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AI · MBA

2026-09-22~16 minSolertio · esej

The bot rejected everything important without a deadline

The triage queue I started on 13 August holds eighty-four analysed items. Sixteen came back as "relevant now". Thirty-two were dropped as noise. The remaining thirty-six went onto a "come back to this" list. The rule that sorted them read: does this content change what I do within fourteen days, measured against my project priorities. The model applied it correctly every time. The rule was the bad part, because it welded two independent things into one verdict, weight and deadline.

My claim is that a tool built around your own attention does not increase the supply of it, it moves the cost of judgement outside you, and only then can you see how much of that cost there was and what shape it had. A decision hangs on this, easy to state and uncomfortable to answer: keep the prosthesis running, or switch it off. One measurement settles it, and almost nobody collects it.

Attention is a budget, and Simon supplied the unit

Herbert Simon set this out in 1971 in his lecture "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World". The sentence about a wealth of information creating a poverty of attention gets quoted to death. What Simon did immediately afterwards gets quoted far less. He said an allocation problem has to be posed properly, which needs a measure of the scarce resource that cannot be stretched at will, so he rejected Shannon's bit: bit capacity depends on how a message is encoded and is therefore not an invariant. What was left was the simplest unit available. Simon proposed the time a recipient spends on a message (Simon 1971, pp. 40–41).

This is where the line runs between a metaphor and a model. If attention is a budget, a link dropped into a queue is not a saved expense but a deferred one. You drop it because right now you have nothing to pay the judgement with. The bill waits.

Where the debt comes from when you defer judgement

Sophie Leroy showed in 2009 that moving from one task to another leaves attention residue: part of your cognitive resources stays with the previous task and does not work on the current one. The residue is largest when the previous task was cut off halfway (Leroy 2009). An item dropped into a queue is exactly such a half-cut task: you watched enough to call the thing potentially valuable, and too little to do anything with it.

More important for this argument is what Leroy published with Theresa Glomb in 2018 in Organization Science. Across four studies the residue shrank when the interrupted person got a moment to write down a plan for returning: where they were and what they would do on coming back. Not to finish the task. To record a decision about it (Leroy and Glomb 2018).

That is where the mechanism of a prosthesis comes from, and it is not doing your reading for you. A prosthesis turns an open loop into a recorded decision, and a recorded decision pays off a debt that finishing the reading would not have paid. The working criterion follows in one sentence: the system works when it makes a decision you do not have to make a second time.

A rule written into code shows what you cannot choose

Separating importance from urgency is not a discovery. Covey described it in 1989 as the second quadrant of the matrix: things that are important and not urgent, the ones that lose every single day and win the decade. The maxim underneath is older; Eisenhower delivered it in Evanston on 19 August 1954 and credited an unnamed "former college president", so treat today's named attributions with care. The point is that I knew the distinction and still wrote a rule that papered over it. I wrote it out of my own reflex, not out of the book.

The same reflex came out a second time, in another tool and in a harder form. I run a weekly radar that picks three things to do out of everything that arrived in a given week. Priority was impact times confidence, divided by effort, and effort entered as a linear divisor rising from 0.5 for half a day's work to 5 for work longer than three days. With that divisor the best possible large move scores 5 times 1 over 5, which is 1.0. Average small stuff scored 2.8 to 3.6. A large correction could never win, whatever it was worth. This was not a model error or a data error. The ceiling sat in arithmetic I had written myself.

Both rules removed the same class: things important, slow and without a deadline. The categories I invented turned out to be a map of my own gaps. I saw them only once I had to write them in a form a machine executes, because a machine makes no exception for a thing whose author privately knew it mattered.

One design decision from that period held up completely. A rejecting verdict still writes one line to the wiki with a link and a reason. The rejection is therefore reversible and countable, and I can check after the fact what the system threw out and why. A bad system is one that deletes quietly.

