But the problem isn’t always solved in the most efficient manner. It’s solved in a way that someone on a salary can solve because they’re sitting there, ready to solve it, without constraints of time or an eye on the bottom line.

Perhaps the problem didn’t need to be solved in the first place. Or, worse, you, as the agency owner, might have found a way to solve it in less time because your time is more valuable, so you’re naturally seeking the most expedient solutions so that you can get back to your core job of making money.

However, if you had a smaller team, an employee would more urgently need to say, “I only have five minutes, what’s the most efficient way to solve this?”

The biggest change I made this year was reducing the staff at my own agency. Some of it was not my choosing, but most of it was. The surprising thing is that it’s forced me to rethink many of our business processes, which, in turn, transformed our P&L.

When I was forced to examine our business structure through the lens of having fewer humans, we started making decisions that sped up our work and decreased our costs.

It exposed how much inefficiency we had been carrying. Here are a few examples (out of dozens).

We used to put all client expenses on our company credit card. I think at one point, the theory was that this would maximize our airline miles. But, once a month, it required someone on our team to go through and code all the expenses on our credit card back to the appropriate client. Then we had to invoice each client, chase down payments, and code them back into QuickBooks.

It took about ten hours per month. Well, when the person in our agency who is in charge of this silly process left, I looked at this and said, “This is indeed silly, the airline miles aren’t worth it. We are no longer charging company expenses to our own credit card. All company charges for clients need to be charged directly to their own card.”

Boom. Ten hours saved every month. That’s thousands of dollars a year in salary.

Here’s another one. A few years ago, we got talked into hosting our QuickBooks files on a remote desktop solution so we could remote into the most powerful version of QuickBooks Enterprise. The cost seemed reasonable, and the added enterprise features were appealing at the time. However, every time we needed to get into the books, we had to first remote into a cloud server. That took a few minutes alone, and then the software was just painfully slow to navigate because it wasn’t a local file.

It cost 15 minutes in labor every time we needed to pull a report in QuickBooks, which, as it turned out, is often. This never dawned on me because I wasn’t the one doing it. I had someone on staff, earning a big salary, whose job it was to pull these reports. So, again, the problem felt solved.

As soon as I was left to figure this out on my own, I was like, “Well, this is crazy. Let’s just migrate each client to QuickBooks Online.” It lacks a few of the features, but I can log in and pull reports faster than the previous remote solution took to boot up. Clients also prefer real-time access to their books.

Internally, I called these invisible cost multipliers “paper cuts.” We had absorbed so many paper cuts over the years, but we didn’t notice them because we had a big staff.

Worse, it forced us to hire ever more staff. As soon as someone got bogged down with too many paper cuts, like the person pulling the AMEX statements, we hired more staff because that first person was already overloaded with AMEX work.

So we kept adding staff, thinking everyone was always busy. But the truth was, they weren’t. They were just doing shitty, meaningless invisible work. And all of these invisible paper cuts added up to tens of thousands of dollars in salary expenses and infrastructure bloat that we didn’t need.

When we were forced to think like a small team again, we became more efficient. And that efficiency saved us both time and money. And often with better results for our clients.

There’s something else fewer humans on staff forced us to do: we fired a bunch of clients. I’ll expand on that in an upcoming essay. For now, I’ll say that I used to treat all incoming money as a good thing for our agency.

But by saying yes to more clients, we were building a hamster wheel we couldn’t escape from. We had to keep chasing new money to support a growing staff, which led to more paper cuts, inefficiency, and waste.

Being a smaller team has not only led to greater internal efficiency, but it’s also allowed us to be more choosy about which clients we take on, because there’s only so much work we can handle. As a result, we’re…happier. We’re working with clients we’re better aligned with, and we feel like we’re providing superior value to them.

I’m glad we were forced to get off that hamster wheel this year. Once you realize you’re running just to stay in place, you don’t get back on.

And now, with Claude Cowork and MCP, agentic AI is here, and it is indeed transformational. The other day, Cowork redlined a document for me based on information it found in my email and Office files, saving me at least an hour.

And yet, I still want more.

To pull on the thread of the truly great assistant, Cowork is now one of the best assistants you can hire…provided you tell it exactly what you want it to do.

But what makes for a truly one-of-a-kind assistant? It’s the one who doesn’t need to be told what to do. The one who sees an email from an important client asking for an updated report, and, on their own, prepares the report, drafts the reply, and queues it up in your outbox, ready for your approval.

This is the go-getter assistant, otherwise known as a proactive assistant.

What I’m looking for now is the proactive agentic agent. Completing tasks for me when prompted is game-changing. But I’m ready for the agent who knows what I need to get done without being told what to do.

For instance, the proactive agent should see a task in my Todoist or an email in my Superhuman and put the pieces together for me.

With MCP, Claude can now pull data from Notion, Slack, and Google Drive. And, with Cowork, it can assemble Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.

The ingredients are all there; I just want it to go from being a great assistant to one that has my back and makes me better at what I do.

Today’s agentic AI still requires a fair amount of prompting. And yes, some of what I am looking for could be handled by scheduling a recurring task in Cowork to check my email. But that’s not the proactive agent I’m looking for.

The proactive agent I’m looking for operates 24/7 in the background and acts on new data: new emails, new Slack messages, new tasks. And when I fire up my email client, emails are already drafted, with reports waiting for me.

I’m not writing this because I doubt we’ll get there; I’m writing this because I 100% believe we will, and quickly. At the pace Anthropic is shipping, we’re talking weeks, maybe even days.

So I’m writing this down as a marker: ‘Here’s something we can’t quite do yet, but will soon.’ And I don’t think it will be long before we see truly proactive agentic agents.

At first, that felt like a gap. Something unfinished. Another idea I needed to return to, refine, and expand.

But over time, I started to realize that the pause itself was the point.

