March 9, 2026

Miraculous productivity tool or shiniest object ever?

The irony of my trip down the OpenClaw rabbit hole is that the promise of having your own personal AI agent is that it will increase your productivity by handling tedious repetitive tasks for you.

For me at least, the reality so far is that I’m three days behind on my daily email, so...

That doesn’t seem very productive.

So what gives?

As I look back over the past week or two, I’ve been spending a ton of time experimenting with OC to better understand its capabilities and limitations.

The more I understood what it could potentially do, the more I wanted to do.

In other words, instead of simply applying OC’s capabilities to my existing SOPs and enjoying the productivity gains from a few simple automations, I used my increased bandwidth to pull probably a dozen projects off my “maybe someday” list into active development.

On top of that, I created a few brand new moonshot projects that weren’t even on my radar before.

So...

Before OC, let’s say I had one or two active projects.

Now I have nearly twenty.

And even though OC is doing almost all the heavy lifting on these, there’s a surprisingly high cognitive load that comes from all the context switching.

It’s just too many things to keep in my mind. It feels like a swarm of bees buzzing around my head.

The good news is, the solution is obvious:

Focus.

How do I choose which things to focus on?

The same way I did before OC:

Clearly define my overall business objective.
Choose a strategy that I believe will achieve the objective.
Only do things that are aligned with my strategy, and say no to everything else.

(NOTE: I’ll try not to spam you with too many emails as I catch back up with my writing schedule. Thanks for your patience!)

Yours,

—J