The AI 'Productivity Boost' That Secretly Doubled My Workload

''' We were sold a lie. A beautiful, tantalizing, Silicon Valley-branded lie.

The lie was that Artificial Intelligence would be our great liberator. It would descend from the cloud, a digital angel, to smite the demons of tedious work. Replying to emails? Done. Summarizing long reports? Handled. Writing code? No problem. We were promised a future where we’d be freed from the mundane to focus on the glorious, the strategic, the human.

I've been living in that "future" for a while now, and I can tell you what it really looks like. My workload hasn't been cut in half. It's doubled. And it has become ten times more annoying.

The great "productivity boost" from AI is a mirage. What they don’t tell you about is the "supervision tax." AI doesn’t do the work for you. It just creates a sloppy first draft that you are now responsible for. It’s like being promoted to manager, but your only direct report is an infinitely confident, pathologically dishonest intern who has never seen the sun. And you can't fire them.

The "Writer" Who Can't Write

Take marketing and content creation. Every agency and their dog is now using AI to "generate" blog posts, social media updates, and website copy. The pitch? "Create 10x the content in half the time!" The reality? You generate a 1,500-word article on, say, "The Benefits of Sustainable Packaging."

What you get is a steaming pile of plausible-sounding nonsense. The sentences are grammatically correct, but they’re lifeless. Devoid of voice. The "facts" it includes are often subtly wrong, or worse, completely fabricated—what the tech bros cheerfully call "hallucinations." Suddenly, you aren’t a writer anymore. You’re a forensic accountant of falsehoods.

You have to check every single claim. Does that statistic have a source? Is that historical anecdote true? Did it just invent a company name? By the time you’ve fact-checked, corrected, and rewritten the soulless prose to sound like a human wrote it, you’ve spent more time and energy than it would have taken to just write the damn thing yourself from a blank page.

The AI didn't save you from writing. It tricked you into becoming its long-suffering, unpaid editor.

The Coder Who Creates Chaos

It’s the same story in the world of software development. Tools like GitHub Copilot are sold as a programmer's best friend. "It writes the boilerplate code for you!" And sometimes, it does. It will autocomplete a function. It looks like magic. It feels like progress.

But then the dread sets in. Did that AI-generated snippet of code introduce a security vulnerability? Does it handle edge cases properly? Is it efficient, or did it just create a hidden performance bottleneck that will bring the entire application to its knees in three months? The junior developer sees a shortcut. The senior developer sees a field of landmines.

The time saved by not typing a few lines of code is immediately spent on a new, more stressful task: rigorous code review, obsessive testing, and debugging the ghost in the machine. Your job isn’t creating anymore. It’s supervising. Babysitting. Your creative flow is shattered by the constant need to be vigilant, to second-guess your "assistant."

The Real Cost is Cognitive

This isn’t just about lost time. It’s about the change in the nature of our work. Creative, deep work is rewarding. It puts you in a state of flow. The work of supervising an AI is the cognitive equivalent of eating junk food. It’s a series of unsatisfying, low-value micro-tasks that leave you feeling drained and anxious.

Instead of building from the ground up, we’re stuck renovating a house that was built with shoddy materials. Instead of the pride of creation, we get the weary relief of having caught a mistake before it caused a disaster. This isn’t a better way to work. It’s a recipe for burnout.

We’re also deskilling ourselves. A writer who stops writing and only edits AI copy loses their voice. A coder who only accepts AI suggestions without understanding them never truly learns the craft. We’re outsourcing the practice, the very thing that makes us better, to a machine that isn’t actually learning anything at all.

The Off-Ramp

So what’s the alternative? Reject the premise. The solution to tedious work isn’t a machine that generates more tedious work. The solution is focus, discipline, and tools that serve the human, not the other way around.

Turn off the AI. Close the tab. Embrace the glorious, productive friction of thinking for yourself. The real productivity boost comes from knowing your craft and using tools that help you execute it, not ones that pretend to do it for you. Start with a blank page. It’s the most honest productivity app there is. '''