Summarized, Archived, Exhausted
Not sure what happened first - I got old, or apps stopped being cool.
The blooming ecosystem of iOS apps used to feel energizing. Sharing emails from Dispatch to Things 2, or connecting services through IFTTT, felt like having a productive superpower in your pocket. There was a sense of possibility - that software was getting more personal, more elegant, more fun. You’d stumble on a new indie app, and suddenly your workflow felt smarter. But then again, I’m not sure if it was the apps - or just the feeling of being young, when everything felt wide open.
Over time, exhaustion kicked in. Eventually, you realized no new automation or clever app would actually make you more productive - there's a limit to how many features you’ll actually use, and beyond that, it's just noise.
Now it’s all a blur. Every app is adding AI. “We’ve added FlinkAI to Cajoo, so you can emotion-sort your life backlog via Izea MCP.” Naturally.
The myth of the never-ending productivity is sold to us under the new sauce. In this future, we’ll never forget anything - because AI will summarize and remember it all for us. We’ll never miss a meeting - because AI will auto-attend and send us a cheerful bullet-point recap. We’ll never be disorganized - because AI will cluster our messy thoughts into tidy mind maps. We’ll never miss a deadline - because AI will... You get the idea.
If WordStar 4.0 was enough for George R.R. Martin to write Game of Thrones, then Things 3 or Reminders - with no AI features - are enough to remind me to take the trash out. Or TextEdit - to write something profound. Or Orion - to browse the internet.
Okay, maybe that’s a bad example - The Winds of Winter still isn’t finished - but that’s probably less about the software, and more about George having the time of his life spending his Game of Thrones money in semi-retirement.
Okay, maybe that’s a bad example - The Winds of Winter still isn’t finished - but that’s probably less about the software, and more about George having the time of his life spending his Game of Thrones money in semi-retirement.
In this constant race to increase value for shareholders, we forget about the ephemerality of human nature. There’s a reason our memory works the way it does - we’re meant to forget things. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Forgetting creates space. It softens pain, blurs the noise, helps us move on. Not every moment needs to be archived, indexed, summarized, and retrieved on demand using AI. Some things are supposed to fade.
So go ahead and disable that shiny new integration. Archive the tabs. Clear the backlog. Delete the saved articles.
Let it go. That’s how you make room for what’s next.