It's Never Been Easier to Do Too Much

The importance of deciding what not to do

Modern life is relentless about adding things to our plates. More obligations, more information streams, more choices, more meetings, more tabs, more apps, more channels to check. And, increasingly, more productivity tools that carry an even bigger promise: that we can finally do it all.

I’ve spent time recently with a few different organizations that are rushing to implement AI tools, and the pattern is striking. Teams are bolting AI onto everything they can, often without slowing down to define which problems the tools should actually solve. The result can be what some researchers now call “workslop”—AI-generated output that looks productive but doesn’t actually move anything forward. More dashboards no one looks at. More summaries no one reads. More content, less signal.

This isn’t really a new problem, it’s just coming in a new form. When capacity grows, it outstrips our ability to choose what not to do.

There is a passage from Inside the Box that I think is relevant. It describes the innovation team at the Broad Institute, the joint MIT-Harvard biomedical research center. The team had made Broad a world leader. But eventually they started working on so many things at once that they got sloppy, fragmented, and frustrated. They were in danger of losing the lead they had worked so hard to build.

So they tried something simple. They made all of their current commitments visible. As I write in Inside the Box:

“They generated a list of every single ongoing project, and then—on a wall in the office—made a diagram of their development ‘funnel.’ Every ongoing project had a Post-it on the funnel indicating its current stage of development. The funnel diagram relayed two obvious lessons: Nobody knew everything that was going on—which meant some projects were redundant—and there were at least twice as many projects underway as the team could deal with, even in a best-case scenario.”

Twice as many, even in a best-case scenario.

The Broad team set up a weekly meeting at the funnel wall and started canceling lower-priority work. They added a “hopper” before the funnel that held ideas which could move forward only when space opened up. That is, nothing could go in the top of the funnel until something else came out the bottom. In two years, they cut the number of ongoing projects by more than half, which increased the number of projects they actually got done.

Many of us (✋) have the same problem, far more in process than we can realistically do well. We just haven’t put it all on the wall, taken a hard look, and forced ourselves to prioritize ruthlessly.

AI tools are great at the production side — generating, summarizing, coding, drafting, replying. They offer almost no help with the harder question: Should this be getting done at all? By making production cheaper, they can make the underlying problem worse. The drag that used to limit how much we could attempt has mostly disappeared. The discipline of choosing what not to do has not.¹

The Broad team’s first move wasn’t a new tool. It was making everything they were already doing visible. Just the act of putting it all on the wall told them much of what they needed to know.

I’ve found that simple exercise to be useful in other contexts—my information sources, my work projects, my obligations. I also use a wall, and when I actually see the list, it’s clear that it’s not possible to get it all done. The question changes from “How do I get all of this done?” to “What comes off the wall?”

Our new tools have staggering promise, but they don’t answer that latter question. They just make it easier to avoid.

Thank you for reading. Inside the Box comes out tomorrow! This is the last day to fill out this form to get the preorder bonus. And if you haven’t ordered, there are links there to booksellers.

I start book tour this evening (info here). If you can make any of the stops, come say hello.

If you enjoyed this post, please share it.

Until, well, tomorrow…

David

1. There is a story in chapter one of Inside the Box that exemplifies the scenario of having almost unlimited capacity, but failing to choose what not to do. It ends in disaster.