The productivity question AI forces us to ask

We have a story we tell ourselves about productivity tools. The story goes like this: The more efficient we become, the more time we free up, and the more we can relax. We’ve been telling this story since the dishwasher. We’ve never once been right.

Every tool that has made us more capable has raised the ceiling on what’s possible—and in doing so, has raised the floor on what feels acceptable. We don’t use reclaimed time to rest. We use it to produce more. And with each new capability, the gap between what we’re doing and what we theoretically could be doing gets wider, louder, and harder to ignore.

The result is a feedback loop between productivity and anxiety that begs to be reckoned with, especially now. The more we can do, the harder it becomes to exist in any moment without the question: Is this the most productive thing I should be doing right now? Should I open a seventh terminal? Is my workflow efficient enough? That hum of productivity maxxing is the ambient noise of modern professional life. With AI, we’ve turned up the volume to a level the human mind has never encountered.

AI is not just another productivity tool. It produces at a pace that has no human analog. The gap between what these systems can output in an hour and what any person can output in an hour isn’t a gap anymore—it’s a canyon. And for people like me who are trying to build with these tools, to stay current, to use them well—the dissonance is already acute. I use these tools every day. I follow the tech blogs and podcasts. And I can tell you: Nobody is really keeping up, and it’s possible we never can, because the tools change in our hands.

THE PACE QUICKENS

At a recent vibe coding event I attended in San Francisco, I sat with a group of women in AI, including some from Anthropic, talking through our workflows. What’s striking is that we’re all figuring it out together—there’s really and truly no manual at the frontier. One of the Anthropic engineers threw up her hands, saying that her workflows would probably change tomorrow, and we all had to nervously laugh in agreement. They would, and they did.

AI is taking a significant role in building itself, in fact. It creates synthetic data to train itself; it supervises, critiques, and revises itself; it is self-correcting. The important fact about this is that AI is building itself at its pace, not ours. The pace of technical progress, like the acceleration of productivity potential itself, is closer to light speed than anything we’ve experienced before.

Now scale that forward. As AI capabilities continue to compound, the ceiling on possible productivity will rise faster than any human nervous system can track. Which means the anxiety that comes from the gap between doing and could-be-doing won’t just persist. It will intensify, systematically, as a direct function of how powerful the tools become.

We are already seeing the symptoms. The explosion of ADHD diagnoses—particularly among high-functioning professional women—is not a coincidence. It is a signal. If you’re a parent of young children, you already know acutely the unique pain of fractured attention, even before you’ve glanced at your devices. But of course, we must glance at our devices. Here we’ve built an environment so perfectly engineered for fractured attention—the notifications, the tabs, the always-on culture, the infinite scroll—that it is producing cognitive fragmentation at scale. Perhaps we developed an ADHD disorder at near-epidemic proportions, or perhaps we didn’t. Perhaps we developed a world that generates its symptoms. And AI is about to make that world significantly harder to live in.

CHANGE THE FUTURE

This is not inevitable. This argument can slide easily into fatalism, and I don’t mean it that way. It’s just that the writing on the wall, as far as I can see it, is that we could fragment our minds and attention to a point of untenable dilution and dissolution. And further, this is the default trajectory here. But defaults can change when we see them clearly enough to choose something different.

What that looks like practically is still being figured out—by researchers, by clinicians, and most importantly by us. We’re doing it in our own little lives, as we try to build thoughtfully and live sanely inside an industry moving at inhuman speed.

The dishwasher didn’t give us more rest. It gave us a cleaner kitchen and a longer to-do list. AI will not give us more peace. Not unless we decide, deliberately and in advance, that peace is something we’re actually building toward.

Let’s keep talking, because every minute the ceiling gets higher, including in all the minutes I spent writing this and the ones you spent reading it.

Lindsey Witmer Collins is founder and CEO of WLCM Software Studio and Scribbly Books.

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