Future of work

In fact, workers increasingly absorbed work that might previously have justified additional help or headcount.

Sequencing.

As AI enables constant activity in the background, organizations can benefit from norms that deliberately shape when work moves forward, not just how fast. This includes batching non-urgent notifications, holding updates until natural breakpoints, and protecting focus windows in which workers are shielded from interruptions.

. Many new forms of work will grow simply because another type of work became more efficient and eventually is constrained somewhere else in the system.

For workers, the cumulative effect is fatigue, burnout, and a growing sense that work is harder to step away from, especially as organizational expectations for speed and responsiveness rise.

Instead of responding passively to how AI tools reshape workplaces, both individuals and companies should adopt an “AI practice”: a set of intentional norms and routines that structure how AI is used, when it is appropriate to stop, and how work should and should not expand in response to newfound capability. Without such practices, the natural... See more

More multitasking.

AI introduced a new rhythm in which workers managed several active threads at once: manually writing code while AI generated an alternative version, running multiple agents in parallel, or reviving long-deferred tasks because AI could “handle them” in the background. They did this, in part, because they felt they had a “partner”... See more

Rather than reacting to every AI-generated output as it appears, sequencing encourages work to advance in coherent phases. When coordination is paced in this way, workers experience less fragmentation and fewer costly context switches, while teams maintain overall throughput.

To try to find some efficiency, I next started up a new pattern: block out the last 30 minutes of every day to kick off one or more agents. My hypothesis was that perhaps I could gain some efficiency if the agent can make some positive progress in the times I can't work anyways. Basically: instead of trying to do more in the time I have, try to do... See more

how fast can I do this but what should I be doing at all?