Is AI actually making us more productive?

AI makes me incredibly productive.

I’m also starting to wonder whether AI makes me incredibly unproductive.

Both things appear to be true.

I have always thought fast. I like ideas. I can move quickly and I am very good with a hard deadline. AI has basically given that brain a sparring partner that never needs to sleep.

Which sounds brilliant.

And it is.

But there is no end.

Before AI, I might have an idea and write it down for later because investigating it required effort. Now I can explore it immediately. Then that exploration generates another possibility. Then I want to test that. Suddenly I have gone from writing a proposal to questioning the entire future of my business in approximately 17 minutes.

The tap of possibility never turns off.

We talk a lot about context switching caused by other people: Slack, email, notifications, meetings. There is loads of research about how long it takes us to refocus after an interruption.

But what if we are increasingly self-interrupting?

I have a thought. AI makes it frictionless to follow it. So I do. Again and again.

I don't think this means AI is bad for productivity. I couldn't possibly argue that given how much more I can produce with it.

But perhaps “how much did I produce?” isn't the whole definition of productive.

Did I finish the important thing? Did I make the decision? Did I move something forward?

Or did I generate another 43 extremely interesting possibilities?

I’m increasingly interested in the difference.