[Placeholder text — this essay is not written yet. The structure below shows everything a post can do: headings, a chart, an image with an automatic figure caption, a quote, a list and a footnote.]
Every tool that makes a task cheaper also makes it cheaper to add a task. When writing a draft takes five minutes instead of an hour, you don’t write one draft, you write twelve. The backlog doesn’t shrink. It grows.
The work that got cheaper
The obvious effect of AI is that some work collapses in cost: first drafts, research summaries, boilerplate code. What used to fill a week now fills an afternoon.
But look at the gap between the two lines. Tasks done grows, slowly. Tasks added grows faster, every single month.1
The work that didn’t
What stays expensive is everything that needs judgment: deciding which of the twelve drafts is right, reviewing what the machine produced, saying no.
The constraint moved. It used to be making things. Now it is choosing which things deserve to exist.
What to do about it
- Cap the backlog, not the output.
- Review before you generate more.
- Treat deleting a task as progress.
Footnotes
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Placeholder data. The real numbers will come from Onvero’s own task tracker. ↩