We all know the feeling. You wake up with a clear, simple idea: “Let’s tighten up our go‑to‑market.” At first this feels simple. But the moment you try to turn that idea into a plan, the world gets noisy. Ten confusing topics appear—ideal customer, pricing, channels, messaging, tooling, and so on. Each topic branches into tasks, dependencies, and unknowns. Suddenly your neat idea is a big pile of sticky notes, and you are knee‑deep in the messy middle.
Founders and investors often treat that mess as normal. We think the job is to push our brains harder, stay up later, or hire another analyst. Yet the real problem is not willpower. It is coordination drag—the invisible energy leak between “I know what to do” and “I’m doing it.”
The hidden cost of coordination
Every time the market shifts or a pilot customer gives feedback, your plan must change. That means another exhausting lap through the messy middle: rethink the ICP, reshuffle milestones, rewrite the sprint board. Re‑coordination is expensive because it asks for two things humans find scarce—focused time and mental context.
Enter AI as a self‑coordination layer
Large language models (LLMs) make that cost almost free. Think of the model as cognitive middleware that:
Explodes your big goal into a full decision tree in seconds.
Compresses the tree back into bite‑size tasks (“Call these five partners,” “Draft the v2 price sheet”).
Re‑runs the same loop whenever reality changes.
The loop goes simple → messy → simple, but the messy part now happens inside silicon, not inside your head. Energy you once spent wrestling slide decks can flow into customer calls or product insight.
The new role of tools
Apps like Notion, Jira, or Asana used to feel like extra work because you had to feed and prune them by hand. With an LLM connected to your workspace, those tools flip roles—from passive storage to living substrate. You speak intent; the system updates pages, tickets, and briefs for every team and investor. Your notes become a map that redraws itself.
Why this matters now
Markets move faster than ever. The winners will not only build better products; they will cycle from idea to action—then back again—at machine speed. Lowering coordination drag is the cheapest leverage left.
Try it yourself: locate your hidden drag
Copy‑paste the prompt below into ChatGPT (or your favorite LLM) and follow the steps.
AI Prompt:
Act as my self‑coordination analyst.
Ask me for one current goal (business or personal).Break that goal into major topics and sub‑topics.Show me where I’m likely losing momentum: gaps, unclear owners, missing data.Return a list of three 30‑minute tasks that would remove the biggest drag today.When I complete a task, ask me what changed and update the plan.
Run this once, then again after your next pivot. Notice how the messy middle shrinks—and how much faster you reach the next simple step. That’s the power of “simple, messy, simple.”