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Not to come across as dismissive of your job, but if a "day's worth of email" can be done in 20 minutes now, it to me mostly highlights that it was mostly busy-

Not to come across as dismissive of your job, but if a "day's worth of email" can be done in 20 minutes now, it to me mostly highlights that it was mostly busy-work with little value and could have had another process? Good that AI improved upon the old process, though.

latexr 26d ago
Assuming your first sentence is accurate, I would disagree with the second. Making a bad process more efficient is a negative, not a positive, we should instead strive to improve the situation. The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster. That still wastes resources and stresses the system, which makes it worse by hiding problems that will bite you in the future. For example, say you deal with 100 emails a day. 90 of those are pointless busy-work and 10 are meaningful. It takes you all day. Now you begin using an LLM. You still have to separate the 90 from the 10 but then have the LLM reply with the 90 and leave the 10 for yourself because they are important and you have to make sure they’re done right. It now takes you a fraction of the day, so what happens is you start taking on more and more email¹. You’re now at 300 a day, with 270 busy-work and 30 meaningful (same ratio as before). Then one day your LLM breaks (ran out of tokens; a model was retired; bad connection; your powerful local machine broke down) and now you’re flooded by email and don’t even have time to separate the bad from the good, let alone prioritise and reply. If you had instead fixed the busy-work problem, you’d have been fine. ¹ Let’s be real: Work expands to fill the allotted time (Parkinson's Law). Those selling increases in productivity always promise more free time but what always happens is more work.
- mschuster91 26d ago
  > The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster. Good luck trying to bring this through your typical bigco process management. Either your initiative dies, having gotten caught in a spider web of red tape, or it succeeds but now half your colleagues are angry at you to the point there's a non-zero chance of you getting beaten up, because now they have to do actual work or leave the niche they have made themselves comfortable coasting in for 20 years. Office politics is even worse than actual politics.
  - latexr 26d ago
    “You won’t have luck implementing a sensible solution on a dysfunctional system” is an evergreen answer which doesn’t offer any insight. It’s a cop-out and discourages any attempts at improving anything. Not everyone works for big corporations, and of those who do some work in departments with sensible bosses where they can make some change. As an exaggerated example, we could also say “one way to resolve issues in a community is to gather the people involved and have them talk through their issues in a room with an experienced impartial mediator to help guide the discussion” and then have someone reply “good luck trying that at a maximum security prison where inmates are constantly confined to solitary and beaten by the officers”. Yeah, no shit. You have to adapt your solutions to your environment, but that’s no reason to dismiss a general starting concept.
    - _1100 25d ago
      Having a name for these "thought-killing statements" or "thought-terminating cliches" has helped me recognize them in all sorts of settings in my life. Corporate, social, religious, the list goes on. It makes sense as humans that we do many things to simplify things or even eliminate them in order to save energy and avoid stress, and we should be careful to recognize a need for balance while still working towards some greater goal, purpose, or good. Even so, much like kerning, once you are aware of it, it is painfully difficult to ignore.
  - epolanski 25d ago
    +1, I see it very clearly at my SO work. Half of her organization has just a calendar filled with meetings. And without meeting the organization would find that you only really need a third of the people, and you would even likely increase the overall output. Many time wastes are just designed to make people busy, not productive.
- deleted 26d ago
  [deleted]
- stasomatic 26d ago
  Making a bad process more efficient is a negative, not a positive, we should instead strive to improve the situation. This gent can Minesweep his extra free time and not tell his bosmang "I finished my day in 20 mins, what else you got?" I appreciate your comment honestly, the Those selling increases in productivity always promise more free time but what always happens is more work. But the real is real, so now what? Better faster AI? Just curious, replying in good humor. Cheers.
safety1st 26d ago
I mean, I can't stop people from emailing me. I get over a hundred non-spam, non-mailing-list emails on some days. I'm not able to respond to most of them. I'm often not expected to, I'm just being copied in as a FYI. The AI is able to assess subject and intent well enough to determine what should receive my limited time, and through the voice interface it converts "making coffee" time into "composing email" time. I do read every email that's sent to me eventually, but it can take several weeks in some cases. I don't let AI reply to anything for me, but I'm happy to have it propose a draft.
- skydhash 26d ago
  I'm using mu4e as my MUA and one the things that it offers are actions (something similar in mutt is macro) where you can map a keybind to some code that do something to the current message or the set of selected messages. This is generally the reason that a lot of mailing list recipients (high volume of messages) use those software, where you can refile messages very quickly leaving the more thoughtful reply things for later.
- vablings 26d ago
  I think something concerning is that your email has become a sluth and for people wanting to contact you and not your AI agent how do they break through that 2FA step
Wolfenstein98k 25d ago
Don't confuse "Ben can answer these emails in 20 minutes" with "anyone could answer these emails in 20 minutes" Imagine you could get Elon to answer your emails. Is that perfectly interchangeable with any other human?
- matsemann 25d ago
  It's kinda my point, though, that it's busy "manager" work if it really can be answered by an LLM. So yeah, getting answer from someone like Elon is exactly as useful as just asking the LLM myself.

