Comment by Pannoniae

Being I/O bound is usually a result of bad engineering practices though. If you're I/O bound, that either means the problem doesn't require much computation - which is possible but fairly rare, or more likely that your code is so unoptimised that barely any computation gets carried out while your code is waiting on memory/disk/network.

"I can't do anything because my program is I/O-bound" is more of an excuse / mental justification of why your program is slow instead of an honest reason for so.