AI compresses time but not cognitive load.
Recently I picked up Go in 3 hours for an open source project. Later I built an entire sandbox integration in half a day. That speed was unimaginable before.
But after that day I was wiped. Needed rest before I could continue.
On the time axis it's a 10x improvement, but energy-wise you have to discount that. AI compresses days of information into hours. The density your brain absorbs in those hours is several times higher than before. Time shrinks; exhaustion doesn't.
So the real unit of productivity might not be output/time — it's output/energy.
Familiar domains cost the least energy, giving the highest real ROI. Zero-to-one spikes have the highest time multiplier but also the highest energy cost — you can't do a "learn Go in 3 hours" every day. The middle ground doesn't save much time and still drains energy — lowest real ROI.
HBR recently published a piece called "When Using AI Leads to Brain Fry" — people using 3 or fewer AI tools saw productivity gains; those using 4+ saw a sharp drop. The brain consumes 20% of the body's energy, and it doesn't scale by burning more — it reallocates within a fixed budget.
In the future of human-AI collaboration, human work hours will likely shrink. Between sessions you'll need rest, meditation, exercise. At middle age, health and muscle are the top productivity lever.
A few directions for BetterMe:
- More autonomous — let AI gradually handle shallow judgment calls, freeing you completely
- Transitional collaboration — AI pauses at the right moments, giving you recovery time
- Priority nudges — telling you what doesn't matter, so you spend energy on what actually needs thinking
Add real-time cognitive state monitoring (wearables feeding back stress, fatigue, focus), and the agent doesn't just do things for you — it senses how you're doing.
Still figuring this out.