Because the instinct to keep adding, to keep refining, exploring, and building, is the same instinct that No New New is trying to gently push back on.

We live inside an endless stream of new: new messages, new requests, new ideas, new crises, new advice. Much of it is useful. Some of it is important. But taken together, and consumed all day, every day, it leaves us overstimulated, scattered, and strangely exhausted.

And more than that, it quietly changes what we think about next.

Every new email, text message, or Slack alert is from someone who needs something from you. Every article, podcast, or post has the potential to provoke or inspire. Some of that inspiration is incredible. But inspiration all of the time, or at the wrong times, distracts you from what you had initially intended to do.

Both types of newness, requests and inspiration, have the same effect: they rob us of the essential time to focus, reset, or simply not think.

Once something enters your awareness, you can’t unsee it. Your mind continues to process it. You try to return to what you had planned, but part of your attention is now elsewhere, solving a problem, replaying a conversation, or imagining a new plan.

And so, without realizing it, your priorities begin to shift.

Not because you made a conscious decision. But because something new showed up and asked for your attention at just the right moment.

Over time, this adds up.

We start to live on other people’s schedules. Every notification creates a small mental tab left open. Every interruption pulls us slightly away from the moment we’re actually in. Every new idea, even a good one, can hijack the plans we had already made.

It’s not just that we get less done. It’s that we become less present; in our work, in our relationships, and in our own lives.

A phone buzz doesn’t seem like much. But in close relationships, even small interruptions can leave a mark. In that brief moment, you leave the conversation you’re in. And it takes your brain a few moments to steer itself back to the moment at hand.

You can feel it. And so can the people around you.

The same thing happens at work. You sit down to tackle a project you promised to someone else, and a new request appears. You try to ignore it, but your mind keeps returning to it. What started as a focused morning becomes fragmented.

And the same thing happens in your thinking. You read an article or hear a podcast that captures your imagination, and suddenly your mind is racing. Maybe you should change this. Maybe you should try that. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

The advice may be sound. The idea may be worth pursuing. But taking it in at the wrong time pulls you away from what you had already chosen to care about.

This is what No New New is really about.

It’s not a rejection of technology. It’s not a call to throw away your phone or disconnect from the world.

It’s a proposal to use technology on your terms first, instead of letting every new notification, headline, or idea decide what your brain thinks about next.

It’s about creating intentional stretches of time where you opt out of that stream, so your mind can rest, reset, and focus on what you’ve already chosen to care about.

Not forever. Not all day. Just long enough to let your brain stop reacting and start settling.

Think of it less as a productivity hack and more as attention hygiene.

Because the real cost of newness isn’t just distraction. It’s that it quietly replaces your priorities with whatever shows up next.

And once you see that, you start to notice it everywhere.

You notice how quickly your attention shifts when your phone buzzes. You notice how hard it is to return fully to a conversation. You notice how often your plans change, not because they needed to, but because something else entered your field of view.

You start to see that the issue isn’t your discipline or your willpower.

It’s the constant introduction of new inputs that your brain is wired to process.

The solution, then, isn’t to try harder.

It’s to see less.

To create periods of time where you take in no new information that asks something of you or provokes you into action.

To protect those periods, not aggressively or perfectly, but intentionally.

To let your brain rest. To let your thoughts settle. To follow through on what you had already decided mattered.

There’s no single way to do this. There’s no perfect system.

Think of it as a dial you can adjust throughout the day. There will be times when you need to let the newness pour in and be on someone else’s schedule. That’s life.

But there can also be hours, whole stretches of time, where you turn that dial down.

Where you are not reacting. Not checking. Not switching.

Where you are simply doing what you already chose to do. Or being with the people you already chose to be with. Or even just doing nothing at all.

We’ve all gotten so used to doing all of the time, doing email, doing texts, doing research, that we’ve forgotten what it feels like to not take anything new in.

You might be surprised at how much you need that.

If you want to try this, start small.

Pick an hour where you want to focus on a project or be present with your family. During that time, take in no new information that asks something of you or provokes you into action.

Just work on what you already committed to. Or enjoy something that doesn’t pull you into action. Or simply sit and let your mind wander.

You can build from there.

You don’t need a new system. You don’t need a new app. You don’t need a new framework.

You just need a little space from new.

That’s enough to begin.

And for now, that’s enough for this series.

The full series of No New New essays can be found here and includes:

• Start Your Day on Your Terms

• Your Presence Matters More Than Their Ding

• What is New

If companies everywhere become dramatically more efficient and require fewer employees, who will be left to buy the products those companies produce?

Since publishing that essay, a number of readers pointed out something important.

Technological revolutions rarely eliminate work entirely. What they tend to do is change how work is organized.

When the automobile replaced the horse, blacksmiths didn’t simply disappear. They became mechanics.

When computers entered the office, we didn’t eliminate administrative work; we reorganized it. Entire industries emerged around software, IT services, and digital infrastructure.

What feels different about AI is that it may not simply change industries. It may change the size of the organizations required to run them. AI may not eliminate professional work. But it may eliminate the need for large teams of people doing it together.

For most of the modern professional economy, large firms existed for a simple reason: coordination. Complex work required teams of specialists, layers of management, and significant administrative infrastructure just to keep everything moving.

Law firms needed armies of paralegals and support staff. Consulting firms required layers of analysts. Agencies depended on project managers, client relationship managers, and administrative teams.

AI is beginning to strip away much of that overhead.

Across many professions, the amount of administrative labor required to run a practice is beginning to shrink.

In my own agency, I’ve begun rebuilding our internal systems around this idea. Tasks that once required entire administrative workflows can now be handled by AI-assisted processes.

The result is a smaller team that spends far more time on the highest-value thinking for our clients.

We may be entering a period where many professionals rediscover something that used to be common: the solo practice.

