I opened my daily to-do list and found 156 items,” she wrote in Fortune . Every few weeks, another AI assistant promises to take a task off your plate. The promises are tempting: it can draft the email, sort the inbox and plan the week. The question is no longer whether these tools can do the work. It’s whether they are lightening the load or quietly adding to it. Morissa Schwartz, an entrepreneur, author and AI strategist, recently discovered just how easily an attempt to improve productivity can turn into another job. “I believe in AI. But my AI assistant gave me more work than it could finish.
For assistant execution, I’m aiming for roughly 25 meaningful entries on a weekday, while preserving real deadlines and necessary daily operations. She revealed how she retrained her AI assistants.
“A genuine deadline deserves space that has not already been occupied by 40 vaguely urgent reminders,” she wrote. ‘This browser session cannot access the account’ identifies an access problem,” she said. “Here are the changes I’m making. First, I want a daily list that reflects available capacity. The number is a working limit for my system, rather than a productivity prescription for everyone. Its purpose was to force her system to prioritise tasks instead of treating everything as equally urgent. Flexible work also moves into a backlog with a regular checkpoint. Items waiting on someone else get a waiting status rather than a place at the top. Related steps, such as research, outreach and follow-ups for a single campaign, are grouped under one execution item. The details stay available, but they stop competing for attention. Fourth, a ‘blocker’ needs to be specific. “‘Unable to complete’ gives me another mystery to manage. ‘The form requires an answer only you can provide’ gives me a decision. She wanted the AI to explain clearly why a task could not be completed, whether it needed her input or had an access issue. This would help her solve the problem quickly without delaying other tasks.
“If everything is due today, the list has stopped helping me decide what to do today.