You can call this procrastination and sometimes you would be right

The strongest objection to this thesis is not "tools do not help". It runs: building a system for reading is a form of avoiding reading, only with a better justification. The objection lands and it narrows the conclusion, so I will not leave it in a footnote.

A prosthesis defends itself under two conditions at once. First: the stream is larger than the attention budget. Eighty-four items in eighteen days is not quite five a day, and for material that has to be watched and judged that is more than I have to pay with. Second condition: the cost of keeping the prosthesis is falling. Eighteen days of triage cost 3.14 dollars in model charges, roughly 17 cents a day, and it fits inside a hard cap I set for myself. A radar run cost 17 cents, the same as one day of triage.

Honestly: those figures speak to money, which was small from the start, rather than to the cost of my attention, which is the thing actually in dispute. I do not yet measure upkeep in hours, and after eighteen days I have no right to claim the curve is falling. If the cost of upkeep is rising then it is a hobby, and a hobby is allowed as long as nobody calls it infrastructure.

I split the axes and fell into the same hole one floor up

In the radar the axes are no longer welded. A data point gets a class, impact from 1 to 5, effort, confidence from 0 to 1 and a gate flag for product ideas, each on its own. No deadline is written into any of those axes. That looks like a repair and at the level of classification it is one.

What settles the outcome is not the split but the formula that welds the axes back together. It contains a rule of mine: a product idea whose only source is content from the internet gets confidence of at most 0.4, and the rule is a sensible one, because a single creator's video does not justify changing a product. In the first real run the effect came out like this: two product ideas with impact 4 got a priority of 0.36. They landed at the bottom of the backlog, below small stuff with impact 2. The three proposals were two small things and one medium, the last of them only because I had added a separate rule guaranteeing one slot to something bigger.

The class the first version rejected outright, the second version no longer rejects. It pushes it to the end of the list with a multiplier I judged reasonable myself. The scope of the thesis therefore has to narrow: separating the axes is a necessary condition and not a sufficient one. What survives is decided by the recombination rule and by who is obliged to look at the result.

The obligation is in worse shape than the arithmetic. The radar has had one run so far, on 24 August, and it produced fourteen proposals. Six days later not one of them carries a recorded decision, and the trust ledger meant to hold my approvals and rejections is empty. Thirty-six items on the "come back to this" list plus fourteen proposals without a decision makes fifty deferred judgements. I started with one queue of unjudged things. I now have two, neatly sorted.

I wrote the condition for my own failure into the spec before I saw these numbers: if I accept fewer than 30 percent of proposals after six runs, the kill criteria apply. I have one run and zero acceptances, so the counter has not started. That is the one measurement nobody collects, and the only one that will separate a prosthesis from an expensive hobby: what share of deferred judgements ever received a recorded decision.

References

  1. primaryHerbert A. Simon, "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", in M. Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1971) — the quoted passage and the argument that an allocation problem needs a measure of the scarce resource, with the bit rejected and time proposed instead, pp. 40–41. Read in the original scan.
  2. primarySophie Leroy, "Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks", Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 109(2), 2009, 168–181 — attention residue and its dependence on how the previous task was left.
  3. primarySophie Leroy and Theresa M. Glomb, "Tasks Interrupted: How Anticipating Time Pressure on Resumption of an Interrupted Task Causes Attention Residue and Low Performance on Interrupting Tasks and How a 'Ready-to-Resume' Plan Mitigates the Effects", Organization Science 29(3), 2018, 380–397 — four studies; a written plan for returning reduces residue without the interrupted task being finished.
  4. primaryStephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) — the important–urgent matrix and its second quadrant.
  5. secondaryQuote Investigator, "What Is Important Is Seldom Urgent and What Is Urgent Is Seldom Important" (2014) — dates the maxim to Eisenhower's address in Evanston on 19 August 1954 and records that he credited an unnamed former college president; the widespread named attributions do not hold.

Figures on the triage queue, its costs and the radar run come from the database and repository of my own tools, as of 30 August 2026.