Through Time

Click. Scroll. Scroll. Click. Click. Scroll. Scroll. Click. Type. Click.

Open a dropdown. Find the right item. Select. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Add a date. Generate the report. Download. Over and over again.

Nearly every job in the universe has some boring, repetitive task like this, the kind where your mind drifts off halfway through and your hands just keep clicking.

I've been thinking about how differently time passes depending on what I'm doing. When I'm brainstorming or designing something, or digging into a problem I find interesting, I can go four hours without noticing. The hours don't seem like hours. They seem like fun, and most people know that feeling as flow.

But give me four hours of the click and scroll stuff and it feels like days. It's like wandering through a desert. The end of the task is out there on the horizon and never seems to get any closer, and the whole time you've got that thirst and that afternoon sun that just won't let up.

Those are the hours I try to give back to people. Not every one of those tasks can or should be handed to a machine, at least not yet. But a lot of them aren't hard, they just take forever, and that happens to be exactly what agents are good at.

The way I see it, any piece of work is a string of tasks done one after another. Adding people lets you split those tasks up and run them side by side, so ten people might finish in a tenth of the time. That's why labor is leverage. But everyone on that team is still walking their own piece of the desert. AI works differently, because once an agent takes over the task, nobody has to walk that stretch at all.

So from what I've seen, the best use of agentic AI is going after the horrible, boring, monotonous tasks inside a job, not the job itself. Nobody is going to miss those tasks.

Helping people get that time back is the most meaningful work I do, and it legitimately brings me joy.

If you've got your own desert walk at work, like the report you dread every week or the dropdown you've clicked through a thousand times, DM me. I'll look at it for free and tell you what I think an agent could take off your plate.