😵‍💫 I Think I Have Token Anxiety

Sunday was Father's Day.

We all slept in, then Val made breakfast. 

No alarms. No-where to be.

I went for a long walk with the dog, cleaned up the backyard, swam with the kids in the pool, listened to the birds, we got burritos for dinner, and finished the day with watching a family movie. 

I wanted a full day of not thinking about anything.

At some point I wandered into my office, pulled up a couple of AI things, looked at them for about 30 seconds, and then had to tell myself to walk away. 

That was hard to do.

And I've been sitting with it ever since. Not because I can't disconnect, but because there's this feeling I've been having that's difficult to kick.

The next day I was on a call with my friend Kelley, and we found the name for it: token anxiety.

It's the feeling you get when productivity is so vast, so capable, that you feel restless, not stressed, not overwhelmed, just restless, like you're leaving something on the table every minute the machines are quiet.

The counterintuitive part is this:

At 9am I already had Claude working on something, one of my agents running in the background, and another account open doing client work.

I was fully present on the call, but had this feeling.. knowing.. that once the call was done I would be able to see how much got done (spoiler alert - it was a lot). 

My Asana board with tasks for me is next to empty all the time. I finish the things I'm great at so fast that when the agents go quiet, I don't know what to do with myself.

I'm looking for more fulfilling work. 

I am bored with the normal stuff. Because I don't do much of it anymore - but you better believe it gets done.

And that feeling of ‘just disconnecting’ is now both easier than ever (because I'm ahead of my game) and harder than ever (because of the missed productivity when my agents aren't working).

Basically this was me Sunday (between laughing with the kids and truly enjoying being present)..

From a lizard brain coder like me, this is a very strange new feeling. And I know I'm not alone in it.

What I'm doing right now used to cost tens of thousands of dollars a day, worth of tech, resources, output and outcomes.

Now it's a $100/month subscription, maybe.

That is why you see people starting to walk around with their laptops open. They are letting their AI run while they go do something else.

The future version of me doesn't want to look back on this window of time and wonder “what was he even doing”.

He wants to look back at this time and say “you didn't let that moment slip and we wouldn't be here today otherwise”.

🎨 AI Gave Us What Technology Took

I mentioned my friend Kelley, she's an artist at heart. 

She's also in a community that largely hates AI, but she had an insight that offers a really great perspective.

Kelley used to be a teacher. 

When classroom computers first arrived, she kept getting in trouble for not checking her email. 

Because before that, if someone needed you, they walked to your room, called you, or left a note in your physical mailbox. 

Then email came along, and suddenly everyone felt more productive.

But Kelley's point was a wake-up call: you're not actually more productive if you can send an email. 

You're not sure it was received. 
You're not sure anything will get done. 
You're basically adding to someone else's to-do list for your tasks. Who's to say they'll do anything about it.

By swapping human interaction for sending an email, you've just added a step between the intention and the result, and called it progress.

Technology in some ways gave us a fake sense of productivity. 

And we paid for it in ways we didn't notice until quite some time later. 

Not to sound like a grumpy old man but…

Kids now rarely *look you in the eye. *Most can't even sign their name in cursive. 

They lost human abilities because they attached themselves to a system that didn't actually guarantee outcomes.

AI gave us back what that technology boom took from us.

Because now we can actually be human with that time reclaimed and gained.

Here's a real example. 

I will never start an Asana task from scratch and fill it all out myself again. 

Ever. 

I've decided, and there's no going back.

If something requires that, it means I've already talked about it on a call, emailed about it, or processed my thoughts on it somewhere. 

That knowledge has left my brain, so why would I do it again, in a boring open text field when I could be taking a strategy call, building relationships or taking a dip in my pool?

Rather I have one of my agents build it out, and it does a better job than I would, while I'm doing something that actually needs me, or brings me joy.

The chemistry in my brain has finally aligned to the point where I can see how this adds more than it takes. 

And I want MORE of it.

🖼️ The Art World Saw This Coming

Kelley knows a highly skilled painter who is having trouble selling his work right now.

She informed me that for years, photorealism was the gold standard in painting. 

You'd spend a decade mastering the craft of making a canvas look like a photograph. 

But what's commanding the premium in the art market today is post-impressionism - Van Gogh, Monet - work where you can see the brushstrokes and the mark of a human. 

Abstract, imperfect, unmistakably made by a person.

AI can generate a photorealistic image in seconds. So photorealism, the thing that took a lifetime to master, is no longer scarce. 

The human hand, the visible imperfection, the proof that a person was there, that's what people are paying for now.

Kelley knows that AI is going to become so cheap and so good that the technical skills that used to make digital people valuable are going to be table stakes. 

Everyone will have them. 

So then what?

The thing that becomes rare, and therefore valuable, is the capacity to be human, to think, to connect, to create with a point of view that a model can't replicate.

This is already happening across every creative field, not just painting.

💭 Productivity vs. Token Anxiety

Another example.

I founded a startup called  QuickSign 🔗.

I got tired of overpaying for DocuSign, PandaDoc and all the alternatives that suck, so I just built my own. 

It has paying customers, which means it's real, and I actually want to sell it. (If you're also sick of overpaying for Docusign, try it out right now at https://quicksign.pro.)

But I hadn't set up the emails yet.

You don't pour water into a leaky funnel expecting anything other than the obvious.

I scored a free year of Customer.io through their startup grant program about 2 months ago.

Five hundred dollars a month plan…

For free. 

I've used that platform for over a decade, so I knew it was powerful. 

The thought of sitting down and mapping out the customer journey, all the segments, goals, and funnels - I just didn't have time for it.

And now the clock is ticking. 

“When will I actually do this?" was the question in my head.

So when I saw they had an MCP and an API, I plugged it into Claude and told it to do the whole thing. This was during those 72 glorious hours when Claude's Fable model was live (you can read all about that here 🔗).

It built the segments, goals, funnels, analytics, and a visual flowchart of the entire customer journey.

It even went back and removed redundant steps on its own + cleaned up tests I had in place that were unnecessary.

Now I'm going through, approving, touching up the emails, and turning on one sequence at a time. And it's a Joy. 

That saved me a FULL WEEK of work I didn't want to do.

Normally, I wouldn't have done it at all. More things come up with greater importance and these types of projects get pushed to never.

And here's the kicker. 

It did all of that while I was on calls, being a strategist, doing the things only I can do.

Kinda like this morning while I was on my call with my friend.

That day I felt massively productive and accomplished. And I wasn't exhausted or overworked. I just felt like a 10x human that was working on aligned things that made a difference to me.

I still find myself at the end of the week asking why I wasn't more productive, most of the time.

Since every week feels like a year in the AI timeline right now. I sit in a seat where I am capable of doing this, and I keep asking myself what I'm doing.

Honestly…

I don't have a clean answer for that yet. 

I just know the feeling is real, and I know I'm not the only one sitting in it.

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