[linsomniac]

I've been having the opposite experience; I've been GAINING focus through AI use.

In my day, when there's something that is distracting me from moving my objectives forward, I'm asking "Can AI help me automate this?" The answer is surprisingly often "yes". I call these "rough edges" and have been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to "file the rough edges down".

[augment_me]

I feel like the whole blog and the point can be reversed. If your bottlenecks are meetings and emails, and you make an agent take notes and summarize things for you, you gained focus to work on what you find meaningful.

> He explains that this happens because knowledge work often relies on “pseudo productivity,” where visible busyness is treated as a proxy for real value. Digital tools reinforce this by making people look active: sending more messages, producing more drafts, attending more meetings, and generating more work artifacts. To avoid the trap, he recommends measuring real outcomes, identifying the true bottlenecks in one’s work, and separating deep work from shallow work so that digital tools support meaningful progress instead of consuming attention.

---

Like, you are just as well make the argument that if you replace the pseudo-work, you end up with 8 hours of deep work for things that bring you value.

[prmoustache]

> your bottlenecks are meetings [...], and you make an agent take notes and summarize things for you.

An agent taking notes and summarizing things is of no use. You are supposed to participate to a meeting, otherwise it is just a memo and the meeting doesn't have to take place. The correct solution is just to not attend it if you know you aren't requested to participate and are just here to grow the numbers and make your company waste money.

[augment_me]

> The correct solution is just to not attend it if you know you aren't requested to participate and are just here to grow the numbers and make your company waste money.

If this argument actually worked in practice, the world would be a better place

[lukeschlather]

I had a coworker at Amazon who always said "just do what I do, accept the meeting invite and then don't go." Linkedin tells me he's now a director at Google.

Personally I make sure meetings are a good use of my time and I complain when they are not. I also am starting to complain about AI summarizers because they frequently misrepresent what is said in meetings and they're potentially worse than nothing, although I am starting to think that they're potentially valuable if Google is trying to datamine them for info about our company meetings as a way of poisoning their datasets. But I am worried my coworkers may be thinking they are reliable.

[demorro]

It always has in my experience, you merely have to make it true.

[bsiverly]

Same. I focus on the part that matters. As someone with ADHD I feel like AI is a salve for my mind. I used to listen to intense EDM while working. Now I sit in silence and talk to my agents. I maintain inbox zero. I absorb and comment across all relevant projects, even outside my team. I literally feel like I have a support team for the first time.

[danielbln]

This is me. I found AI to be an incredible provider of structure, focus and productivity, its an externalized executive function provider. No longer do I forget what last week's meetings were about, no longer am I paralyzed by seemingly I surmountable tasks it all just flows, and I get to rubber duck against an endlessly patient system. I love it, and I'm somewhat bewildered by some of the takes in this thread. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

[thingsilearned]

What's your setup for using voice with the agents and for handling your inbox zero? OpenClaw?

[bsiverly]

OpenClaw and whisper for talking (I use an opensource tool called ghostpepper)

[AlecSchueler]

Has it been part of a longer term shift or just something for the past few weeks? What will happen once all the rough edges are filed down?

[linsomniac]

I've been using the AIs heavily for ~3 years, but really about Feb/Mar I feel like they really ticked up in quality. For about the last 6-12 months I've been using them to file off the really rough edges ("build a CLI tool that implements commands to simplify this workflow"). The last 2-3 months my tooling has felt really competent, and so it was only really the last month where I felt like I could reasonably start having it automate the more subtle stuff.

>What will happen once all the rough edges are filed down?

You're new around here? ;-) Or maybe I'm just old and jaded, and feel like there's always infinite more work to do. My boss, the CTO, has said "if you are getting twice your pre-AI work done in half the time, the rest of the time is yours." Unfortunately that statement came after "I'm not sure how the CEO feels about this but..."

My company has 25 years of tech debt built up, and the AI tooling has allowed us to make amazing headway on that, but I'm ~5 years from retirement, even working 10X I'm not expecting we can catch up in that time.