One founder I spoke to this week mentioned he had 1,200 lines of ideas for blog posts, to-dos, market observations, product thoughts, things he’d meant to follow up on…
There’s at least one document somewhere in your system – it’s called ‘ideas’ or ‘backlog’ or ‘misc’. It’s been there for a while. You lost it once. Started a new one, You add to one or the other. You rarely take things out. You know you should deal with it and you don’t.
The document is a partial record of stuff you’ve decided to care about without deciding what to do about it. Every item = a small claim on your attention. Together, it’s a lot of background noise.
What The Document Costs You
Most people treat their backlog doc as a minor irritant. Minor irritation => minor irritations => major irritation => a nasty rash => bubonic plague… Where to draw the line?
Every unresolved item is a deferred decision. Deferral becomes the default. You stop dealing with it. You manage around the list rather than resolve. The stuff, your ideas, your intentions, your plans for the business you meant to build. You feel a faint sense of failure every time you think about it and move on.
The problem is not time. If time were the constraint, you’d have dealt with it in a quieter week years ago. The constraint is the absence of anyone else who can process it. In any business where you’re the main strategic brain, the backlog is yours alone. You can add to it, but you can never quite clear it, because clearing it requires the same thinking capacity that everything else in the business is already competing for.
Why This Matters Now
Today, you can use tools to execute the boring stuff so you can focus on the stuff that you decide matters. Not the decisions, but the processing. Taking raw input and turning it into something you can look at and act on: that work no longer has to wait for you to have a free afternoon.
Back to the Founder…
He said he had put aside time next week to work through this then decide what to do with it. I asked directly, it turns out that setting time aside next week for this has been going on a long time.
We tried an alternate option, we pasted the whole doc into the OS.
As we watched, in the space of 3 minutes, the document got digested and organised into structured content plans, a separate list of prioritised to-dos, and 60 blog and video topics. He watched it happen.
His response: “It’s done what I was going to do next week AND organised it. I can see how I can use this now.”
A lightning bolt of realisation,
“AI just gave me a day I was dreading back”.
He wasn’t surprised by the capability. He was delighted by the outcome. He didn’t leave the session with a framework to think about his backlog, he left with a plan.
We’ve all got at least one similar document.
The document isn’t waiting for you to have more time. It’s waiting for you to stop being the only one who can process it.
AI should work for you. When it does, it can delight.
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