Last year I read Cal Newport’s really interesting book, Slow Productivity, and walked away with a couple of interesting ideas, and one that I started recommending to my direct reports: the visible backlog. The concept is simple. Let people see what’s actually on your plate so they can prioritize accordingly and not pile more on when you’re drowning. This could be as simple as a Word document that is shared with me, where I can see what people are working on next in order of priority.
I kind of thought I was doing that bit ok, but I started ramping up my AI tools heavily, and things have gotten complicated.
Here’s what happened. I trained some AI assistants on my past proposals, emails, contracts, the whole archive… like everyone probably has done by now. So naturally, I’ve become more and more efficient.
A proposal that used to take me half a day gets done in an hour. Contract redlines with three different risk levels can be done before lunch. Even my emails (god, the emails)… I just tell the bot what tone I’m going for, what I want the outcome to be, and it drafts something I’d normally spend ten minutes fussing over. Multiply that across a dozen emails and a few documents and I’m getting back two, maybe three hours a day.
It felt like a real advantage. I was keeping up the way I’d always wanted to but am probably to lazy to actually pull off.
The problem showed up slowly at first.
I’d send something to legal and get silence. Then more silence. Turns out they were still working through the last batch I’d sent. Marketing hadn’t made the four new web pages I’d drafted. My inbox started filling up with thoughtful replies to the thoughtful emails my AI had helped me write, replies I now actually had to read and respond to.
I had removed myself as the bottleneck. Which sounds great until you realize the bottleneck just moved downstream to everyone else, especially when you are the boss… People actually take what you send them seriously and really read it because it’s probably important, even if it’s not that important.
There’s a moment in Slow Productivity where Newport talks about not burning out. I remember reading that and thinking about my poor team. What I didn’t anticipate was that I might accidentally shift some of that pressure to other people.
So right now I’m thinking about what I actually need.
It’s not another tool to help me work faster. It’s like I need something that tells me when to hold off. Something that looks at my team’s calendars and workloads and says “hey, maybe don’t send that until Thursday when Sara’s actually finished the last thing you asked her to work on.” Some sort of reverse productivity assistant.
It should be pretty obvious that productivity isn’t a solo sport. All that efficiency I gained doesn’t mean much if the people around me can’t absorb it. This is similar to the problem with code reviewing AI generated pull requests all day long when you used to actually write code. I’m trying to slow down. It’s harder than it sounds when the tools make speed so easy. So obviously what I’m proposing here (maybe tongue-in-cheek) is an AI bot for each one of my direct reports that connects to their calendar and backlog. Every time I go to assign something to one of them, it is the thing that asks me where it is in the priority based on their current workload, meeting schedules, days off, etc. A bot in the loop of the human in the loop. I know I probably sound crazy, but I think I might try and build this.
