Touch Grass, Save Your Sanity | AI for Interior Designers™

AI for Interior Designers™ Podcast

Touch Grass, Save Your Sanity

On AI exhaustion, social media burnout, and why real-world connection has never mattered more for your design business.

Ep. 67 Solo Episode ✦ Jenna Gaidusek January 2026

This blog was written using AI as a recap from the recording, then edited by the author for accuracy and details.

Key Takeaways

Posting every day for a year is a growth experiment, not a sustainable strategy. Jenna did it in 2024, proved a point, and will not be doing it again. Intentional and human beats frequent and automated every time.
The "AI slop" problem is real. Feeds are heavy, feeds are fake, and feeds are increasingly engineered to keep you scrolling rather than to give you anything useful. You are not imagining it.
In-person community is not just nice to have — it is how firms are staying afloat. Collaboration with other designers and vendors starts with real relationships, and those start with showing up somewhere in the physical world.
Use AI for the admin tasks that drain you so you can protect time for the work that only humans can do. The goal is never to automate yourself. It is to unchain yourself from the desk.
Your health and your business are not separate. If you ran hard last year, this is your permission to run differently this year. Set the boundaries. Build in the resets. Show up for the long term.

The Short Answer

Use AI to get your time back. Use that time to go be a person again. Meet someone in your industry. Go to the event. Start the collaboration. Get off the scroll and report back in three months.

On Social Media Burnout and Posting With Intention

Jenna challenged herself to post every single day for all of 2024. She grew her presence. She proved the point. She also found it exhausting in a way she does not want to repeat. Daily posting for an entire year is a case study, not a lifestyle — and AI was the only reason it was even remotely manageable.

Now she posts when she has something to say. Not to feed the algorithm. Not to stay visible. When something is wrong, when something is genuinely worth sharing, when she has a real perspective to put out in public. That is the threshold. Everything else is noise.

When it comes to her own personal Instagram, Jenna does not automate. She does work with Swink Social (led by Leslie Swink) to manage repurposed content for the AI for Interior Designers™ brand account — and highly recommends them for Instagram and Pinterest support. But the personal feed is intentional and human, or it does not happen.

The other shift: she stopped posting AI prompts and tool tips in public. When AI image tools started getting genuinely good, she made a conscious decision. A public social feed is a free forum. Anyone can see it. Her job is not to teach homeowners how to cut designers out of the work.

The Millennial Middle: Growing Up in Both Worlds

Jenna is a late-80s millennial. She played outside until the street lights came on. She played The Sims on a CD-ROM and learned Google SketchUp in design school back when it was still called Google SketchUp. She got a Motorola flip phone in high school and spent years figuring out how to text on a nine-key pad before getting a full keyboard.

That generation got both worlds — analog and digital — and lived through the whole transition consciously. That experience is part of why so many of them can feel the difference between tech that genuinely helps and tech that just consumes you. They remember what it was like before infinite scroll existed. They have a reference point that younger generations do not.

"We got to have the best of both worlds. And I don't know another generation that got this experience."

— Jenna Gaidusek

That perspective informs everything about how Jenna uses AI now. Not as a replacement for the human parts of her work or life. As a tool to protect them.

AI Slop, the 2016 Aesthetic, and What the Feed Has Become

Social media in 2026 is overflowing with AI-generated content — images, captions, accounts, and entire storylines — that looks plausible enough to mislead people who are not looking closely. Jenna found herself following an account that turned out to be an entirely AI-generated model with 2.3 million followers. That is not a curiosity. That is a problem for anyone who uses social media to understand what is actually happening in the world, the industry, or their own niche.

The response she keeps seeing across the feeds: a hunger for messy, real, unpolished content. "Messy girl aesthetic" is trending. Saturated photos from point-and-shoot cameras are trending. The "2026 is the new 2016" phrase keeps surfacing — a reference to the last time social media felt simple, manageable, and genuinely social.

When AI takes over the polished, curated aesthetic, authenticity becomes the differentiator. Real opinions, real life, real mess. That is what stands out now. Designers who show up as genuinely human — not perfectly branded — have an advantage in a feed that is increasingly full of content no human actually made.

Where AI Actually Helps: Meeting Prep, Email, and Getting Time Back

Jenna is clear that she loves AI — it is why she has a thriving business, and it is why she can build things fast. But the AI use cases she values most are not the flashy ones. They are the ones that take administrative weight off her day so she can spend that time somewhere better.

One workflow she built entirely inside Google Workspace using the built-in Gemini integration: a meeting prep summary that pulls from past email threads, transcripts, and conversation history, and delivers a prep note 24 hours before a client call. No separate tool. No extra subscription. Already built into what she uses every day.

1

If you use Google Workspace, open Gmail and look for the built-in Gemini features. They are already there. Most people have not touched them.

2

Ask it to pull everything from your past conversations with a specific client — emails, transcripts, notes — and summarize it before your next call.