latexr 26d ago

Assuming your first sentence is accurate, I would disagree with the second. Making a bad process more efficient is a negative, not a positive, we should instead strive to improve the situation. The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster. That still wastes resources and stresses the system, which makes it worse by hiding problems that will bite you in the future. For example, say you deal with 100 emails a day. 90 of those are pointless busy-work and 10 are meaningful. It takes you all day. Now you begin using an LLM. You still have to separate the 90 from the 10 but then have the LLM reply with the 90 and leave the 10 for yourself because they are important and you have to make sure they’re done right. It now takes you a fraction of the day, so what happens is you start taking on more and more email¹. You’re now at 300 a day, with 270 busy-work and 30 meaningful (same ratio as before). Then one day your LLM breaks (ran out of tokens; a model was retired; bad connection; your powerful local machine broke down) and now you’re flooded by email and don’t even have time to separate the bad from the good, let alone prioritise and reply. If you had instead fixed the busy-work problem, you’d have been fine. ¹ Let’s be real: Work expands to fill the allotted time (Parkinson's Law). Those selling increases in productivity always promise more free time but what always happens is more work.

mschuster91 26d ago
> The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster. Good luck trying to bring this through your typical bigco process management. Either your initiative dies, having gotten caught in a spider web of red tape, or it succeeds but now half your colleagues are angry at you to the point there's a non-zero chance of you getting beaten up, because now they have to do actual work or leave the niche they have made themselves comfortable coasting in for 20 years. Office politics is even worse than actual politics.
- latexr 26d ago
  “You won’t have luck implementing a sensible solution on a dysfunctional system” is an evergreen answer which doesn’t offer any insight. It’s a cop-out and discourages any attempts at improving anything. Not everyone works for big corporations, and of those who do some work in departments with sensible bosses where they can make some change. As an exaggerated example, we could also say “one way to resolve issues in a community is to gather the people involved and have them talk through their issues in a room with an experienced impartial mediator to help guide the discussion” and then have someone reply “good luck trying that at a maximum security prison where inmates are constantly confined to solitary and beaten by the officers”. Yeah, no shit. You have to adapt your solutions to your environment, but that’s no reason to dismiss a general starting concept.
  - _1100 25d ago
    Having a name for these "thought-killing statements" or "thought-terminating cliches" has helped me recognize them in all sorts of settings in my life. Corporate, social, religious, the list goes on. It makes sense as humans that we do many things to simplify things or even eliminate them in order to save energy and avoid stress, and we should be careful to recognize a need for balance while still working towards some greater goal, purpose, or good. Even so, much like kerning, once you are aware of it, it is painfully difficult to ignore.
- epolanski 25d ago
  +1, I see it very clearly at my SO work. Half of her organization has just a calendar filled with meetings. And without meeting the organization would find that you only really need a third of the people, and you would even likely increase the overall output. Many time wastes are just designed to make people busy, not productive.
deleted 26d ago
[deleted]
stasomatic 26d ago
Making a bad process more efficient is a negative, not a positive, we should instead strive to improve the situation. This gent can Minesweep his extra free time and not tell his bosmang "I finished my day in 20 mins, what else you got?" I appreciate your comment honestly, the Those selling increases in productivity always promise more free time but what always happens is more work. But the real is real, so now what? Better faster AI? Just curious, replying in good humor. Cheers.

safety1st 26d ago

I mean, I can't stop people from emailing me. I get over a hundred non-spam, non-mailing-list emails on some days. I'm not able to respond to most of them. I'm often not expected to, I'm just being copied in as a FYI. The AI is able to assess subject and intent well enough to determine what should receive my limited time, and through the voice interface it converts "making coffee" time into "composing email" time. I do read every email that's sent to me eventually, but it can take several weeks in some cases. I don't let AI reply to anything for me, but I'm happy to have it propose a draft.

skydhash 26d ago
I'm using mu4e as my MUA and one the things that it offers are actions (something similar in mutt is macro) where you can map a keybind to some code that do something to the current message or the set of selected messages. This is generally the reason that a lot of mailing list recipients (high volume of messages) use those software, where you can refile messages very quickly leaving the more thoughtful reply things for later.
vablings 26d ago
I think something concerning is that your email has become a sluth and for people wanting to contact you and not your AI agent how do they break through that 2FA step

Wolfenstein98k 25d ago

Don't confuse "Ben can answer these emails in 20 minutes" with "anyone could answer these emails in 20 minutes" Imagine you could get Elon to answer your emails. Is that perfectly interchangeable with any other human?

matsemann 25d ago
It's kinda my point, though, that it's busy "manager" work if it really can be answered by an LLM. So yeah, getting answer from someone like Elon is exactly as useful as just asking the LLM myself.