When Doing Gets Easy, Deciding Gets Difficult |
You wake up at 5:30 AM. Before your feet touch the floor, you’ve already made 17 decisions.
Should you answer that late-night email now or should you wait? Can the dentist appointment wait another week? Who’s handling school pickup? Do you have the mental bandwidth for that difficult conversation with your colleague, or should you postpone it again?
By 9 AM, you’ve orchestrated a small logistics operation: coordinating schedules, sequencing tasks, allocating your limited attention across competing demands. You’re prioritizing, delegating, planning, and adjusting on the fly.
This is management work. And whether or not you have a manager’s title, you’re doing it every single day. It’s just part of the overhead of adult life. And as with so much else, AI is going to change the way we lead ourselves as well.
AI promises liberation from the management burden. And this promise is very real. AI can help you draft your emails, schedule your meetings, and analyze your data; it can handle a thousand small tasks that used to consume your day. And all of this assistance has the potential to create substantial efficiency gains and free up considerable time and energy.
But that’s only one side of AI’s impact. As I pointed out in a previous post, the fact that AI will be able to take over many tasks for us does not eliminate the........