A subset of "too much to do, not enough time," but this one is harder to name: AI is making your team more productive than ever, and the breakthroughs are real. Reports arrive faster, outputs are multiplying… The system is working!

And somehow that's the problem.

Being a CxO in an AI-powered era means you are on the receiving end of a system that is accelerating around you. The bottleneck that used to live in the middle of the process (in the collecting, the synthesizing, and the building) now lives at the end. At the moment when human judgment is required. At the moment when someone has to make the call.

The bottleneck lives at your desk.

What’s really happening? Are you just indecisive? Are you squandering too much time on distractions? No, it’s not that mundane. Rather, AI has collapsed the time between idea and execution. The 'middle' of the work has vanished, leaving you with the high-stakes edges.

These edges (the moment when you frame the real question at the beginning and when you commit and act at the end) have always belonged to the leader. The adage, “Your company moves at the speed of your decision-making,” was true ten years ago, and it's true today.

The difference is that AI has made it impossible to ignore. It's turned what used to be more or less a time management problem (“work is busy, too much to do”) into a more complex three-pronged monstrosity:

That’s why the instinct to “just push through” doesn't work.

Remember this scene from The Devil Wears Prada? Miranda's team is presenting looks for a photo shoot. She asks for the belts. An overeager assistant hurriedly produces two and holds them up:

"It's a tough call. They're so different!"

Think of that assistant as AI (or your team powered by it): Questions get answered almost instantly, and deliverables arrive polished, well-argued, and grammatically pristine. Which means distinguishing "good option" from "perfect option" now requires genuine Miranda-level discernment.

In the scene, Miranda makes that call effortlessly. But imagine her surrounded by 17 assistants, each holding up an accessory, all waiting for a decision, with little to no context beyond “Thoughts?”

You are like Miranda; remarkably capable, with genuinely good judgment. But too much volume and too much friction per decision erode the conditions you need to exercise that judgment clearly. 

The options stop being distinguishable. The belts start to look the same. That's the fog.

The instinct is to work on yourself (get better at deciding, move faster, think more clearly under pressure, etc.). But if you only optimize your personal decision-making and leave the organizational conditions unchanged, you're just trying to be a faster bottleneck; the queue just refills faster. 

The more complete solution is to improve the conditions around the decision, not just the decision-maker. Here’s where to start: 

This is where most of the leverage is. The volume, quality, and impact of what reaches your desk is a direct function of how clearly the work was framed before it began. One question does most of the heavy lifting:

What does a useful output look like?

To answer effectively, you have to think through what question you're actually solving for, whether the work is worth doing, and whether you're just exploring or converging on a decision. 

Teach your team to ask it before they hit generate (and model it yourself when you delegate), because without it, you're the one who ends up doing the framing at the moment you can least afford to.

Once the framing work is done, empower your team to make some of the calls. Build explicit decision rights: a clear, written description of what decisions belong to your team versus what belongs to you. “Spend under $X, hire for roles at this level, change the roadmap within these parameters — you decide, no approval needed.”

Try developing your own two-way door rule:

If a decision can be reversed in X days for less than $X, I never want to see it. If it's a 'One-Way Door' (like a key hire or a brand pivot), put it in my batching window. 

[More on “batching” in a bit.]

The goal isn't to be less involved. It's to be involved in the highest-leverage decisions, which means being deliberately uninvolved in everything else.

Even after you've reduced the volume, some decisions will and should land with you. The question is what shape they arrive in.

"So, what do you think?" puts the onus on you to figure out what the question actually is, what the options are, and what criteria matter—all before you've even started deciding! 

Try setting a standard where any decision that reaches you arrives as a recommendation, not a question:

Here's what we're optimizing for. Here are the options we considered. Here's what we recommend and why. Here's what we need from you (a yes, a redirect, or a specific concern). Here's when we need it.

This makes the difference between someone handing you a problem and someone handing you a shaped choice. The former takes twenty minutes. The latter takes two.

Once you turn down the volume (steps one and two) and reduce the friction (step 3), it’s easier to identify the work only you can do: high-stakes bets and situations where the information is genuinely ambiguous or incomplete, yet someone has to make a call.

These deserve your full attention. The problem is that by the time most executives get to them, they've already spent energy triaging everything else.

Two habits that make a real difference here:

When I sit across from a client in the thick of this “too many decisions too fast” problem, it doesn't present as a straightforward systems failure. Those tend to bring out curiosity and problem-solving energy. 

Instead, it presents as frozenness; a hesitation to act:

“Yeah. I mean. I guess. I dunno. Worth a shot, I suppose.” 

That's how overwhelm actually manifests: as a stress response that makes action feel impossible.

So, while I’ve done my best to pack this issue with practical, minimally invasive solutions, they may not stick. Why? Hidden internal narratives could quietly undercut your efforts: 

AI didn't just accelerate your team's output; it changed your job description — without announcement, without ceremony, and without any kind of onboarding.

There was no moment when someone said, "You are now primarily a high-throughput decision-making engine." It just started being true.

Which means many executives are still approaching the bottleneck problem by asking, “How do I guide, develop, and oversee more effectively?” 

With the “I’m a director” mindset, absorbing decisions just feels like part of the job: If making calls for your team is what good oversight looks like, then having 17 things waiting for your input is evidence you're needed. Which makes it very hard to want to fix.

The suggestions in this issue make more sense (and stick more easily) once you accept that absorbing decisions isn't the same as leading well.

Quick — what is your gut response: 

A deliverable lands on your desk; polished, well-reasoned, asking for a speedy decision. But you don’t have enough background knowledge or context to confidently make a call. 

What do you do? For most high-performers, the honest answer is: you scan what’s in front of you, hedge where you can, make your best call, and project confidence.

Because admitting you need more support before you can decide feels like a failure of leadership. Like you should have been more on top of it. Like a competent executive wouldn't need to ask.

Intellectually, it’s straightforward: AI is compressing the middle of the work, and no human brain is built to absorb everything that's being generated. Needing additional support makes sense. 

But if it were that cut and dry, the temptation to perform omniscience wouldn’t be so strong. You wouldn't keep absorbing the "Thoughts?" emails in silence. 

Instead, asking for what you need—more time, a recap, another primer, a shaped choice —feels like asking for spoon-feeding; like admitting that otherwise you can't handle the job.

You can. And you can also dial down unnecessary friction. Those aren't in conflict.

Pre-AI, it was easier to find a way to spread the blame for poor choices: The data was incomplete. The process was flawed. The option that looked good at the time turned out not to be. There was usually something external that shared the weight of being wrong.

But now, when everything arrives polished and well-reasoned, when all the options have been pressure-tested, and none of them are obviously flawed, a wrong call can only mean one thing: your judgment missed. 

For executives whose sense of worth is tied to being right (and many of us landed in the C-suite precisely because we were reliably right), a wrong call doesn't just carry operational or professional risk; it carries identity risk. And the stakes are often messily intertwined. 

These hidden narratives are neither right nor wrong, good nor bad. They just are. And the moment you name them, they lose some of their impact. 

So, however these mindset traps show up for you, notice your self-talk and treat it as information rather than a verdict. That’s how you regain the capacity and energy to attack the bottleneck problem with your typical confidence and curiosity. 

Keep reading, keep leading,

Jess

P.S. If The Left-Hand Column has resonated with you, consider supporting my work by clicking on one of the ads below. It's a small action that has a big impact!

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