I opened my email this morning and there were three product announcements from companies I have never heard of. Each one was going to change how I work. Each one had a logo I will not remember by Friday. I closed the tab and made more coffee.
That used to be unusual for me. For years I read every announcement. I clicked through every demo. I built side project after side project just to keep up with whatever wave was supposedly cresting. Now I just feel tired.
If you're feeling the same thing, Id like to suggest that you are not broken. You are just on schedule.
I've been in this industry long enough to have watched a few waves come through. RPA was going to eliminate back office work. Low code was going to make every business analyst a developer. Blockchain was going to remake supply chains. AI copilots were going to ten x our productivity. Agents are now going to replace whole roles. Some of these were real shifts. Some were not. All of them arrived with the same breathless tone, the same conference circuit, the same blog posts about how everything was about to change.
Something Ive learned is that every tool that survives eventually becomes Tuesday. It stops being the future and starts being part of the floor you walk on. Nobody writes a blog post about npm install anymore. And Im pretty positive no one is getting excited about Jira. Git is just there. The wave that felt like it was going to drown you is now the puddle you step over without thinking. That is what success looks like for a tool. Boring infrastructure that you stop noticing.
Which means the exhaustion you are feeling is not really about the tools. Its about the gap between the volume of the announcements and the actual rate at which any of this becomes useful... The announcements come in daily. The integration into your job comes in months or years. Your brain is being asked to pay attention at the speed of marketing and adopt at the speed of reality, and those two speeds do not match.
So Ive given myself permission to stop trying. I let the announcements pile up. I look at the ones my team is actually using. I learn the tool when it shows up in a real ticket, not when it shows up in a launch post. The waves will keep coming. Some of them will become Tuesday. Most of them will not. I will be here either way, drinking coffee, ignoring the email.
Top comments (10)
stopped reading every announcement around 18 months ago. now I wait for the post-mortem blog posts. faster signal.
LOL I think most of us are doing something similar at this point.
yeah the ratio of hype to useful thing just keeps widening. the 6-week post-mortem pool is almost always more informative than launch week.
Yes, I feel the same, especially with AI. It’s developing so fast. Last year was such a breakthrough for AI, and it became widespread. I’m trying not to fall behind, but it’s just too fast. 💨
this hit differently from a habit change angle. i spent 12 years smoking marlboro reds and every "quit tool" felt like the next wave you described — exciting for a week, then invisible. the gap between marketing speed and reality speed is exactly what made me build my own tracker. when the app stopped being shiny and started being tuesday, that's when it actually worked. funny how the boredom is the signal that something stuck.
Thank you, Im so glad it resonated!Ive been thru many cycles of quitting things myself and youre right, its always the same. A week of total engagement then nothing. I havent touched my Lumen since after that first week LOL
Sensible outlook, though its not easy to ignore all the noise but surely possible to filter it because our brain will also go dry and we shall not be able to focus on what we could have done, thanks for writing. Having said this, the AI wave has its emerging impacts or influence on different roles in different industries and when it comes to livelihood, there is always panic and worry- human psychology... still, capitalism doesn't care anyways
The 'Tuesday' framing nails something I see on the consulting side. The tools that actually make it to boring-floor status are almost never the loudest ones at launch. Usually it's the second or third wave, the unsexy refinement of an idea that died screaming the first time. RAG is the obvious one. Half the patterns being announced this month are already in production stacks somewhere.
"every tool eventually becomes Tuesday" is a great frame, the hype fades and you just want it to quietly work. that's honestly the bar I hold Moonshift to: not magic, just agents that build + deploy + market a SaaS overnight and become boringly reliable. the harness is what lets it earn a Tuesday slot instead of a churn. lovely piece. first run's free if you ever want to test it for that.
I like the idea behind this post. A tool often feels revolutionary when it first appears, but over time it simply becomes part of the normal workflow and people stop thinking about it as something special. The real value is in how much friction it removes. That’s true for practical tools as well, where complex weather and school-board data are transformed into straightforward insights people can use every day.