Tuesday Email: Capacity Without Purpose is Just More Busy Work

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

Here's what nobody tells you about AI: You'll create massive capacity... and fill it with exactly the same work you were doing before.

More emails. More reports. More meetings. Just... more.

I see it everywhere.

Teams automate their research process and suddenly they're producing 30-page meeting prep documents.

Firms build AI workflows for client communication and double their outreach volume.

We solve the "how" of getting things done faster, but we never answer the "why" we wanted that time in the first place.

Without intentionality, all the capacity we create just becomes a larger container for non-essential labor.

It extends the plateau we are standing on. And that's why everyone feels like they have more capacity but somehow less time.

Look, capacity is created through solving the how.

How do I respond to emails faster? How do I research more efficiently? How do I analyze portfolios quicker? AI solves these problems brilliantly.

But here's the thing—once you've solved the how, you need an answer to the why. Why did you create this capacity? What are you going to do with that freed time to reach your why?

Most people skip this step entirely. They celebrate the efficiency win and immediately fill the space with more of what they were already doing.

There's a concept called Parkinson's Law that explains this perfectly.

The idea is simple: work expands to fill the time available. If you give me three days to build a presentation, I'll get it done in three days. Give me 14 days for the same presentation? It'll take me 14 days. Not because the work requires it, but because constraints force focus and time invites complexity.

The vacuum of time is a magnet for complexity.

We think that more time means we'll finish early and have capacity left over.

But that's never the case.

We fill it all the way to the deadline because we're driven by busyness, not by completion. We want to show we're busy. We want to show it took time, that we put thought into it. Even if we didn't start until day 13.

And the data proves this. Americans reporting they "never had enough time" rose from 70% in 2011 to 80% in 2018—a period that coincided with the rapid adoption of productivity software. We got better tools. We got more capacity. And we felt more time-starved than ever.

But it gets worse.

When AI makes deep research reports easy to generate in seconds, we don't produce fewer reports, we produce an explosion of them. We've effectively reallocated cognitive constraint rather than removing it.

The time saved on creation gets spent on consumption. Your team now has to read everything you're generating, and suddenly their freed capacity is gone too.

The real issue is that we're confusing capacity with capability.

Capacity is volume—how many hours you have, how many clients you can serve. Capability is effectiveness—what skills you possess, what quality you deliver, what problems you can solve.

AI creates capacity. It doesn't automatically create capability. And without pairing the two, you become a bottleneck who is capable but exhausted, pushing harder rather than growing smarter.

A large majority has the thesis on AI that it's going to take away jobs.

That's wrong.

Here's what's actually happening: There's a concept called the Jevons Paradox from 1865. An economist noticed that as steam engines became more fuel efficient, coal consumption didn't fall—it exploded. The paradox suggests that increasing the efficiency of a resource lowers its price or effort required, which stimulates demand and increases total consumption.

AI is doing exactly this. The cost to take an idea to reality is lower than ever before, which will lead to an explosion of ideas and then lead to more jobs, more opportunities, and what I believe is a new age industrial revolution.

I started to realize something recently. I spent eight years and seven and a half million dollars building a technology company for advisors. Today, I could build an initial prototype of what we created in a weekend. That prototype could test with real advisors, get feedback, iterate—all before needing to hire anyone or raise money. That is what's so crazy about the world we live in.

AI is not going to eliminate all of what we're doing. It's just going to give us the opportunity to do more new things that we never thought we could do in the past.

But only if we're intentional about it.

So how do you break this pattern?

It starts with problem clarity. Strategy must drive the tool rather than using the tools as a proxy for strategy. Too many people are building their strategy around what AI can do instead of determining what tools they need to execute their strategy.

You can use an LLM to help you think through strategy. But you have to own the idea. I learned this the hard way running my tech business. I'd bring in smart advisors, have these board meetings, they'd tell me what to do. For a couple weeks I'd follow their advice. But when I hit a challenge, I couldn't overcome it because it wasn't my idea. You have to ultimately own the idea.

Then you need workflow stability. Your current process must behave consistently before AI touches it. If you don't understand how work flows, where decisions get made, how exceptions are handled—AI won't understand it either. AI will just make something up.

Next comes governance. Who is accountable when outcomes surprise you? Who owns what part of the process? This has to be defined before automation.

AI automation is the final layer. It's the most amplifying, which means it will amplify clarity or amplify confusion with equal force. If you haven't done the first three steps, AI will just make your spaghetti more real.

Now I know what you're thinking: "But Matt, emails come in all the time. Markets move. I have to respond."

I get it. I'm not saying ignore your clients. But do you have to reply two minutes after receiving an email? Could you check emails three times a day for 30 minutes instead of every 10 minutes? Could you set trading blocks—9:30 when markets open, 12:30, and 2:30 before close—instead of watching tickers all day?

That's being intentional. That's creating space to do other things.

Here's what I'd suggest: Start with theme days. Don't try to restructure your entire week. Just pick one day where you spend two hours on something that serves your why. Maybe it's learning AI. Maybe it's strategic planning. Maybe it's deepening client relationships.

I tried the whole "structure Monday through Friday with different themes" thing. It failed ridiculously. Start smaller. One theme. One day. Two hours. Build from there.

Here's what's really going on: Business identity is a societal construct where being perpetually occupied is equated with status, importance, and professional virtue. Everybody thinks that just being busy makes you feel like you are important.

And that's all just a bunch of baloney.

We don't take intentionality seriously because we think if we spend two hours just learning about AI, we're not being busy. So we're not valuable. But that's completely wrong. Decision-making becomes both easier and more overwhelming as the bottleneck shifts from information access to attention, judgment, and prioritization. The value of attention is higher than ever before.

You've got to get back to essentialism—the disciplined pursuit of less, done better. Look at everything you're doing and ask what can be eliminated without clients really missing it. I used to write these newsletters to our team. I thought if I stopped, everyone would notice and really want them. One day I just stopped. Nobody cared. Which was a little hurtful, but I get it. Nobody cared.

Protect that white space for what actually matters.

When I was really young in this business, I felt so behind.

I just wanted time to learn.

So I did something I'm talking about now, I was intentional about it. I decided I'd spend one day a month at the library. Quiet, peaceful, not distracted. Just heads down gathering information and learning.

I remember telling this older advisor. He said, "What are you doing? Why would you do that? That's crazy."

But I kept doing it. For a while. I had folders and books. I structured what I'd focus on each session. I felt like I was making progress relative to my peers, which mattered to me then.

But the lesson I learned was I didn't have a specific why.

I thought the why of learning more would be enough. It wasn't.

Learning provided a high and that's what I kept chasing. But I didn't have a reason for it.

What was I learning and what did I plan to do with that learning? What outcome was I trying to drive toward?

Intention is more than just doing something deliberately. It's doing something deliberately toward a specific why, with a specific what you're going to do to get there.

I stopped going to the library because I realized I was just creating capacity without purpose. I was filling time with learning that made me feel productive but didn't actually move me forward.

Don't make the same mistake with AI.

You're creating capacity. That's good. But what's your why? And what are you actually going to do with that time to reach it?

Because without those answers, you're just going to fill it with more meetings, more emails, and more reports. You'll be just as busy as before. Maybe busier.

And you'll still be standing on the same plateau.

The best is ahead!

-Matt