A note: This is a different kind of post than I usually send from After Burnout. Instead of something raw, short, and personal, this is more of a deep-dive article. But given how much this topic connects to burnout and our relationship with productivity tools, it felt important to share.
We were promised a productivity revolution. AI tools would handle the boring stuff, freeing us to focus on creative, strategic work. We’d finally have time to think, to innovate, to maybe even leave the office before dark.
Instead, something strange is happening. We’re working harder than ever.
But here’s the kicker: we were told AI would free us up for “higher-level work.” What actually happened? We just found more work to fill the space. That two-hour block AI created by automating your morning reports? It’s now packed with three new meetings. The 30 minutes you saved on data analysis? You’re using it to manage two more AI tools and review their outputs.
We instinctively expand our work to fill available time—it’s like a productivity version of Parkinson’s Law (work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion). AI promised to elevate us to strategic thinking, but instead we’re just doing more stuff, faster, with less mental bandwidth to actually think strategically about any of it.
I see it everywhere—in Slack channels exploring AI tool recommendations, in LinkedIn posts about “game-changing workflows,” in the exhausted faces of colleagues who’ve spent their morning cleaning up code AI wrote for them.
The promise was simple: AI saves time. The reality is messier.
The data doesn’t lie (even if we do)
A recent study of experienced software developers working on their own repositories found something shocking: when developers used AI tools, they took 19% longer to complete tasks than without AI. Even more telling: the developers estimated they were 20% faster with AI—they were completely wrong about their own productivity.
A 25% increase in AI adoption correlated with a 1.5% drop in delivery throughput and a 7.2% decrease in delivery stability.
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