I had a conversation last week that’s stuck with me. Someone was telling me, with real pride, how productive their week had been. They’d cleared every email, sat through nine meetings, skimmed four reports and watched a couple of webinars. By Friday they were wrung out. So I asked the obvious question: what actually changed because of all that? There was a long pause. The honest answer was, not much. They’d taken in a mountain of information and moved almost nothing forward.
That gap — between taking things in and actually getting somewhere — is something I keep coming back to.
Busy is not the same as moving
It has never been easier to consume. Open Outlook and Copilot will boil a forty-message thread down to a few lines before you’ve read the subject. Miss a Teams meeting and the recap is sitting there waiting for you. Ask Copilot in Word to turn a thirty-page document into five points and it’s done in seconds. All of it genuinely useful. But here’s the trap I keep watching people fall into: they mistake the speed of consuming for the act of progressing.
Reading a summary feels like work. It isn’t. It’s the warm-up to work. That summary only earns its place if it leads to a decision, a reply, a change of plan — something that wasn’t true before you read it.
The point of a summary is what you do next
When I use Copilot to catch up on a noisy channel, the value was never the recap itself. It’s the one thing the recap surfaces — the client still waiting on an answer, the date that quietly moved, the call only I can make. If I read the summary and slide straight into the next one, I’ve consumed, but I haven’t progressed a single step.
So I’ve started asking Copilot a different kind of question. Not “summarise this thread,” but “what here needs a decision from me?” In Outlook, instead of “what’s in my inbox,” I’ll ask what’s waiting on a reply from me specifically. It’s a small change in wording, but it shifts Copilot from a faster way to take things in into a prompt to actually act.
More input, fewer outcomes
The real risk in all this capability is sheer volume. Because we can now process more, we start to feel we should. More reports, more recaps, more dashboards, more catch-ups. But a business doesn’t run on how much its people have read this week. It runs on what they decided, finished and delivered.
I’d rather end a week having genuinely moved three things forward than having consumed everything that landed on my desk. Copilot is brilliant at clearing the path — pulling the signal out of a crowded SharePoint site, drafting a first version in Word, getting the numbers into shape in Excel. But once the path is clear, walking down it is still on me.
The tools will keep getting faster at feeding us information, and that’s not the part I’m watching. I’m watching whether all that speed actually changes what we do — or whether we just get very good at staying busy. Consumption is effortless now. Progress still needs a decision, and that’s the one thing no tool will make for you.
CIAOPS 