For most of human history, skilled professionals worked this way: independent, reputation-driven, and directly accountable to their clients.

If this shift accelerates, the most valuable professionals in the next decade may not be those within the largest firms. They may be the individuals who can combine deep expertise, strong relationships, and AI-powered tools into small, highly efficient practices.

Lawyers will depart firms to become solo practitioners. Doctors may begin leaving the private-equity-owned practices that now dominate much of modern healthcare.

I’m hazy on how the economics will work for this newly minted solo-practitioner class. Will practitioners charge more but provide a high level of human touch to select clients? Or will they charge less but serve a broader base of clients?

Many people are leaning into AI for efficiency gains. Far fewer seem to be asking how they will continue to provide value in the new economy.

Meanwhile, I have been breaking apart and rebuilding my business to be high-touch, obsessed with creating value for our clients, and deeply personal. If I have any chance of creating value in this new economy, that’s my strategy.

AI may hollow out large organizations. But it may also empower individuals in ways we haven’t seen in decades.

The question many of us should be asking is not just how to use AI more efficiently inside our current jobs. It’s whether AI might eventually allow us to build something of our own.

For most of the last century, professional success meant climbing the ladder inside large firms.

The next decade may reward something very different: individuals who combine deep expertise, strong relationships, and AI-powered tools to build small, highly effective practices of their own.

I’m curious how others are thinking about this shift.

What’s your strategy?

To be fair, I didn’t just add AI tools into my existing workflows. I tore apart old systems and rebuilt them from the ground up, assuming AI would be part of the process. I plan to write much more about that in future essays.

But one reality quickly became obvious.

When work becomes dramatically more efficient, you need fewer humans to do it.

This is great news for businesses. Lower costs. Higher margins. Faster output.

But it raises a question that I can’t stop thinking about:

If AI allows companies everywhere to operate with fewer employees, who will be left to buy the products those companies are producing?

Right now, the conversation about AI is mostly focused on productivity. And rightly so. The gains are extraordinary.

But economies do not run on productivity alone. They run on purchasing power.

If enough workers lose their jobs, or see their roles dramatically reduced, those same workers may no longer have the income needed to buy the goods and services companies are selling.

That’s the paradox I find myself wrestling with.

On the one hand, AI could allow companies to operate more efficiently than at any point in history.

On the other hand, if those efficiencies come primarily from replacing human labor, we may be weakening the very consumer base that modern economies depend on.

The real question is whether the economy can adapt fast enough to absorb the workers it replaces.

In the meantime, how confident do you feel about the economy over the next twelve months?

The next twenty-four?

I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

My thinking on screens and kids has always been twofold. One, computers and the internet have long been a fact of our world, and we must train our children to be proficient users of these tools.

However, screens, and in particular social media, have countless insidious effects on young people, a dystopian list that includes cyberbullying, sexual assault, and unregulated access to drugs, many tragically laced with deadly compounds.

If this local initiative had been launched two years ago, or even one year ago, I would have raised my hand in unwavering support.

But this manifesto didn’t arrive a year ago. It arrived this week. And this week, looking at its recommendations, I find myself unsure how to respond.

While I believe the manifesto is well-intentioned, and agree with many points raised, including:

Computers and iPads are often being used to fill free time or indoor recess, with minimal supervision. This limits opportunities for socialization, hands on learning, and creativity.

And;

Students are allowed access to YouTube. Inappropriate content slips through filters on this platform has prompted partial or entire bans in other school districts.

There are parts of the manifesto that give me pause, namely:

At the elementary school level, preset settings in Google Classroom offer autocorrect for spelling and autocomplete for sentences, undermining students’ learning of both spelling and writing composition.

And;

Math homework can only be completed using online software.

What, broadly and specifically, gives me pause about such a manifesto/survey?

One, it’s hard not to look at any survey about kids’ screen usage and not see that the adults around the kids are equally addicted and reliant on their screens.

The behavior we’re modeling for our kids is that of heavy screen dependence, if not co-dependence. Our kids look at us as adults and see us on our phones. I’d wager most of our kids see us with a phone in our hands more than without.

So hypocrisy runs deep when it comes to screen time.

It reminds me of campaigns against texting and driving aimed at teenage drivers. When I walk around my suburban neighborhood or commute into the city, it’s the adult drivers who seem most likely to be using their phones while driving.

We like to think of screen time addiction as a problem with younger generations, without standing back to look at our own behaviors and how those behaviors get passed down to the very kids and teenagers we’re trying to protect.

I’m all for any movement to reduce our collective screen time, but adults have to be willing to put down their phones as well. And frankly, I’m not sure the adults are.

Second, my feelings about spell check and autocorrect for young kids are mixed. On the one hand, I can see how, absent these tools, children must first learn to spell on their own accord before letting the tools correct their mistakes.

However, the tools will be there for them soon enough. Even as an adult, I lean on tools like spell check, Grammarly, and AI (more on this in a moment) to check my writing.

Will keeping them from using spell check for a few more months because it’s toggled off by default, really stop what’s coming?

Speaking of what’s coming, and this is really where I’m entirely conflicted about almost everything I wrote above.

What is happening on our screens, right now in early 2026, thanks to artificial intelligence, is altering the world in ways we have yet to understand and won’t be able to fully process until we’re looking in the rearview mirror.

In a recent essay, Dario Amodei suggests that AI will soon outperform humans at most cognitive tasks:

We are now at the point where AI models are beginning to make progress in solving unsolved mathematical problems, and are good enough at coding that some of the strongest engineers I’ve ever met are now handing over almost all their coding to AI. Three years ago, AI struggled with elementary school arithmetic problems and was barely capable of writing a single line of code. Similar rates of improvement are occurring across biological science, finance, physics, and a variety of agentic tasks. If the exponential continues—which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it—then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.

How will this affect our kids and change the opportunities that are available to them?

