Faster, Not Closer

If AI really makes us so much faster, why aren’t our to-do lists finally getting shorter?

Most people carry an endless backlog. A lot of those tasks are digital by now. If AI truly is some kind of generic superpower for knowledge work, shouldn’t our lists slowly be shrinking?

I do believe AI makes us faster.

I recently had my entire website rebuilt with Claude Code. I’ve partly automated my job search and the hunt for a new company car. Things that used to take days sometimes take hours now.

But maybe speed was never the real problem.

Even as the time per digital task keeps trending toward zero, we humans still have to define the tasks, choose them, and judge them. Instead of finishing ten tasks, we simply finish a hundred.

Execution gets faster. The human overhead stays.

Every task needs context. A decision. A direction. Someone has to judge whether it makes sense at all.

In the end it comes down to the old distinction between efficiency and effectiveness.

AI can make us dramatically more efficient. It doesn’t automatically make us more effective.

If yesterday I completed ten wrong tasks in the wrong direction, tomorrow I might complete a hundred of them.

Faster? Absolutely.

Just barely any closer to my goal.