Ending the Second Shift

We obsess about what’s broken in modern work.

It’s not that people aren’t productive. It’s that the shape of the job has changed. Most teams don’t just build anymore - they coordinate building. They spend huge portions of the week in conversations that are necessary, but expensive: meetings, alignment, handoffs, follow-ups, status, decisions, clarifications. And then the part nobody budgets time for kicks in: turning all of that back into actual execution.

You can see it everywhere. A one-hour discussion turns into a pile of “work about work” - notes, tickets, updates, decisions, action items, reminders, and a dozen small things that keep a team moving. It’s not glamorous, but it’s real. And it quietly becomes the second shift.

We’ve tried to solve this with better tools. More docs. Better templates. More dashboards. Cleaner workflows. But the overhead keeps growing, because the actual problem isn’t documentation - it’s translation. We’re still asking humans to do the most repetitive part of coordination: listen, interpret, extract, format, and distribute.

That’s why I think the next big shift won’t be another wave of productivity apps. It’ll be a change in what we consider “work” in the first place.

The obvious thing AI should do isn’t just summarize what happened. The obvious thing is to remove the cleanup. Meetings shouldn’t create more work - they should produce work. Decisions should become decisions in writing. Action items should land with owners and next steps. The output should be ready while the context is still fresh, not recreated later from memory.

I keep coming back to the same framing: the best systems won’t just help people move faster inside the old process. They’ll take entire categories of busywork off the plate. Humans do the judgment and direction. Software does the stitching.

That’s what we’re building toward at Earmark. Not “better notes.” Not “more summaries.” A world where the conversation is the input, and the work shows up finished.

We’ve got a new release coming that moves us closer to that end state - without changing how teams work. Just removing the last bits of friction.

Earmark is getting better at producing the outputs teams actually need in the moment: decisions that resolve into a decision log, follow-ups with clear owners and context, and tickets drafted with the structure teams expect—problem, approach, acceptance criteria - ready to push into the tools where work happens.

We’re also sharpening the real-time experience, so what matters becomes visible while the conversation is still happening: what was decided, what’s still open, what needs a name on it. Not as “notes for later,” but as clarity that makes the meeting itself cleaner and more decisive.

The goal isn’t to create more artifacts.

The goal is to make the meeting the moment the work gets created.

Less “I’ll write it up later.” More “it’s already done.”

If you’re building in a world where coordination costs keep rising, you can feel how important that is. The future isn’t more process. It’s less cleanup.