Checking work drains more energy than doing the work itself. Producing output is straightforward, but verifying it forces a slow, vigilant mindset that breaks momentum and makes even small errors costly to uncover. My father’s advice, if you want something done right, do it yourself, makes more sense with experience. Oversight often takes more mental effort than execution, especially with AI agents that require constant verification. In modern work, the real tax is uncertainty, not effort.

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There is a kind of work that drains me more than anything else, and it is not building, creating, or solving hard problems. It is checking someone else’s work. The moment I have to review output that should have been correct the first time, my energy collapses. I lose interest, momentum, and then I start thinking to myself that I would rather have done the entire thing alone.

My father used to tell me, if you want something done right, do it yourself. When I was younger, I thought he meant it as a complaint about other people, but now I understand he was describing a psychological reality. Producing work is one kind of effort, but verifying work is an entirely different one. The second category is far more punishing.

Checking work forces you into a mode of thinking that is slow and vigilant. You must scan for errors, guess the author’s intention, reconstruct the logic, and imagine how mistakes might ripple through whatever comes next. Even when the work is mostly right, the small gaps still require full attention. You may spend only ten minutes fixing something, but it takes an hour’s worth of mental energy to confirm you haven’t missed a hidden flaw.

This is why so many founders, builders, and operators would rather take on twice the workload than half the oversight. It is not ego. It is efficiency. The mental tax of fixing someone else’s imprecision often exceeds the cost of doing the entire task from scratch yourself.

AI agents have only made this more obvious. The work they produce is often impressive at scale, but the uncertainty inside their answers forces you back into constant verification. Now you are not only checking the work, you are checking the logic of an unaccountable system. One incorrect answer out of twelve can require you to verify all twelve. That destroys the value proposition.

The truth is simple. Checking work is one of the most exhausting forms of labor in modern business. Until the people and tools around us can deliver accuracy with accountability, many of us will continue to prefer the old advice that still holds up: if you want something done right, do it yourself.

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