I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about productivity recently as I’ve been diving into AI, and I believe our society is coming quickly to an inflection point. As a group, we’ve idolized productivity and held up those among us who get the most done in a day. We’ve decided being busy is a virtue, and progress means striking more and more things off of a real or imaginary to-do list.
As I’ve started integrating AI features into my work in the clinic, on the podcasts, and at the Uncharted Conference, I’ve seen this technology take the tasks I struggle with (i.e., the mundane, administrative, bureaucratic, or protocol-centered jobs that my creative ADD mind avoids at all costs) and grind through them while I focus on things that are more interesting.
In the last month, I’ve vacuumed up countless tips, tricks, and hacks for getting repetitive, non-creative tasks off my plate, and I’ve made a staggering discovery… They. Never. End.
Productivity (or “efficiency,” they are both about getting more things done) is to the modern high achiever what gold was to King Midas: the goal no one thought you could overdose on. King Midas, for those who are grasping for the name, was the man who wished everything he touched turned to gold. Of course this was an immediate blessing (“Haha!! I can turn trash into treasure!”), that quickly became a curse (“Drat! It happened again. Get me another Chihuahua and sell this last one as a bookend!”).
Well, I’ve never touched anything and had it turn to gold, but I did wish for a way to tear through my to-do list at blinding speed. Today, I’m sending emails to my bookkeeper, scheduling Office Hours in Uncharted, updating my webpage, planning a birthday party, booking some holiday travel, asking for a refund on a gift that wasn’t right, paying someone for work they did, sending some invoices, and tallying up all my expenses from a retreat I put on last week.
If you think about that list, accomplishing it all in a day seems like a wish come true. But here’s what’s going to happen: the majority of these to-do items are going to spawn multiple other to-do items that I’ll have to deal with tomorrow. That’s right, my to-do list is like a hydra where when I cut off a head, two or three more often grow back in its place.
When I email my bookkeeper, he’s going to say that I have not set my client portal up the right way and I also need to talk to the state of South Carolina before he can do the thing I’m asking about. The birthday party is going to spawn a sprawling group text that will inevitably devolve into multi-day debates over artisanal cupcake vendors—a fresh circle of Dante’s inferno that simply wouldn’t exist if I were just winging it like a normal human. Paying someone will generate reminders about other people who will need to be paid in the future and also end-of-year tax decisions that need to be made, and on and on.
Just like Midas had the realization: “Oh crap. I’m starting to think this gold isn’t such a good thing,” I’m thinking, “Why am I exhausted and stressed every day while getting so much done?”
The answer is not that being productive is bad and we should just quit. When we talk about AI, wanting to get more done, and figuring out how to use the limited time we have in our day, people have a tendency to jump to all-or-none thinking. This is not a go-all-in or give-up decision. The lesson of King Midas is not that gold is bad, but that you can have too much of a good thing.
Online discussion about using AI or focusing on being efficient is dominated by two extreme factions. On one side, we have those who believe we’re heading to a dystopia where soulless corporations relentlessly cut costs and push for profits until they lose control and the AI kills us all. These people want to shun the new tech and, metaphorically, burn it at the stake. On the other side, we see tech enthusiasts who are literally dating (or marrying) AI chat bots and who want to do things like surgically implanting AI chips into their brains.
I don’t roll my eyes at people who are fearful about the impacts of AI or at those who are idealistic and excited. I do think it’s important to recognize the tendency of modern media to willfully ignore nuance in favor of mutually exclusive extremes.
I imagine King Midas at a modern press conference trying to explain the lesson he has learned to his royal subjects and it sounding like:
Reporter 1: “So King, you’re saying that gold is terrible and no one should have it?”
King: “Um, no. Gold is great. You just don’t want it to take over your life.”
Reporter 2: “Do you blame Big Gold for all the problems of the kingdom?”
King: “Yeah, no. This was really just a personal choice that I made that kind of got out of control. I’m taking responsibility here.”
Reporter 1: “So you’re responsible for all the problems of the kingdom?”
King: “No. Only the ones related to things turning spontaneously to gold.”
Reporter 2: “I want to circle back to the dangers of gold…”
I bring this up because last week I wrote about how a hyperfocus on halloween candy is driving out the less efficient, more social parts of the holiday that made it special for me as a kid. In the comment section, someone playfully took this to mean that I think compensating people in a veterinary clinic based on how productive they are would be a bad thing, because it would drive the negative extreme-productivity behaviors I was lamenting.
I think that’s a really interesting idea, and the cautionary tale about what happens when we ruthlessly optimize is exactly the point I was hoping to make. My answer to the cautionary tale, however, is no more to the benefits of getting things done than it is to shun gold if it falls into your lap during the middle ages.
Right now, all of us who are leaning into AI and the productivity boosts it brings are experiencing what King Midas did right after his wish. This feels great, and the benefits seem enormous. Also, we have got to realize the downsides of a life dedicated to ripping through to-do lists. We must recognize that, just like Midas could never be satisfied by gold, we will never be satisfied by the number of things we do in a day.
Our to-do lists will never end, our patients will never be completely healed and healthy, and our clients will never be out of questions, problems, or concerns. The more tests we run in a day, the more results we’ll have to interpret and conversations we’ll need to have. The more marketing we do, the more price shoppers and people we’ve never seen before we’ll have to engage with. The more emails we send, the more responses we’ll be expected to reply promptly to.
This doesn’t mean we swear off trying to help more pets and people, doing more good with fewer resources, or simplifying complicated tasks we don’t enjoy. It does mean, however, that we must change our relationship with busy-ness and to-do lists. We must be intentional about what we want our days to look like, and how we will assess our own performance. We cannot measure ourselves against the list of possible things we could theoretically do if we never got tired. That’s the path to disaster.
I used to think that one day, I would finish my to-do list and feel completely free. I used to believe, at some unconscious level, my challenges and problems were finite and it was possible that I’d eventually figure them all out and get through them. That’s right… Subconsciously I believed I could work my way to a life that didn’t have problems. I bet you did too.
Ripping through my task list only to see it expand, circle back, and mutate has brought me face-to-face with the falsehood of that idea. Like Midas looking at his favorite food turned to gold, I’ve stared at a page-long to-do list with every line crossed out… and a second page with every line unstruck, waiting for me tomorrow. It’s deeply demoralizing.
So how do you decide that you’ve done enough? Where do you step off the infinite treadmill without feeling like a lazy fraud? I don’t think we’ve ever needed those answers more than we do right now.
