“It’s all running in the background.”
So is this. It started when you opened the page and it has not stopped since. It never complains, never sleeps, and has never once decided anything.
output nothing yet
The tray has been empty all night.
- tasks completed
- 0
- hours saved
- 0
- decisions made
- 0
Handled while you slept
- Summarised the meeting, then summarised the summary
- Generated six names for the project, all of them fine
- Rewrote the one sentence you had already got right
- Replied to an email that did not need a reply
- Turned three sentences into nine
- Turned the nine back into three
- Wrote a document explaining the other document
- Found 61 unused things and removed 4
Eleven hours of work, it says. It is very proud.
Exactly where you left it
- Whether to take the job
- The conversation you keep rescheduling
- What the company is actually for
- Which of the two you would genuinely rather do
- Telling your co-founder the real number
- The apology, in your own words
- Naming the thing
Nought hours of work. Nobody is proud.
The machine is magnificent. The tray is still empty.
Nothing on this page is an argument against running things in the background. Run everything you can that way — the images, the spreadsheets, the fourteenth draft, the tedium. It is a genuinely good trade and you should take it.
It is only an argument against the flex. Being busy has never been the hard part, and now it is free. What is left is the small pile of things that are actually yours, and that pile does not get shorter because a machine spent the night making a noise.
The version of this without the jokes makes the same point with a straight face. This one is about what lands on your desk once the agents get going.