The man who tried 200 to-do apps has some advice about AI

Casey Newton kicked off a new podcast miniseries about surviving the AI job upheaval by talking to David Pierce, The Verge's editor-at-large and a self-described productivity obsessive who has installed and abandoned roughly 200 to-do apps over the years. Pierce's take, after two decades of chasing the perfect system, is refreshingly deflating: despite all the noise about AI rewriting how we work, almost nothing has actually changed yet. We're stuck, he says, in a chaos phase where everyone assumes a revolution is imminent, but the tools mostly do what tools always did, help you capture a task and find it again later.

Where AI does earn its keep, in Pierce's experience, is grunt work. Bulk-converting a folder of files, torching a thousand marketing emails in under a minute, tracking down a plumber, that's the sweet spot. Judgment calls are a different story. When he handed AI the keys to his main inbox, it flubbed nearly everything, tricked by senders who write every subject line like the building is on fire. He suspects that's an early sign of a new kind of attention-hacking arms race, where people learn to write emails that fool the filters meant to protect us from people.

The bulk of the conversation, though, isn't really about AI at all. It's about the unglamorous plumbing of getting things done. Pierce's hard-won rule after 200 app breakups is that capture matters infinitely more than organization. Don't waste time building an elaborate tagging system nobody will maintain, just get the thought out of your head and into one place fast. He currently splits his life between Todoist, Apple Reminders, and Craft, chasing whichever app has finally added the one missing feature, a cycle he admits he repeated on the very day of the interview. He also pushes back on the instinct to hide your to-do list until only the important stuff shows. Seeing the mess repeatedly, he argues, is what actually gets it into your brain and off the page.

What lands hardest, though, is Pierce's rejection of AI FOMO. He calls the get-on-the-train-or-get-left-behind messaging pernicious, and his fix is almost comically simple: swap the word AI for the word software whenever the hype gets loud. Sometimes it's very good software, he says, and sometimes it isn't, but it's still just software, not a referendum on your career. His actual advice boils down to offloading the tedious stuff, protecting the work that builds your own understanding, and not mistaking a busy news cycle for an actual transformation of how anyone gets things done.