Amodei is predicting that AI will “displace half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next 1–5 years,” and worries that, while the labor market may reset itself in the face of AI, just as the labor market has done after previous technology shifts, “the short-term shock will be unprecedented in size.”

Short-term shock… meaning likely during the labor market our own children will face in a few years’ time.

When my first child was born, I recall thinking that, to give him a leg up, I should immerse him in Mandarin classes and coding lessons.

That was five years ago. Will either skill be necessary in the next five years?

I’d like to believe that social skills, getting along with one’s peers, and having a basic understanding of grammar and math will be necessary skills for humans in the short term, or at least within my kids’ lifetimes.

And yet, I can no longer fathom what skills my now elementary school-aged kids will need by the time they enter the job market.

Will they need to be proficient in AI prompting? Will prompting still be a thing? Or will the labor market be seeking young people who can focus for more than a few minutes at a time and who have developed social skills and the ability to cooperate?

I don’t think this survey was misguided. It raises valid points that I can get behind. But given everything that’s happening around us right now, I’m not sure spell check is the problem.

While we’re debating how much screen time our kids should have, the rules on the ground are changing faster than we can make sense of them.

What do you think about kids’ use of screens at school? Is AI re-shaping your opinion on screen time? Let me know in the comments below.

For many of us, our days have become centered around relentless calls for our attention, often arriving on someone else’s schedule, not our own. News alerts that get us riled up. Emails from a client. Slack notifications from a boss. Even text messages, once reserved for family and friends, now arrive as bill reminders and appointment notices.

Subscribe now

For some people, this constant stream of newness is energizing. And if that’s you, I’m not here to stand in your way. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed, if your attention feels fragmented, your thinking rushed, or your days increasingly reactive, then it’s worth getting more precise about what this “newness” actually is, and why it has such a powerful effect on our minds.

There are two primary sources of newness that interfere with your ability to let your brain reset, recharge, and focus on the task at hand.

First are the endless new requests for your time and focus. Every new email, text message, or Slack/Asana/Teams alert is from someone who needs something from you, whether it’s a spouse who needs you to run an errand or a medical provider who needs a bill paid.

These are all incoming requests for your time. All new things for you to do.

You get in the car for a quiet drive with your family when you receive a notification on your phone; it’s most likely someone who needs you to do something for them.

And now your brain can’t stop thinking about this request until you’ve had time to act on it.

But why is it fair that your personal time should be hijacked simply because it was the right moment for someone else to make a request of your attention?

And not just your personal time, but your brain space. Instead of thinking about your kids in the car, who are excited to spend the afternoon with you, you’re thinking about getting back to your computer, finding the email with the bill, and making sure it gets paid.

It’s right that the medical care provider should want their bill paid, but it’s not right that your brain space is now occupied with something that is not urgent. Something that can wait.

Second, there is the newness that isn’t a direct request for your time, but instead provokes or inspires. Some inspiration, some of the time, is incredible. But inspiration all of the time, or at the wrong times, distracts you from what you had initially intended to do.

This newness often comes from an article, a social media post, a podcast, or cable news.

For me, it often comes from an online article. I’ll be sipping my morning cup of coffee, catching up on some of my favorite blogs, when I see an article that totally captures my imagination.

My brain starts racing. Yes, this author is on to something, I think. Maybe I do need to change my task management system. Perhaps I do need to find a different way to talk to my kids about food. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Or I’ll be listening to a podcast that sends my brain down the same rabbit holes.

And then whatever I planned on doing that morning goes out the window. I’m now all systems go on changing my life because this article or podcast has struck a chord, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I had planned to work on a client project, but now my mind is racing, and I need to put a new plan into action. I have to share this article with my spouse, make a new meal plan for my kids, and plan to talk to them about the importance of protein.

The article was important. The advice was sound. I should put it into action.

But by reading the article during what should have been a quiet morning for reflection and being present, I let my morning and my day veer wildly off course.

It’s a marvel of modern times that we now have access to so much great advice (although some of it not so great) online, from all sorts of folks who have mastered this or that, but we need to be more intentional about when we digest and take in all of this great advice.

To recap, both the newness that inspires us and the newness that demands our attention have the same effect: they rob us of the essential time to focus, reset, or simply not think.

This is the third essay in a series I’m calling No New New, which encourages us to rethink how we engage with persistent demands for our attention.

Throughout these essays, I’ve tried to make visible what newness looks like in our daily lives. In the next essays, I’ll offer concrete, science-backed ways to limit newness and regain control of our days.

If you want to be alerted when I post these next few essays, please consider subscribing using the button below.

Subscribe now

The full series of No New New essays can be found here and includes:

• Start Your Day on Your Terms

• Your Presence Matters More Than Their Ding

Google just announced that, in 2026, it plans to transform how most of us engage with our inboxes by adding a new AI Inbox view that surfaces our most critical emails and summarizes the rest.

Most of us dread email, so I’m open to almost any serious attempt to make it more manageable. AI has already, and will continue to, make email better for many people.

And while I have some skepticism about Gmail’s current implementation of AI Inbox, at least based on the announcement, I do think it’s pointing in a promising direction.

That said, I do have a few nitpicks with what Google demoed.

First, Gmail isn’t the first product to offer a summary layer over the inbox. It’s clearly building on ideas that Cora explored earlier. I never used Cora myself, but I was excited by what they were attempting. This kind of summary layer will be useful, so I’m glad Gmail, and likely others, are taking a serious stab at it.

Second, this doesn’t solve the deeper attention and focus problems I’ve written about elsewhere. A smarter inbox may reduce friction, but it doesn’t change the underlying dynamics of distraction.

Third, and most concerning. is the set of signals AI Inbox appears to use to determine what’s important. According to Google’s press release, AI Inbox works by:

identifying your VIPs based on signals like people you email frequently, those in your contacts list and relationships it can infer from message content. This lets high-stakes items — like a bill due tomorrow or a dentist reminder — rise to the top.

