Why I Burned Out, and What I Am Changing

I slowed down this past week. I realized I can come up with and launch far more tasks than I can carefully bring to completion. AI agents extend what I can do, but every new branch still asks for my attention.

A day can begin with two or three tasks and turn into ten by midday. Some get finished. Others remain half-open, waiting for a decision, a review, or a clear ending. The agents can keep producing work, but my ability to supervise the growing number of branches does not expand at the same speed.

I need to know how many tasks I am carrying at once. When that number rises above five, I want to decide in advance what would count as finished, or explicitly put the task on hold. At eight or nine parallel tasks, it becomes hard for me to think clearly about all of them. When I push past my own limits, the system starts to come apart at the point where it still depends on me.

That is the strange tension of this moment. AI makes it feel as though almost anything is possible. But the person directing the work has a real limit. I want to keep moving without turning my attention into the bottleneck, so I am learning to run fewer tasks at once and make clearer choices about which ones I will actually finish.