I Finally Have Time to Optimize My Optimizations
Thanks to the little sparkle button, I spend my days polishing emails that no one will read. Have I finally reached peak efficiency?
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Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
My greatest creative act this week was getting Gemini to rewrite a two-sentence email in ten different styles. It was a masterpiece of pointless labor. You know the feeling, don't you? That tiny sparkle-shaped button that has appeared everywhere, the little syringe icon offering you a free hit of "improvement".
I'm hooked. That little cyan ribbon in my Word doc? The green spiral in my search bar? They're my best friends. My enablers. They whisper sweet nothings in my ear: "Why just say 'yes' when you can say 'Absolutely, let's leverage this synergistic opportunity moving forward'?". I spend hours generating lists of "10 creative ways to..." and then never look at them again. It feels incredible. It feels like work.
The Busywork High
This is the purest form of productivity. It's not about the destination (a finished project, a shipped product, a paid invoice). It's about the journey—a beautiful, endless loop of tweaking, rephrasing, and generating alternatives. It's the dopamine rush of activity, with none of the messy stress of actual accomplishment.
I am a finely-tuned engine of preparation. My entire day is pre-production for a movie that will never be filmed.
The real junkies, the ones who get their fix reading the tech pages of places like The Guardian, have known this for months. This isn't about replacing our jobs; it's about replacing our work. We still have to show up, but now we get to spend all day sharpening a pencil that will never touch paper.
The first hit was free, slipped into our Gmail compose window or our Slack message box. But the subscription emails are already rolling in. Twenty dollars a month to feel this productive? It's a bargain. It's the best stuff on the market.
My to-do list for tomorrow is already auto-generated. It's beautiful. Task #1: "Optimize yesterday's optimization report." I can't wait.
Your turn: what did your AI help you not accomplish today?