This is not how I would choose to rank my most critical emails.

As I’ve argued, email is primarily a place where other people tell you what’s important to them. An “urgent” client email is not always truly urgent; nor should it always be presented to you as such.

As an agency owner, I’d want an AI summary to prioritize emails from potential new clients: people I’ve never, or rarely, corresponded with before. I would not want it to elevate messages from the client who emails at all hours of the night with manufactured emergencies.

So I hope there’s a way to explicitly prompt AI Inbox toward what’s truly important to me. Without that, it risks encouraging the worst behavior from the loudest actors, the ones most determined to dominate our inboxes.

Finally, as a longtime Superhuman user, I’m most curious to see how they might approach a summary layer of their own, and whether they’ll give users more control over what “important” actually means.

Subscribe now

I use the app Due a lot and I’m a big fan of it. And it was reminding me about something. I think it was to wash [the baby’s] bottles or whatever before I left for the office.

And I wanted to be able to just say to my phone, “snooze that notification for 30 minutes,” which is just not a thing that I can do right now. But my computer should understand what I want. It’s not a complicated thing to ask.

And I feel like I was thinking about it. Like, I feel like if I asked ChatGPT that, it would understand it and would do it, right? Like, if I had some kind of task or reminder in ChatGPT, and I was like, tell me about this in 30 minutes, I feel like it would understand it well enough to be able to execute on that command, right?

Yeah.

My iPhone can’t do that.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with Siri this morning:

Me: Siri, add paper towels to my Costco order list.

Siri: You don’t have a Costco order list. Would you like me to create one?

Me: (sigh) Siri, add paper towels to my Costco list.

Siri: Okay, I’ve added paper towels to your Costco - Bulk Shopping list.

Siri should have understood what I meant the first time. But because I appended the word “order” to my initial request, Siri completely botched it.

This is exactly what Myke is getting at. ChatGPT would have understood what I meant the first time.

In the age of LLMs, we’ve grown accustomed to AI systems almost always understanding our intent. A chatbot is now as good as, if not better than, a real human at the intern level, precisely because they can abstract meaning and intent, like a real human can.

If my intern responded to me as literally as Siri still does, I would fire them.

But Siri still can’t. And that’s what’s most frustrating about the current state of Apple’s AI. Other systems can do this. Siri still can’t.

Jason Snell, later in the same episode:

“we just want [Siri] to be good, or at least better. My prediction that I made on a podcast recently was, I think by the end of this year, Siri will be better, but we will still be dissatisfied with it.

Very typical Jason kind of prediction, which is like, it will be better and you’ll still be unsatisfied, which I think is probably the most likely scenario, right? They will not not try to make it better.

But they will also probably not totally succeed where everybody’s like, yeah, “Siri’s the best now.” That seems very unlikely just because of human beings, not just because of Apple.”

This feels like the most we can reasonably expect from Siri in 2026. It will likely get better than it currently is, but it will not be the best. ChatGPT will still interpret meaning and intent better than Siri.

But what does better actually mean? I think Myke is on to a good framework for measuring this. If we ask Siri to do something in 2026, and it can’t, but ChatGPT would have understood, that is not better.

If Siri can’t at least understand what ChatGPT can, then it will not have gotten better. And even this is a low bar, because ChatGPT can not only understand our intent, but it often can act on our intent.

I’m not even asking Siri to go the extra mile in 2026. I just don’t want to have to say, “ChatGPT would have understood.”

Will Siri get there in 2026? And what does it say about Apple if it can’t?

Subscribe now

I use the iPad more than my phone, but the phone is obligatory. Is there a world in which I no longer have to have a phone that I also put in my pocket when I leave the house, but mostly I use the iPad? Could this be that product?

It is my iPad and it’s my iPhone at once. So if they can make a case like that, that it’s like, this is also the iPad, I would love to see that.

But with Apple Silicon now powering Macs, why stop at iPhone and iPad?

I know the idea of a dockable computer has been tried countless times, but what if the combination of Apple Silicon and cloud storage now makes it not only possible, but seamless (pardon the folding pun)?

You buy one $2,000-ish device from Apple. When folded, it’s your phone. Unfolded, it’s your iPad. Plug it into a monitor, and it’s your Mac.

Without a fan, or a plethora of performance cores, you probably wouldn’t want to edit a Hollywood movie on it. But a YouTube video? That feels doable

Subscribe now

You say to him, “Honey, what do you think about that?”

And he stares back at you, bewildered, “Huh?”

“The school bake sale,” you say again, slightly annoyed, “did you want to bake the cookies we made last year?”

“Oh, uhm, yeah,” he tries, as he struggles to piece together the conversation you were having just five seconds ago, “Yes, the oatmeal raisin cookies,” he finally manages to say.

Or, you’re enjoying a long-delayed date night with your wife when her watch dings. It’s Stella, texting your wife about the ladies’ game night. Your wife glances at her wrist, thinking you don’t notice, but of course you do. You’re thrilled that your wife has a fantastic group of girlfriends, but when Stella texts, her message immediately becomes a third wheel on your date night.

These notifications carry a subtle but significant cost, one that shows up in our closest relationships. They pull you away from being present with the people who matter most in your life.

A recent study from Dr. Brandon T. McDaniel at Penn State found that “phone use around [a] partner (not total daily phone use) predicted lower relationship satisfaction and coparenting quality.”

And in another study, McDaniel specifically cited the interruptions, the mere act of receiving a phone notification, as the cause of tension in a romantic relationship:

The current abundance of technology in daily life creates opportunities for interruptions in couple interactions, termed technoference or phubbing. We found that on days when participants rated more technoference than usual, they felt worse about their relationship, perceived more conflict over technology use, rated their face-to-face interactions as less positive, and experienced more negative mood.

