2026.09: Why AI Is Making You More Productive and More Exhausted at the Same Time
This week I’m taking things a different direction.
No three signals. Instead, I want to talk about one thing that's been showing up in every classroom, every consulting engagement, and every honest conversation I've had in the last month.
AI fatigue.
Not "I'm tired of hearing about AI." The other kind. The kind where you shipped more work last quarter than any quarter in your career and somehow feel worse. The kind where the tool that was supposed to save you time has consumed your entire day. The kind where you sit at your desk at 11pm reviewing AI-generated content and wonder what happened to the afternoon.
I've been circling this topic for weeks. A brilliant piece by engineer Siddhant Khare finally put language to what I've been watching play out in real time. I've been ranting about it to my colleagues. And I think it's time we had this conversation out in the open.
Let's break it down.
The Buffer Zone Is Gone
Richard Banfield at Second Harvest gave me a way to frame this that I haven't been able to shake. He said, "Technology shrinks the time between what you want to happen, to it actually happening."
He's not talking about hours getting shorter. He's talking about our subjective experience of time. The distance between desire and fulfillment is collapsing.
Think about it. Historically, someone had to invent the technology. Then people had to adopt it. That adoption period, the messy middle where we figured out how a new tool fit into our lives, gave us time to adapt. By the time the next wave hit, we felt ready. Or at least ready enough.
That buffer is gone.
The invention-to-adoption cycle used to take years. Now it takes weeks. Sometimes days. Claude ships sub-agents, then skills, then an Agent SDK. OpenAI launches Codex CLI, then a model that helped code itself. New agent frameworks show up weekly. And somewhere in the middle of all this, someone on LinkedIn posts that if you're not orchestrating AI agent swarms, you're already obsolete.
Our nervous systems were not built for this.
The Paradox Nobody Warned You About
Here's what's actually happening on the ground, and I see this with my students and my consulting clients, not just in articles.
AI genuinely makes individual tasks faster. That's not a lie. What used to take three hours now takes 45 minutes. Drafting a document, building a workflow, researching an unfamiliar topic. All faster.
But your days got harder. Not easier.
When each task takes less time, you don't do fewer tasks. You do more. Your capacity appears to expand, so the work expands to fill it. Your boss sees you shipping faster, so expectations adjust. You see yourself shipping faster, so your own expectations adjust. The baseline moves.
Before AI, you might spend a full day on one problem. You'd sketch on paper, go for a walk, come back with clarity. One problem. One day. Deep focus.
Now you might touch six different problems in a day. Each one "only takes an hour with AI." But context-switching between six problems is brutally expensive for the human brain. The AI doesn't get tired between problems. You do.
Here's the part that really matters for anyone running a business: AI reduces the cost of production but increases the cost of coordination, review, and decision-making. And those costs fall entirely on the human.
You became a reviewer. A judge. A quality inspector on an assembly line that never stops. Creating is energizing. Reviewing is draining. And most of us didn't sign up to be full-time editors of machine output.
Faster Is Not Better
This is where I need to get something off my chest, because I think we've lost the thread on this one.
Somewhere along the way, we started to conflate "faster" with "better." But pace and efficiency are different levers, and good operators know when to push each one.
Efficiency is about getting to the outcome you care about while wasting as little time, energy, or resources as possible. When you consistently produce more value from the same (or fewer) inputs, that's efficiency. Not speed.
AI does not equal better.
The key is to use technology to produce more value and provide the time to pursue your gifts. Or, as Dan Martel would say, "Buy back your time."
But that only works if you actually buy it back. If every minute AI saves you gets immediately filled with more AI-generated work that needs reviewing, you haven't bought anything. You've traded one hamster wheel for a faster one.
I say this to every cohort I teach: find the efficiencies that allow you to pursue your gifts, and give those gifts to the world. If AI is just making you a faster hamster, something is broken.
What Actually Helps
I'm not going to pretend I have this figured out. I spend 15 to 20 hours a week trying to stay current so I can produce quality material for my students and consulting clients. The FOMO treadmill is real, and I've ridden it hard.
But between Khare's experience, the practitioners I talk to, and my own trial and error, some patterns are emerging that actually work.
First, before you open a single AI tool, write one sentence about what you're actually solving. One sentence. That's it. If you can't explain the problem in a single line, AI is going to generate noise. And you're going to spend your evening editing that noise instead of living your life.
Second, give yourself a three-shot rule. If AI doesn't get you to 70% usable in three prompts, close it and write the thing yourself. I've watched people burn 45 minutes refining a prompt for something they could've written in 20. That's not productivity. That's a slot machine.
Third, and this one is going to sound old-fashioned, separate your thinking time from your AI time. I do my best thinking in the morning with a voice recorder and a coffee. No tools. No prompts. Just me talking through the problem out loud. It feels slow. It is slow. But when I sit down with AI in the afternoon, I'm sharper. I can actually judge whether the output is good because my own reasoning showed up to work first.
Fourth, set a hard stop. A "last prompt" time, the same way you'd set a "last email" time. I've talked to people who are prompting at midnight, 2am, "just one more." I have a rule I stole from my years at Apple: the best time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining. Set the boundary before you need it. Because the most productive thing you can do at 11pm is sleep. The work will be there tomorrow. Your brain won't be if you don't let it rest.
And fifth, the one that matters most: ask yourself whether you're doing more things or the right things. Are you actually closer to your goal? Or did you just ship a bunch of stuff that felt good in the moment? If you can't answer that honestly, you're busy. Not productive. There's a difference, and AI has made it dangerously easy to confuse the two.
The Part Nobody Wants to Talk About
One more thing, and I'll keep this brief because it deserves its own conversation.
Many of us have our identities wrapped up in our careers. I know I do, despite my best efforts. The impact this has on our psyche when the ground keeps shifting underneath us is real. It's not weakness. It's human.
Whole industries are about to get reshuffled. Most of the jobs we recognize today won't exist in ten years. New roles will pop up, burn hot for a while, and vanish just as fast. If we see our identity as "marketer" or "developer" or "consultant" or "accountant," we're going to experience a lot of suffering in this new reality.
The skill worth building isn't mastering the latest AI tool. It's building an identity that strengthens under the pressure of constant change and chaos. That's a different kind of work entirely.
The Real Skill
Khare put it better than I could:
“The real skill of the AI era isn't prompt engineering. It isn't knowing which model to use. It isn't having the perfect workflow. It's knowing when to stop.
We design our systems for sustainability. Circuit breakers. Backpressure. Graceful degradation. We should do the same for ourselves.
AI is the most powerful set of tools I've ever worked with. It's also the most draining. Both things are true. The people who thrive won't be the ones who use AI the most. They'll be the ones who use it wisely.
If you're tired, it's not because you're doing it wrong. It's because this is genuinely hard. The tools are new, the patterns are still forming, and too many people are pretending that more output equals more value.
It doesn't. Sustainable output does.
Take care of your brain. It's the only one you've got.”
Deep Dive
No deep dive this week, that was deep enough.
The signals will keep moving. I'll be back next week with a full Deep Dive.
Thanks for reading!
This one was personal, and I suspect it hit close to home for some of you too.
I'd love to hear how you're managing this. What boundaries have you set? What's working? What's not? Reply and tell me. The best ideas I've found on this topic have come from real conversations, not articles.
See you next Friday.
Best,
JT
P.S. — AI writes v1. But you decide if v1 should exist at all. That distinction is worth more than any prompting course you'll ever take.