3

Build the habit of saving call transcripts to a single location so the aggregation actually works over time. The more it has to work with, the more useful the prep becomes.

The AI imagery side is powerful too — being able to show a client in real time what a sofa looks like in a different fabric, or what a wall looks like painted a different color, shortens decision cycles and creates a better client experience. But those are the visible wins. The invisible ones are the 15 minutes per day that compound into hours per week.

Why In-Person Community Is Not Optional Right Now

The night before recording this episode, Jenna made herself go to an IDS Charleston event at the Navy Yard Charleston Design Center — the new design district's kickoff event, with showroom visits including Kravet and Schumacher. About 65 designers showed up. She is an introvert. She pushed herself to introduce herself to people she did not already know.

She left feeling better. That is the point.

"I was craving those in-person experiences. I needed to have that personal, human experience — and also go see the design center, of course."

— Jenna Gaidusek

She is seeing firms close. She is seeing more collaboration between designers and across disciplines — not as a trend, but as a survival strategy. The collaborations that are actually happening are starting with relationships that started in a room, not in a DM. If you are not building those relationships, you are missing the part of this industry that AI will never be able to replicate.

Her recommendation: join something. Interior Design Society is where she started. ASID and NKBA if that fits your work. If money is tight, find a local group, a showroom event, a design center opening. The point is not the organization. The point is getting in a room with people who do what you do.

Interior Design Society ↗ ASID ↗ NKBA ↗ MyDoma Studio ↗ Swink Social ↗

A Personal Note on Health, Burnout, and Running Differently

Jenna is being honest in this episode about something she does not talk about often: she is dealing with some autoimmune health issues that caused unexpected weight loss last year and have meant more doctor's appointments, more tests, and a real need to reprioritize. She cannot run this year the way she ran last year. That is not a complaint. It is just true.

She is building workouts back into her schedule. She is setting clearer boundaries around weekends. She took a real break over December — fully unplugged, present with her family — and came back feeling the difference. She is also genuinely bad at answering emails and texts in real time, replies to everything as a human (not a bot), and is at peace with the fact that it takes a little longer because that is what it costs to stay real.

This is your permission to change your habits even if you built your business on social media. Use it for business. Do not let it use you. Your business exists to support your life — not the other way around.

Your Reset for the New Year

Jenna ends this episode with a simple challenge. Not a 30-day program. Not a strategy overhaul. Just a few small shifts and a check-in in three months.

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Find one in-person thing this month. An IDS event, a showroom opening, a coffee with a local designer. Show up. Push past the introvert resistance. You will leave feeling better.

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Set one social media boundary. One day a week, one hour a day, one platform deleted. Whatever feels like relief when you think about it — start there.

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Open Google Workspace (if you use it) and look for the built-in Gemini features you have not used yet. Find one task it can take off your plate this week.

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Ask yourself one question: when did I last do something I love that has nothing to do with a screen? Then go do that thing, even if just for 20 minutes.

Report back in three months. Jenna promises you will have something to say.

Frequently Asked Questions

Jenna's honest answer: daily posting for a year was a growth experiment, not a sustainable strategy, and she would not recommend it to anyone. What she recommends now is intentional, human posting — when you have something worth saying, when it reflects your real perspective, when it serves a purpose beyond feeding the algorithm. Quality of presence matters more than frequency. If you do want help managing consistent content, working with a specialist like Swink Social is a more sustainable path than burning yourself out doing it manually every day.

AI slop is the growing volume of AI-generated content — images, captions, profiles, accounts — flooding social media feeds with content that looks real but was never created by a human with genuine intent. For designers, it matters in two ways: first, the feeds you rely on for industry information and client connection are becoming less trustworthy. Second, it makes authenticity more valuable. When everything can be generated, a real voice with a real point of view stands out. Being genuinely human on social media is now a competitive advantage, not a default.

If you have a Google Workspace account, the Gemini AI integration is already built in — you do not need a separate tool or subscription. Inside Gmail, you can ask it to pull everything from your history with a specific client, summarize past conversations, and generate a prep note before an upcoming call. The more you store your transcripts and email threads in one accessible location, the more useful this becomes over time. Start by exploring the Gemini features inside Gmail and Google Docs — most people have never opened them.

Jenna recommends the Interior Design Society as her starting point — she has been a member since early in her career and values the local chapter events and board involvement. ASID and NKBA are strong options depending on your specialty and market. If budget is a real constraint, the goal is less about which organization and more about just getting into a room with people who do what you do. Local showroom events, design center openings, and informal meetups all count. Community starts with showing up somewhere.

Shift the ratio. Less time generating content for an algorithm that may or may not show it to anyone, more time building real relationships that result in referrals, collaborations, and repeat clients. Use AI to handle the admin work that keeps you chained to your desk, and reinvest that time into in-person visibility — events, trade shows, speaking, local connections. Social media still has a role, but it works best as a supplement to a real-world presence, not a substitute for one.

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Disclaimer: This blog was written using AI as a recap from the recording then edited by the author for accuracy and details.