I can attest to this personally. I can be in the middle of a conversation with my spouse, and if she receives a notification, she is very likely to glance at her phone—or even just her Apple Watch, to read it.

In that brief moment, she leaves our conversation, and I can tell it takes her brain another few moments to re-orient herself back to our conversation, probably because she’s now not only thinking about our conversation, but the conversation that’s happening on her phone or her watch.

I hadn’t heard of the term “phubbing” until I read McDaniel’s study, but it’s an excellent term for how I feel. I feel slighted by her phone. I feel phubbed.

Again, it’s great that her friends want to connect with her about a girls’ night or a book club, but the mere act of the notification gets in the way of the relationship I’m trying to maintain with her.

In my first essay on No New New, I discussed how work emails can sabotage our days, making it harder to deliver the work we had previously promised to colleagues and clients.

But newness, in the form of texts from friends, or maybe even social media notifications, can pull us away from the connections that we’re trying to maintain away from work. These notifications, while they may seem harmless, can harm those relationships in ways that aren’t always obvious.

As I continue this series of essays, I will argue that we need dedicated time away from notifications, and newness in all of its forms. And, in doing so, we can improve not only our work outputs, but also our personal relationships.

You’ll also notice that I haven’t argued for time away from our phones or our devices. As I’ll explore in this series, it’s not the devices themselves that disrupt our days or our relationships, but the newness they introduce, often at the expense of our presence and our intentions.

More on this soon.

If you’re curious to read more about No New New, please consider subscribing to this Substack, or sharing this post with a friend. You’ll find both button options below.

In the next essay, I’ll unpack what I mean by “newness,” and how it shows up in our lives in two distinct ways.

Subscribe now

Share

What do you do? Both Sally and Roger are good clients. You like them both. You promised Sally that you would attend to her matter this morning. Do you let Roger’s matter interfere with your commitment to Sally?

I say no.

Here’s the truth about work emergencies. They don’t stop. Something will always be pressing to someone.

If you try to problem-solve each emergency ahead of work that you previously promised, you will create for yourself a never-ending cycle of broken promises, sloppy work, and stress that you can’t escape from.

But here’s the other problem. Now that you’ve seen Roger’s request, you can’t unsee it. You try to work on Sally’s project, but Roger’s email keeps surfacing in your mind. Your mind starts trying to solve Roger’s problem, instead of doing your best work for Sally.

There’s only one way to prevent the Rogers in your life from throwing you off course and sabotaging your day.

You have to not see their new requests for your attention to begin with.

You have to start each day on your own terms so you can maximize every minute and stay focused on your priorities. Likewise, you’ll want to end your day so you can wake up restored and ready to be the best version of yourself for you, your loved ones, and your colleagues.

I call this idea No New New.

It’s a simple, meaningful approach. But it’s backed by science, which I’ll explore in the upcoming essays, and offers a range of benefits, from better mornings to better outcomes. And better relationships too.

At its core, No New New means no new email, no new texts, and no new social media until you have accomplished most, if not all, of the tasks and goals that you had previously set for yourself or promised to others.

Using No New New, you’re not letting Roger down, or ignoring him. You’re prioritizing Sally today so that you can prioritize Roger later.

Here’s the other funny thing about work emergencies. Most of them can wait. Not forever. But certainly a few hours. In most situations, you can do your best work for Sally in the morning, then solve Roger’s emergency in the afternoon, and Roger will still be grateful for your work.

Over time, your clients and your loved ones will understand that when you attend to their requests and needs, you will do so with your full attention and focus, even if that means they have to be patient.

If you’re ready to explore No New New with me, hit the subscribe button below. Over the next few weeks, I’ll publish a series of essays on how to reclaim your time, attention, and focus with a few simple tweaks.

If you think No New New will resonate for others in your life, I would appreciate you sharing this post with them. I’m working on building this Substack, and the community around it, so we can work together to find more focus and presence in our lives.

Let’s reclaim your days, and the minutes in those days, for you.

Subscribe now

Share

The move reflects where the entire tech industry is headed — toward a future where screens become background noise and audio takes center stage. Smart speakers have already made voice assistants a fixture in more than a third of U.S. homes.

The form factors may differ, but the thesis is the same: audio is the interface of the future. Every space — your home, your car, even your face — is becoming an interface.

Doh, this was a layup and I totally missed it in my predictions.

Although I have written about my own desire for an audio-first interface:

But I know there are times when I would be open to a form factor that isn’t a phone that can capture my thoughts and tasks.

Which is why, at least for me, an AI pendant is intriguing.

Imagine taking a walk with your dog, or a hike, and you get an idea for something that you want to capture quickly. Wouldn’t it be great to do that without pulling out your phone, in a way that either perfectly transcribes your text, or summarizes the essence of your text for a future use, maybe in a notes app or in a task manager?

And my appreciation of WisprFlow:

• WisprFlow - I thought I was a fast typist, but dictating everything, from emails to Slack messages to texts, is much faster.

In any event, I look forward to seeing how AI leans into audio interfaces in 2026. Look for some upcoming writing (from me) on how I’m using my mobile screen less and less. Sign up below if you want to know when these new posts when they go live.

But, at the same time, the AI evolution can be frustratingly slow, and acquisitions are muddying progress.

In 2025, the promised Siri AI features remained unreleased; Atlassian acquired The Browser Company; Superhuman was sold to Grammarly; and Meta AI glasses captured consumers’ interest more than Apple Vision Pro.

For 2026, I’m expecting we’ll see technology evolve at the same clip, which is to say, everything will get a little more interesting, without major breakthroughs.

Here’s what I’m predicting for the next 365 days:

• Siri gets a little smarter, but you’ll have to squint to see (hear) it.

• You’ll have more opportunities to ride in a self-driving taxi and could even end up taking one.

