Manage, Be Responsible
All the popular tools companies use nowadays have a way to hide the mess you create while you are using the product, or at least attempt to hide it from you, in a way to not make you feel responsible for that mess. These products are built this way because it lets you tell yourself a story of how great this product this is that it doesn't make me feel bad.
Think about tools used for documentation, project management, chat tools, email clients, bug tracking software. Many of the tools in any one of those categories have a way to just create things "because it's important now but don't have the time deal with it right now". That same place fills up very quickly and starts overflowing even faster. And before you know it, you have created a monster that feeds on your good intentions will come to bite you at every decision you make.
It's hard enough to make any good decision at all. It is even harder when there is a bottomless pit that keeps distracting you with "What about this project you created 5 months ago?" while you try to prioritize; or "Here are 50 emails containing your search query from an unrelated context" while you try to search for a relevant piece of information from a conversations a few weeks ago.
The alternative is to say no to more folders, no to more drawers, no to more cabinets, no to more archive libraries, no to anything that lets you store it for later you. And all the craze about aumating every process makes everything worse because you are consuming the contents in isolation and not a whole. To fix all this mess, many people try to use AI to summarize and provide them with a digested version of everything upon which they have to make big and small decisions. The same people do not realize that they have delated their most important task, which is to think, and assumed the position of a robot worker that just executes what others have thought.
As boring as it might sound, sometimes it is even more boring when you do it. There have been more times than not that I would have rather just kept on writing code than go through the backlog, the assignments, the feedback we received from clients and our own ideas to in order to adjust the course of what we have work on next. But You have to take the time and go through things in order to asses the current situation and decide what stays in and what has to be left out, how are the priorities going to shift. Take the time to absorb the context, let it sink, sit with the discomfort for a little while, think about it as a whole, change the perspective from which you look at it. Clarify the puzzel in your head before moving forward.
Going through this process is not a one time thing but a recurrent event that has to be done periodically and every time what was true the last time might change slightly or radically but it will change. It's a huge red flag if they don't change at all, it means that you are not listening to feedback, have not learnt anything while doing the work and have not had any new idea. How can that be?
The tools we use can only enhance our behaviour but cannot fix it. Fix your behaviour. Force yourself to deal with the boring process of being responsible and making assesments. Soon you will your tools will stop fighting against you and actually help you make progress towards your goals. Saying yes to this and no to that and mean it is the only solution forward.