I opened my email this morning and there were three product announcements from companies I have never heard of. Each one was going to change how I work. Each one had a logo I will not remember by Friday. I closed the tab and made more coffee.
That used to be unusual for me. For years I read every announcement. I clicked through every demo. I built side project after side project just to keep up with whatever wave was supposedly cresting. Now I just feel tired.
If you're feeling the same thing, Id like to suggest that you are not broken. You are just on schedule.
I've been in this industry long enough to have watched a few waves come through. RPA was going to eliminate back office work. Low code was going to make every business analyst a developer. Blockchain was going to remake supply chains. AI copilots were going to ten x our productivity. Agents are now going to replace whole roles. Some of these were real shifts. Some were not. All of them arrived with the same breathless tone, the same conference circuit, the same blog posts about how everything was about to change.
Something Ive learned is that every tool that survives eventually becomes Tuesday. It stops being the future and starts being part of the floor you walk on. Nobody writes a blog post about npm install anymore. And Im pretty positive no one is getting excited about Jira. Git is just there. The wave that felt like it was going to drown you is now the puddle you step over without thinking. That is what success looks like for a tool. Boring infrastructure that you stop noticing.
Which means the exhaustion you are feeling is not really about the tools. Its about the gap between the volume of the announcements and the actual rate at which any of this becomes useful... The announcements come in daily. The integration into your job comes in months or years. Your brain is being asked to pay attention at the speed of marketing and adopt at the speed of reality, and those two speeds do not match.
So Ive given myself permission to stop trying. I let the announcements pile up. I look at the ones my team is actually using. I learn the tool when it shows up in a real ticket, not when it shows up in a launch post. The waves will keep coming. Some of them will become Tuesday. Most of them will not. I will be here either way, drinking coffee, ignoring the email.