• AI browsers don’t take flight.

• More people will use MCP and connectors, although they might not realize it.

• The Browser Company becomes increasingly irrelevant after making one of the dumbest pivots in tech history.

• Apple Vision Pro continues to go nowhere.

• We’ll see more Meta AI Glasses in the wild.

• Consumers remain confused about where they should be using, and who they should be paying, for enterprise search (Notion, OpenAI, Slack).

• The Grammarly acquisition of Superhuman continues to not make sense. Superhuman email improves (with new AI and calendar features), but Grammarly remains unchanged, and Coda continues to languish behind Notion.

• Electric vehicle purchases and lease rates continue to tick up, despite the lack of a federal subsidy. Though charging infrastructure development will stay flat.

What do you expect, or hope to see from technology in 2026? Let me know in the comments below.

The problem is that Superhuman doesn’t currently let you mark an individual thread as something you want to be notified about.

This comes up for me all the time. I’ll be part of a thread where I really want to know the moment someone replies — but I don’t want to go through the hassle of temporarily adding every sender on that thread to my VIP list.

Hey.com, another email service does support notifications per thread, and I suspect this is a feature many Superhuman users would appreciate natively. Until that happens, though, there’s a simple workaround.

To set it up, you’ll want to do four things:

1. Create a label in Gmail (I call mine “following”)

2. Set up a Superhuman split for that “following” label

3. Turn on mobile notifications for the “following” split inbox (see image below)

4. Apply the “following” label to any thread you want notifications for

That’s it.

Any time there’s a reply on a thread you’ve labeled “following,” you’ll get notified — without changing your broader notification or VIP settings.

This is especially useful for short-term situations like contract negotiations, scheduling threads, or time-sensitive approvals.

I do wish Superhuman offered this natively, but until they do, I hope this workaround is helpful.

Here are the apps that changed how I work in 2025:

• WisprFlow - I thought I was a fast typist, but dictating everything, from emails to Slack messages to texts, is much faster.

• Superhuman and Ask AI – Imagine having a ChatGPT window right inside your email client. You can instruct Ask AI to draft fully formed, comprehensive emails based on data stored in your past messages. This has already saved me hours in the few weeks since it rolled out.

• Granola - AI-generated meeting notes, formatted for maximum efficiency.

• Howie - Hate scheduling calls and meetings? Same. Let Howie be your virtual assistant. Most people won’t even realize they’re talking to an AI.

• Todoist and Ramble mode - Dictate your tasks, including metadata like project list, due date, priority flags, and even corrections, and Todoist figures it out. Pro tip: map your phone’s Action Button to Ramble mode and dictate tasks without even unlocking your phone.

• ChatGPT - What can I say, another year (or just another month?) and ChatGPT continues to be working for our company as something between a very good first-year associate, a career coach, a paralegal, and a proofreader. Trust it just enough, but not too much, and it can save you hours.

Honorable mentions:

• Arc Browser - I still think The Browser Company made one of the biggest blunders in tech when they pivoted from Arc to Dia, but Arc still works, and there’s nothing like it.

• Notion Calendar - Notion Calendar has now fully replaced Fantastical for me. I just wish it had an agenda view on iOS.

• Raycast - I use Raycast for fairly pedestrian things, from file searching to window management. But even with my limited use case, it’s still better than macOS’s new Spotlight.

Also, here’s a pro-tip: You can use WisprFlow to dictate disjointed thoughts directly into Ask AI in Superhuman and let Superhuman AI transform those jumbled prompts into cohesive, professional emails.

What I’ll be Watching in 2026

• Slackbot - a fully rebuilt AI assistant that you and your team can use to surface work knowledge across Slack and your other apps.

• Puzzle - can a new software company chip away at QuickBooks’ dominance among SMBs? I sure hope so.

• Notion and MCP - I remain curious which service is going to be the AI connector between all of our work apps. Not sure it will be Notion, but they are aggressively pursuing this angle. The open question is what the emerging Superhuman/Grammarly/Coda triumvirate cooks up.

What apps, tools or new features changed how you work in 2025? Let me know in the comments below.

And yet, my small company still can’t go all in with Notion. We have some ongoing experiments with Notion, but we’re still stubbornly dependent on Airtable.

While I’m thrilled that Notion is investing so much energy in building out their AI product, which, don’t get me wrong, is essential, we need to see them go back and polish some of the unfinished basics of their core database features.

I suspect there are others like us who would gladly switch from Airtable to Notion if Notion’s database competed a little bit better in areas where Airtable excels.

What features would I like to see Notion bring to databases in 2026? There are four.

Securely Hide Columns and Rows when Sharing Database Views Externally

Notion needs to improve how external sharing of database views works. Right now, there is no way to securely share a curated view of a Notion database that hides columns and filters rows. This is something Airtable has done for years, and it’s the biggest reason we stay on Airtable.

For example, let’s assume we have an employee database, and one column stores employee salaries.

In both Airtable and Notion, I can create a view that hides the salary column, then further filter it to include only employees in my legal department.

But, critically, Airtable securely preserves these hidden rows and columns when sharing this view externally. Notion does not. Anyone with access to the shared view in Notion can unhide those columns and rows to see the salary field and employees in other departments.

This feels like a huge oversight to me. In fact, a quick search on Reddit shows hundreds of people raising the same concern.

Additionally, there are dozens of YouTube videos that offer workarounds for this. All of those workarounds are incredibly convoluted, hacky, and normally require third-party software. Notion is clearly sleeping on a big user demand, and one that, if they implemented correctly, would bring them a lot more users from people like us who are currently locked into Airtable.

Board and Gallery Views Need Property Labels

Currently, there’s no way to see a property field’s name when viewing it in board or gallery views.

