Ep. 397: Why Do “Productivity Technologies” Make My Job Worse?

A new research study recently caught my attention. It came from a software company called Avatrac, which analyzed the digital activity of 164,000 workers spread across more than a thousand different employers. And what they wanted to do was measure the impact of new AI tools. So what did they find? Here's a summary of their results from a Wall Street Journal article that came out last week.

Avitrack found AI intensified activity across nearly every activity category. The time they spent on email, messaging, and chat apps more than doubled, while their use of business management tools such as human resources or accounting software rose 94%. Meanwhile, the amount of time AI users devoted to focused, uninterrupted work, the kind of concentration often required for figuring out complex problems, writing formulas, creating and strategizing, fell 9% compared with nearly no change for non-users. Alright, so this research results describes in some sense a worst case scenario for knowledge work.

These employees are spending more time on exhausting shallow tasks that don't have a huge impact on the bottom line and less time on the deep tasks that can make the most difference. The efficiency gain of these new tools seems to have made everyone busier but not necessarily better. Now here's the thing. This outcome is not unique to AI.

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