Are you hiring the wrong work?

We spend a lot of time worrying about hiring the wrong person. We spend almost none worrying about hiring the wrong work.

Jason Averbook framed it in a way I can’t shake. Every unnecessary task, he says, is like an employee who takes up time, money, and attention without creating value to match. You would never keep a hire like that on payroll. Yet most teams are carrying a dozen of them in the form of tasks nobody questions.

The recurring report that no one has opened in a year. The approval step that adds a day to the timeline but catches nothing. The recap of the meeting about the meeting. None of it is anyone’s fault. It accumulated like clutter does, one decision at a time.

This matters now because AI is about to make a lot of that work effortless. And effortless is dangerous, because it removes the one thing that used to force us to question a task: the cost of doing it. When something takes real hours, eventually someone asks whether it’s worth it. When AI can crank it out instantly, that question never gets asked. You just automate the busywork, and now it lives forever.

So before you hand a task to a tool, run it through a simple test. If this disappeared tomorrow, who would notice? And what would they miss? If the honest answers are no one and nothing, don’t automate it. Retire it.

Automating waste doesn’t make it valuable. It just makes it faster and permanent. The best thing you can do with a bad hire is let them go. The same goes for the work.