🎯 Nobody Wants a Drill Machine. They Want a Hole.

What Surf Excel, Cadbury, Apple, and Zerodha have in common — and why every task list quietly fails you.

👋 Hey, I’m Mohit. Every fortnight, I share what I’m learning about AI, business growth, productivity, founder life, better systems, and living with greater clarity. From time to time, I also write about music, fitness, books, family, and travel — the things closest to my heart beyond work.

Explore: TimeLens / Grow1000x Club / WhatsApp TimeLens / Books I live by. Connect with me: MohitG / MohitGMusic / LinkedIn / WhatsApp.

Last time, I told you about The Strangest Secret and the Grade-8 maths that rewired how I think about compounding — money, skill, relationships, luck, all of it running on the same engine, quietly, in both directions. Before that, I sent a personal update about something I’ve been building, while I spent months tracking my life — TimeLens.

Today I want to go after something that’s been sitting underneath every conversation I’ve had with founders, friends, and family about “getting organized.”

It’s this: almost nobody I know is naturally organised. And almost every productivity tool I’ve ever used was built for people who already are.

That gap is the whole subject of this edition.

The thing nobody admits about task lists

Here’s what I’ve noticed, watching myself and dozens of founders try (and quietly abandon) every task tool that exists.

It’s never that they lack discipline. It’s that every system — Todoist, Asana, Notion, even the legendary *Getting Things Done* method — quietly demands a job before it’ll do your job.

Capture diligently. Categorize correctly. Review weekly.

Be, in other words, an organised person — first — as the price of entry to becoming productive.

Most people never signed up for that job. They wanted one thing: get this off my mind, and into existence.

If your real task manager today is a WhatsApp message to yourself, a voice note, or a sticky note on the fridge — that’s not you being lazy.

That’s you doing the most natural thing in the world: capturing a thought the fastest way available.

The problem was never you.

It’s that nothing ever met you where your brain already works.

This is, in a strange way, the same idea I want to talk about today, just applied one level up: the task was never the job.

Getting organised was never the job either.

Getting it done was.

A drill, a hole, and the idea that started it all

There’s an old line from Harvard economist Theodore Levitt that marketers have repeated for fifty years:

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole! — Theodore Levitt

Clayton Christensen built an entire framework around that — Jobs To Be Done.

His argument: people don’t buy products. They hire them, the way you’d hire an employee, to make progress against something happening in their life.

His famous example is a milkshake chain trying to sell more milkshakes — until they discovered most morning milkshakes were being “hired” by commuters for one job: stay interesting and keep me full till lunch, one-handed, in a cup holder.

Once McDonald’s understood the job, they stopped competing with other milkshakes and started competing with bananas, bagels, and boredom.

Tasks are the visible part. Jobs are the outcomes you want.

Once you start looking for it, you see the gap everywhere — in your own day, and in your business.

• Task: “Reply to Mom’s message.”
• Job: make sure she feels remembered, not just acknowledged.
• Task: “Go to the gym.”
• Job: look good, feel more confident, stay fit and healthy.
• Task: “Send the deck to the client.”
• Job: look prepared, hold their trust, don’t lose the renewal.
• Task: “Close 5 issues this sprint.”
• Job: ship something that moves a metric or unblocks a customer.
• Task: “Post on LinkedIn.”
• Job: build enough visibility that inbound deals start showing up without cold outreach.

A team can be 100% efficient on the task and 0% effective on the job — which is exactly Peter Drucker’s old warning: there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

A content calendar tracks “posted.” It has no concept of whether the job — compounding visibility, the very thing I wrote about last time — is actually working.

Every tool in your stack has a unit it’s optimized for, and none of those units is “the job.” Slack’s unit is the conversation. Asana and Linear’s unit is the project or ticket. Todoist’s unit is the list item. All three are useful — but all three are proxies, optimized for a surface (talk, deliver, capture), not for the actual transformation a person was trying to make.

Advertising figured this out before software did

The best ads have always sold the job, never the category — let’s observe them carefully.

Surf Excel never sold “removes stains.” Every other detergent was fighting over that exact claim.

Surf Excel sold the job underneath it — let my child be a child, without me feeling like a bad parent for letting them get dirty. Same category, completely different job.

Daag Achhe Hain by Surf Excel

The above Puddlewar ad by Surf Excel came out more than 20 years back in 2005. Daag Achhe Hain gave confidence to mothers and parents that there’s a product — Surf Excel, that will get the job done. It was never about the task remove stains.

Haar Ko Harao by Surf Excel

This came out in 2017. Same thought, anchoring to the emotion of winning — *Haar Ko Harao but with Surf Excel, Daag Achhe Hain*.

Holi Campaign by Surf Excel

The above Holi Hai!! Jo daag dooryiya meta de voh *#DaagAchheHain is their latest ad. And it still compounds on #DaagAchheHain* with the underlying task “remove stains”.

Cadbury’s *“Kuch Khaas Hai”* — the girl running onto the cricket pitch and dancing — never sold chocolate.

