takes enormous time. AI has made generating this type of content faster, but it still left the manual grind of building page designs, duplicating them, updating details, and reconnecting everything — all very time-consuming.
A few weeks ago, I started developing a WordPress plugin to solve this problem. Through the iteration process, I’ve been able to compress what used to take weeks of work into hours. And it’s genuinely solving something I haven’t seen addressed elsewhere.
I’ve also been developing a plugin for review and comparison sites — territory that maps directly to content I produce on YouTube. I’ve been testing it on my own site, and within a matter of weeks, my camera reviews and comparisons started ranking higher than similar content on major websites with hundreds or thousands of other posts in their histories. Some of that is the quality of the content itself. But a significant part of it is what’s happening technically underneath the surface: the plugin structures and organizes content using the current best practices that Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and other tools need in order to quickly ingest and evaluate new content.
The plugin is also built to be updated as best practices evolve, which they will continue to do. I’m currently testing both plugins on additional websites and already seeing early results. They’re ready to sell, but I want to build out a set of initial case studies and testimonials before making them publicly available.
So for now, this is where Site Nitro is going: software plugin solutions for WordPress that solve problems I’ve lived with for years as an internet marketing practitioner. It’s a direction I can build alone, at my own pace, in a way that compounds over time. That’s a much better fit for this chapter of my life.
On AI Coding: From Frustrating Experiment to Legitimate Accelerant
A year ago, I attempted to build something similar to these plugins and gave up. Not because the idea was wrong, but because getting usable output from AI coding tools at the time took more effort than just writing the code myself. The results were messy. The debugging was exhausting. The overall experience was more demoralizing than empowering.
The shift in the last year has been significant.
Now you can feed well-thought-out ideas into AI and get working code back. That’s not an exaggeration. What I’ve built over the past few weeks represents probably 30 hours of prompting, testing, iterating, and debugging — but those 30 hours produced something I can honestly say doesn’t exist in the market yet and will save agency owners like me countless hours of manual work.
I want to be clear about what AI coding tools actually do and don’t replace. They still require real understanding — of architecture, of user experience, of how one piece connects to another. If you don’t have that foundation, you can generate a lot of code that technically runs but isn’t actually usable by another human being. The heavy lifting of writing and debugging code has been dramatically reduced. Being able to think like an engineer is still valuable.
But that shift is meaningful. It’s the difference between an idea being theoretical and actually building the thing. For someone who has been doing web development and digital marketing for over 25 years and has a long list of problems I’ve wanted to solve with software, the barrier that held me back wasn’t the ideas. It was the time and effort required to execute them. That barrier has gotten considerably lower.
Meta AI Glasses: Still Waiting for Smart Glasses to Make Sense
I avoided Meta’s AI Ray-Ban glasses for a long time. I saw through the hype — and I say that having lived through it once before. Over a decade ago I had Google GLASS with prescription lenses. At the time it genuinely felt like the future: a heads-up display for driving directions, hands-free photos, all of it sitting right in your field of view. Then people got uncomfortable with the camera on your face, and the product quietly disappeared.
What followed was the smart watch, which I’m still trying to find enough utility in to justify the price point — but the industry read the room correctly. People were ready for a computer on their wrist. They were not ready for a camera on someone else’s face.
Fast forward a decade and Meta takes a swing at it. Now on version 2, I figured it was worth an honest look. I had a specific use case in mind: POV footage when I’m shooting with my cameras, without strapping an action camera to my head. $650 later (with a coupon), I had my Meta AI Ray-Ban glasses.
Here’s where I landed after spending real time with them.
The capture experience is mostly effortless — when it works. In quieter environments, grabbing a photo or short clip is genuinely low-friction. But put me in a noisier environment like a high school basketball game and the glasses struggled badly, even during moments when the ambient noise wasn’t that intense. I missed shots. The small white indicator light that signals a photo was taken or a video is recording was often hard to see, which didn’t help.
The always-on open-ear headphones were probably my favorite feature. Music, audiobooks, and having select notifications read quietly to me was genuinely nice. Low-key useful in a way I didn’t expect.
The AI features, however, were mostly useless. They worked inconsistently, required me to be very deliberate and slow in how I engaged with them, and with no visual feedback — only voice — the experience of correcting or re-guiding the AI was more frustrating than helpful. Holding up my phone and using its camera to translate something or ask a question is a dramatically better experience. It’s not close.
I did film a full review and have it edited, but I’m still deciding whether to post it. I was pretty hard on these glasses, and I want to be fair. But my honest takeaway is the same one the industry learned the first time around: in 2026, people are still unsettled by a camera on your face at all times. That problem hasn’t been solved. It’s just been repackaged at $650.
What’s Next
I’m continuing to develop and test the plugin suite. Both plugins are in active use and producing results that give me confidence. I expect to have public release details in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, I’m also filming. I’ve committed to a cadence of at least one course per month and I’ve been keeping that pace. The Canon R6 course is updated for the latest R6 III model, the Sony a7V course is just about done, and more are in progress. That side of the work is gaining momentum in ways that feel sustainable.
The common thread in all of this — the productivity shift, the Site Nitro pivot, the AI tools — is the same thing I keep coming back to in how I think about my work: being faithful with what’s actually in front of me rather than constantly chasing what could be. The plugins solve problems I have personally experienced. The courses teach things I actually know. The tools I use are the ones that actually serve me.
I’m building slowly. But I’m building the right things.
— Jerad
If you found this useful, share it with someone who’s thinking through similar things. And if you’re a WordPress agency owner dealing with the same local SEO headaches I’ve been solving for, I’d love to hear from you.
