Why your to-do list will never end

Author: Mark Manson

Length: • 3 mins

Annotated by Josh Deese

"Five minutes each week that might change your life."

The last two months, every waking hour I'm either messing around with AI, or feeling like I'm wasting my time because I'm not messing around with AI.

Turns out this isn’t just a me problem.

This is how every efficiency gain in history plays out. Inventing the train didn't reduce how much stuff got shipped—it multiplied it 100 times, because suddenly it was cheap and fast to move things across a country that had previously been too expensive to bother with. Instead of shrinking, demand exploded.

AI is just the train, but for your brain. (Hey, that rhymed.)

The moment a task gets easier, the task stops being the bottleneck and something else replaces it, usually your time. You then fill that gap with more tasks, because human demand is infinite and when you remove one constraint, we reliably find three more.

In one 2026 study, researchers tracked 443 million hours of work after AI adoption across more than a thousand organizations.

The results:

  • Email time doubled.
  • Chat time nearly tripled.
  • Weekend work jumped 40%.

The workers putting in those extra hours aren't being exploited by their employers. Most of them chose it—because when you can do more, you do more.

The capacity expands and we fill it with emails, projects, and the elaborate self-justification that this batch of work is the one that finally gets us ahead.

It won't. But you'll keep trying. We all will.

Nobody ever got to the end of their to-do list and thought: “Good, I'm done now.”

What’s the best way you’ve been using AI to be more productive?

See you Monday,
Mark

P.S. I just explained why AI won't shrink your to-do list. So no, I'm not going to tell you to do more. But I will tell you to stop guessing which AI tools are actually worth your time. I get my daily briefing from The Rundown AI—a free newsletter that over two million professionals use to cut through the noise in five minutes flat. After signing up, a quick quiz recommends the exact tools, guides, and courses for your specific job. You're already doing more. Might as well know what you're doing. Sign up free here.​

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