You’ve probably noticed something strange happening. You brought in AI to save time, to clear your plate, to finally get on top of things. And somehow you’re busier than ever.
This isn’t a failure of the technology. It’s the inevitable result of how work actually expands in organisations. When you make something faster and cheaper, you don’t create breathing room – you create appetite for more.
Think about what happens when you automate a report that used to take three days. Your boss doesn’t say “great, take the rest of the week off.” They say “brilliant, now we can do this weekly instead of monthly.” Or “can you break this down by region too?” The bar hasn’t stayed in the same place. It’s moved up.
This happens because efficiency changes what’s considered possible. Before AI, certain tasks were too expensive or time-consuming to justify. A detailed market analysis for every pitch. Personalised responses to every customer query. Daily performance dashboards instead of quarterly ones. These things sat in the “nice to have” pile because the cost was too high.
But the moment AI makes them cheap and fast, they migrate into the “expected” pile. What was once impressive becomes standard. And the standard keeps rising because there’s always another level of detail, another degree of personalisation, another data point to track.
You end up in a situation where you’re producing more output than ever before, but feeling no less pressured. The work fills the time available. The technology that was supposed to free you up has simply raised expectations about what you should be delivering.
This isn’t unique to AI. It’s happened with every major productivity tool. Email was supposed to make communication easier – instead it created an expectation of constant availability. Spreadsheets were supposed to simplify calculations – instead they enabled endless what-if scenarios and version iterations. The pattern is always the same: new capability creates new demands.
The only way out is to make conscious choices about where to draw lines. You need to decide what you won’t do with the extra capacity, not just what you will do. Otherwise the work expands indefinitely, and you end up running faster just to stay in place.
