Two newsletters in my inbox this morning. Both wrote of overload, distraction, and the constant churn of modern work.
Azeem Azhar asked whether AI could filter the noise, manage our inboxes, and protect space for meaningful work. Better tools, he muses, might just give us back control.
Oliver Burkeman took a different route and asked why we’re trying to control everything in the first place. Maybe the real problem, he muses, isn’t the flood of tasks but our refusal to accept that we’ll never get it all done. Better boundaries, fewer illusions, and learning to live with what we can’t complete, rather than better systems, are his takeaways.
Smarter augmentation vs Honest limitations
Didn’t Marshall McLuhan once say of technology that every extension is also an amputation?
Originally written for LinkedIn on 21 June 2025. View original →
Gautam John 
Leave a comment