The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

Summary

Conventional wisdom is that burnout is caused (solely) by overwork.So logically, if AI can help us complete tasks 2-100x faster than before, we should be UNDERWORKED and experiencing ZERO burnout, right?If only it were that simple.You may be too young to recognize this meme, but it’s the feeling most people in tech had when AI started accelerating their efficiency.Why?Because for years, all of us had dozens, if not hundreds, of side projects we could have started but had to shelve because there weren’t enough hours in a day.Then AI came along and teased us with a seductive lie…Claude: “But, maybe you can do it all now that I’m here!”For the past decade, I’ve been a repeat startup founder + new dad + always ambitious person. I had over 100 article titles + outlines in draft. I had a someday maybe list full of 50 projects to start “when I had the time.”I started to dip my toe in the water and YOLO some of these side projects between meetings. Queuing up Claude in 5-minute increments and then letting it rip before jumping to the next call.The crazy thing is it started to work…Things I wanted to try, explore, and write about were working, and this only 10X’d my ambition to start more projects! Spin more plates. ALL THE THINGS!You already know how this ends.Because it always ends this way.There’s the quote: “You can have anything in life, but not everything.”Even when AI can 100x your productivity on a single task, we humans still have a finite number of seconds in a day.And we’re not machines. We’re not meant to operate at 100% speed every waking hour.What happened was I started to notice I had something like 40 “proof of concept” projects going on, and I was starting to feel that pang of burnout growing inside me. Each project was a new open loop, a new responsibility, and a new thing to tend to.I used AI to reduce my required work, so I invented an endless amount of make-work.Make Work: “work assigned or done chiefly to keep one busy”Don’t get me wrong, I had fun alon...