Productivity: Progress or Permanent Acceleration?
What are we trying to create time and space for?
This past weekend one of my friends from Kindergarten got married, and the celebrations were absolutely beautiful. As part of the bridal party I was witness to only part of the stress, chaos, and endless planning and preparation that the bride and groom went through leading up to the big day. It was a lot, but what the happy couple said that night and in the days that have followed was: “It was so worth it.”
For a few uninterrupted hours they created a shared space for family, friends, laughter, love, and so much dancing. I left with a blur of fun memories, stories that will be remembered and retold for years, and a deep well of appreciation for those hours of human connection that were carefree and so increasingly rare they now feel almost extraordinary.
In fact, when I came back to “reality” the contrast was stark.
I was immediately bombarded with emails, appointments, and deliverables. No one was being malicious or intentionally stressful, it’s just what everyday reality has become.
What surprised me most, however, was a strange feeling of guilt. Not because I had ignored my responsibilities, but because for a few days I had stopped thinking about them entirely. I felt guilty for not feeling guilty about the growing list of unfinished tasks waiting for me at home. Somehow, being fully present felt slightly irresponsible.
Many of my interactions these days are filled with phrases such as “Sorry, we know it’s a lot,” “Do what you can,” “Apologies for the delay,” and “We’re available four months from today.”
Everyone seems to be collectively overwhelmed, and the pressure isn’t mean-spirited, it’s more like collaborative exhaustion. Almost as if people recognize that they’re doing too much, but they can’t step off the treadmill because that treadmill is now the economy, career advancement, social relevance, or survival.
To be clear, I’m not anti-productivity. I like being busy. I often (and badly) multitask. I do enjoy an occasional day spent rotting in front of the TV, but for the most part I genuinely like filling my days with activity. But these days I find myself asking, “Am I actually becoming more productive, or am I simply producing more?”
The challenge is that hyper-productivity no longer feels entirely like a personal choice. It increasingly feels embedded in the systems surrounding us: technologies that reward constant responsiveness, economies that create insecurity, and cultures that equate busyness with value.
I recently read a Harvard Business Review article titled, “Managers Are Struggling to Keep Up with the AI Productivity Boom,” which, when juxtaposed with the wedding weekend, helped me articulate what I’ve been experiencing and trying to understand.
Productivity has boomed, in part because of AI. More work can now be created at a much faster pace, but this has created a paradox. According to the managers interviewed for the article, “AI has created abundance, meaning it allows teams to pursue more opportunities and ideas, but has also skyrocketed feelings of scarcity, as the new pace strains time, energy, and attention.”
Technology promised efficiency, and efficiency was supposed to create time. But increasingly, saved time does not become rest, reflection, or connection. It gets reinvested into more output, more responsiveness, more optimization, and more expectations. If this all leads to meaningful progress, that’s great. But does it? Or does it just lead to permanent acceleration?
This piece isn’t meant to be anti-AI or anti-work. My intention is that it helps us reflect on the new culture we are collaboratively creating, and helps us be more deliberate about it and less passively adaptive.
A few questions to reflect on:
If productivity keeps increasing, why does time still feel scarce?
Are we optimizing our lives around the wrong metrics?
What happens when efficiency crowds out connection and presence?
Have we mistaken the means for the end?
What is the end goal?
The time being reinvested into more output may also be crowding out valuable human experiences: slow conversations, team dinners, intergenerational learning, community rituals, reflection, presence, and collective joy. The experiences that make life meaningful are often inefficient by design.
As we become increasingly hyper-productive in our professional and personal lives, it’s worth remembering what we are trying to create time, space, and progress for in the first place. Because if technology, efficiency, and productivity are helping us move faster than ever before, it may be worth pausing to ask where exactly we’re trying to go.