Kuch Khaas Hai by Cadbury

It sold permission to mark this moment as special, spontaneously as the job-to-be-done. The underlying task — eat chocolate — was almost incidental.

Apple’s *“Think Different” did the identical thing globally: never about processor speed, always about permission to be the misfit who changes things.*

Think Different by Apple

Fevicol’s bus full of people wasn’t selling adhesive. It was selling this must never come apart, no matter what — the Job To Be Done.

Favicol Bus Ad

And De Beers, arguably the most extreme JTBD case study ever run, didn’t just sell diamonds — it invented the job (prove a commitment is permanent) that diamonds then became the only acceptable answer to.

How else could 2 months’ salary last forever?

Tata built the Nano around a job nobody else was looking at — not “buy a cheap car,” but get my family somewhere safely without four of us on one scooter in the rain.

Zerodha’s Kite was never “another broking app.” It was built around one job: execute a trade with zero friction, zero cost — fast trading platform designed for speed, simplicity, and a user-friendly experience. Different decades, same instinct.

That’s the trap every task tool sets. It lets you win the task in silos, while the actual job — the one you’d care about if you stepped back — quietly stays unsolved, unlinked to the bigger picture, the job to be done, the goal you want to achieve.

This is the part I am actually building TimeLens for

Not to make anyone more organised.

Most people I’ve watched — including, very honestly, an earlier version of me — don’t fail because they can’t plan. They fail because the only entry price every system charges is become a person who plans well first.

So the thesis behind TimeLens is the opposite of every task manager I’d used before:

The thought is simple: As long as you can think it, you should be able to get it done! No structure required to start.

WhatsApp TimeLens

You don’t categorize it. You don’t decide which project it belongs to, what context tag it needs, or whether it’s a “next action.” You just say it, the way you’d say it to yourself in the shower (just kidding!) or type it into a WhatsApp chat with no one in it. (I may build the voice verion later.)

But currently, it is available on WhatsApp (beta version). You can start by messaging right now. You can set reminders, attach your calendar to get reminded about your meetings, and even add notes and links to your reminders.

Go ahead, give it a try > WhatsApp TimeLens

All your reminders get arranged beautifully in TimeLens on a single page:

Reminders on TimeLens

And you get reminded on WhatsApp itself at that exact time that you set, even repeatedly at the frequency you want.

You can add tasks as well without losing sight of your job to be done in goals.

TimeLens

This is where your unstructured thoughts get saved in a structure that you can visualise when you want and make it compound.

Goals on TimeLens

You can even assign it to people like any other tool available in the market. (From WhatsApp itself, very soon!)

Assignig Tasks to Users on TimeLens

What happens after that is the actual answer to “jobs to be done.”

AI tools like Claude & ChatGPT structure it for you — connect it to the goal, the priority, or the person it’s actually in service of, instead of leaving you to do the task sorting that makes most people quit by week two.

Then, consistent small work — the same compounding I wrote about last time — keeps it moving, visible, never starting from zero.

Here’s how it did for the first week of Jun-2026 for me by linking my jobs-to-be-done — my goals, with my tasks :

What am I building now

Now, I am taking it one step further.

I am now building AI Agent Orgs that can get the work done for you.

Here’s a sneak peek:

You give the task from WhatsApp itself, they know the Job-to-be-done from your Goals and they get it done for you.

With that, increasingly, AI agents inside TimeLens will pick parts of it up and actually move it forward — research, drafts, follow-ups — so “I captured it” stops being the finish line.

The job itself keeps moving, sometimes, most times, without you in the room.

This is my vision. That’s the whole philosophy in one line:

Think and get it done.

Not because you became more disciplined. Because the system stopped charging discipline as the entry fee.

Closing the loop

So next time you write something down — call the doctor, send the deck, book the tickets — it’s worth a half-second pause. What’s the job hiding under that task? What would actually change in your life, or your client’s, or your team’s, if it got done?

Most tools will help you check the box.

Very few will help you see — and finish — the job.

If this resonates, TimeLens is in early access with a free 7-day trial for a limited period, and I’d love for you to join and shape it with your feedback.

You can see what it actually does here. If you use Claude or ChatGPT, you can connect directly through MCP.

And I am looking for people, who’d love to be a part of this journey and provide constructive feedback, test it out, and be a part of a community where we build it together with patience, kindness and have fun while doing it!

If you think you’re that person — someone who’d like to be ahead in this game and support me in this journey — I’m looking for you.

**Join here on WhatsApp.**

Or message me directly.

Warmly, Mohit

Thanks for reading this blog! This post is public so feel free to share it.

P.S. The quarter-inch hole was never about the drill. The deck was never about the slides. The gym was never about the reps. Somewhere under every task on your list today is a job you actually care about — the only question is whether anything in your stack is built to see it.

P.P.S. I’d love to know — what’s a task on your list right now whose real job you just realized while reading this? Tell me in the comments, I read every one.

Leave a comment. I read every one of them.

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