Picture this. It’s Sunday night. You’ve got three assignments due, a club meeting to prep for, replies sitting in four different apps, a show you promised yourself you’d finish, and somewhere in there; you were supposed to “work on yourself.”
You open a new productivity app to manage it all. Yeah. We’ve been there.
Here’s something that a researcher named David Epstein just wrote about and it hit differently. He says we’re wired to solve problems by adding things. More tools, more plans, more tabs open. But the real move? Figuring out what to take off the list.
He talks about a world-class research team at MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute; some of the smartest people on the planet. They were so busy working on everything that they were actually getting less done. Sound familiar? So they did something radical. They wrote every single project on a Post-it note and stuck them all on a wall. What they saw shocked them: half the projects were redundant. And there were literally twice as many things in progress than they could ever realistically finish. So they started cancelling the lower-priority stuff. In two years, they cut their projects by more than half and actually completed more.
The lesson isn’t about being lazy. It’s about being honest. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth Epstein points out, AI tools, apps, hacks, they’re brilliant at producing more. But none of them can answer the harder question: Should this even be getting done? That’s on us.
So maybe the most productive thing you do this week isn’t adding a new habit or downloading another app. Maybe it’s looking at everything on your plate, and asking, what actually matters here? Put it on the wall. See what stays.
Inspired by David Epstein’s “It’s Never Been Easier to Do Too Much” : Range Widely, May 2026
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