Let’s say you’re looking at a board view of a pros/cons database. While it’s possible to see the text in the pros and cons fields, there’s no way of knowing which text is for “Pros” and which for “Cons” as Notion doesn’t display the property label, or header, in these views.

This feels like an easy fix but a significant quality-of-life upgrade.

Let’s Have a Real Rating Field in Databases

Notion should add a proper rating field for databases. Yes, you can hack it together with the single-select property, but it’s not the same as a true rating field, where you can simply drag from left to right to change a value.

Just as a proper email field is better than a text field for email addresses, a true rating field is better than a single-select field for ratings.

Grouping and Ordering Databases and Kanban Views is Too Damn Complicated

Finally, I can’t begin to tell you how often I attempt to group a database or order a board view the way I intend and get stuck. Notion has far too many fiddly settings for sorting, grouping, and ordering. That makes it unintuitive even for someone who writes a productivity blog about software to figure out what they’re doing. This morning alone I got stuck on sorting a database view from high priority to low priority. This should be drop-dead simple. And yet I, along with some help from ChatGPT, just couldn’t figure it out. I don’t know what the problem is, but this needs to be simplified.

Are you still relying on Airtable? What missing features are preventing you from switching to Notion? Let me know in the comments below.

Why the gadget rush? The thinking is that the personalized, context-aware future of artificial intelligence demands a new kind of device. Rest assured, though, that smartphone in your pocket will be the brains of the operation for years to come.

AI models interact in a personalized way, so these gadgets aim to give the assistant access to your world. You can talk to it, let it overhear your day and—in the case of glasses—let it see what you’re seeing in real time. The promise is a seamless and hands-free flow of answers, live translations, reminders, coaching and ways to pretend you absolutely pay attention in meetings.

I think, for now, these devices may be overshooting what the hardware can reasonably do. Seems like the sweet spot would be simply focusing on short voice dictation for capturing notes and tasks.

Here’s me, just yesterday:

I’ve long believed there’s a market for a device like this. I’m not sure I want to wear another ring (I already wear a wedding ring and Oura ring), but I’m all for hardware makers entering this category and pushing it forward.

I think of these as devices I’d use when walking my dog because that’s when I feel the pull to capture my thoughts and reminders without getting distracted by my phone.

But, also, where’s Apple in all of this? From me in October:

If I were Apple sure, I guess I’d be working on glasses because it seems like there is some market for them. But I’m not convinced the market for AI glasses is as big as the market could be for an AI pendant device that is…almost any form factor other than something you wear on your face.

And Apple already has a pendant: Apple Watch.

Plus, the silicon, computational power, and cellular connectivity will continue to pose significant challenges for glasses for years to come. However, the Watch form factor is likely only a chip or two away from processing complex AI requests locally on device.

So, if I were Apple, instead of spending resources trying to beat Meta at glasses, or Jony Ive and Sam Altman in the pendant race, I’d be focusing on the pendant they already have.

There’s clearly something brewing with the convergence of small devices that aren’t phones and AI.

But, maybe, two things need to happen:

1. Hardware makers that aren’t Apple need to narrow the scope of what they can ship for now and stick to short dictation.

2. Hardware makers that are Apple (Apple), should focus on the AI device they already have.

PS. I also think Apple needs to make a ring for those who don’t want the watch form factor, but that’s a post for another day.

Want more of me? Here’s a video:

• Chromium-based for broad compatibility and extension support

• Keyboard shortcuts

And the reason so many of us power users haven’t abandoned Arc, or switched to Dia, is that no other browser (that I’m aware of) has both.

There are Arc replicas that utilize WebKit, but that limits users to a more limited extension library.

Or, there’s Dia itself, which is slowly bringing back Arc features, like vertical tabs, but sleeping on keyboard shortcuts.

I’m also not yet convinced AI agents will live at the browser level. To be sure, agents are the future, and they will be ubiquitous. But my money is on agents operating from a combination of MCP support, the system level and within apps. Or perhaps a third party tool like Superhuman Go.

For this, and because I don’t see how Dia competes on the AI front with whatever Google and OpenAI have cooking up for their own browsers, I suspect Dia is not long for this world…unless it can pivot back to being a browser for power users, and charging them a monthly subscrip

tion for that power.

Of course, succeeding or failing may no longer matter to The Browser Company’s new corporate parent. In which case, I do hope someone picks up the true torch from where Arc left off, because I do believe there’s a business model in what Arc was building, even if The Browser Company couldn’t see it.

Do you ever have flashes of insight or an idea worth remembering? This happens to me 5-10 times every day. If I don’t write down the thought immediately, it slips out of my mind. Worst of all, I remember that I’ve forgotten something and spend the next 10 minutes trying to remember what it is. So I invented external memory for my brain.

Introducing Pebble Index 01 - a small ring with a button and microphone. Hold the button, whisper your thought, and it’s sent to your phone. It’s added to your notes, set as a reminder, or saved for later review.

I’ve long believed there’s a market for a device like this. I’m not sure I want to wear another ring (I already wear a wedding ring and Oura ring), but I’m all for hardware makers entering this category and pushing it forward.

I think of these as devices I’d use when walking my dog because that’s when I feel the pull to capture my thoughts and reminders without getting distracted by my phone.

I do continue to wonder why the Apple Watch isn’t this device yet. From me back in October:

At the recommendation of David Sparks, I plan to take a closer look at Whisper Memos for Apple Watch, although I’m hoping that Granola or WisprFlow, two apps I already pay for, will consider Watch apps in the near future.

One caveat with the ring form factor is cold weather. Here in the Northeast of the United States, there are a number of glove-heavy months that will make voice capture challenging to a ring.

Also, it seems like Pebble wasn’t the only AI company to announce a smart ring this week. From TechCrunch: Former Meta employees launch Stream, a smart ring that takes voice notes and controls music.

In any event, there’s something to the Index 01, and I’ll be watching this space closely.