You wake up. Check your phone. 73 emails. 314 unread Slack messages across 12 channels. Your calendar shows 6 meetings today - three are about planning future meetings.
You're a software engineer. Or a designer. Or a product manager. Doesn't matter. Your actual job - the thing they hired you to do - will have to wait.
First, you need to update the project tracker. Then respond to the "urgent" Slack thread about the Q3 planning document. Then read the 18 documents you were CC'd on "just FYI." Then attend the 10 AM standup where everyone will describe how busy they are managing all this information and attending meetings.
By lunch, you've been "productive" for four hours. You haven't done any actual work.
The afternoon brings a meeting about why the project is behind schedule. It's scheduled during the only time you blocked off to actually do work. In the meeting, someone suggests a daily check-in to "maintain alignment." Half the participants nod, the other half stay silent - they heard nothing, just thinking about those unread messages. More fluff about the work that isn't getting done.
You know that memo your boss will ask about next week? The one buried in some FYI email from last Tuesday? You don't. But you will. Right after they ask.
By 6 PM, you've answered dozens of messages, attended hours of meetings, updated multiple systems. If you're a software engineer, maybe you've written 11 lines of code. If you're a designer, maybe you've moved a few pixels. If you're a PM, maybe you've written another document about the customer research you haven't had time to do.
This is your work life. This is all of our work lives.
We've created a world where the fluff about work has become the work itself.
Inbox Zero, Zero Impact
Here's an uncomfortable truth: 99% of the information flowing through our workplaces is mindless brain vomit. I'm not being hyperbolic. Count the Slack messages, the emails, the "FYI" CCs, the meeting notes from meetings about meetings. How much actually drives real work forward?
We've created badges of honor around managing this chaos. "Inbox zero!" we proclaim, as if pressing "select all > archive" is an achievement. But what does inbox zero even mean? That you've mentally processed and acted on everything? Or just that you've swept the digital detritus under a rug labeled "archived"? Archive. Achieve. Close enough, right?
Every morning, knowledge workers wake up to an avalanche. Slack notifications from six different channels. Emails where you're CC'd "just in case." Calendar invites for meetings where your presence is "optional" (but not really). WhatsApp groups, Twitter mentions, LinkedIn messages, Teams chats. The list goes on. Finding the threads that matter across these disparate places has become a job in itself - one that leaves little time for the job you were actually hired to do.
The cruel joke? Someone, somewhere, is waiting on your response to something buried in that avalanche. They're feeling the same anxiety about their own unanswered messages. We've created a distributed anxiety system where everyone is simultaneously drowning and adding to everyone else's flood.
The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fail
There's robust research showing that as companies grow, they become exponentially less efficient. Small firms have three to ten times higher productivity in development than large firms. Three to ten times.
Why? Because growth brings complexity, and complexity brings entropy. More people means more communication channels. More communication channels means more meetings. More meetings means more people hired to manage the meetings. Soon you have entire departments whose sole purpose is to coordinate other departments.
Large companies don't start out this way. Microsoft began in a garage. Google started with two people. But as they scale, they add layers. Middle managers to manage managers. Directors to direct the managers. VPs to oversee the directors. Each layer creating work to justify its existence.
The tragedy is that this system traps good people in bad patterns. Excellent engineers get promoted to management - the only way to pay them more - and stop building. Natural leaders get stuck in middle management, formatting reports instead of setting strategy. Everyone knows the system is broken, but they're too busy managing the dysfunction to fix it.
I've watched companies with thousands of employees move slower than startups with twelve. Not because the people are less capable, but because the system demands it. Every decision requires alignment. Every alignment requires meetings. Every meeting spawns follow-up meetings. Meanwhile, Instagram reshaped social media with 13 people.
But what if artificial intelligence could bring order to this chaos? What if all the busy work could just... busy itself? A world where work means something again. Where you can own and master something real. Where companies can move at the speed of thought, not the speed of bureaucracy.
Middle Managers Will Embrace This Change, and Suddenly They're All Gone
Here's where it gets interesting. What if artificial intelligence assistants weren't about productivity at all? What if they were about respite - about creating space to breathe, to think, to actually work?
Imagine an artificial intelligence companion that doesn't flood you with more notifications but instead says: "Here's what's calling you today. Here are the three things that actually matter. The rest can wait." Not optimization. Not productivity hacks. Just... clarity.
The beautiful irony is that middle managers will embrace this technology. They're drowning too. They'll welcome artificial intelligence that gives them "more time for strategic thinking." And at first, it will. The companion will handle the busy work, draft the reports, filter the noise.
But gradually, quarter by quarter, a truth will emerge: once you remove the busywork, many roles have nothing left. It's like slowly turning up the lights in a theater and realizing the elaborate set is just cardboard. The middle managers themselves will be the ones flipping the switch.
This isn't a job apocalypse - it's a revolution. Let's be honest: some jobs should completely disappear. If artificial intelligence can do 100% of a task better, faster, and cheaper, that job is gone. No point pretending otherwise. The convergence of artificial intelligence with robotics will accelerate this in industries that felt safe - though energy constraints mean this transformation will be slower than the doomsayers predict.
And those holding dead jobs? They will gravitate to where their talent is most needed.
What matters is that new forms of work will emerge, just as they always have. Work we can't yet imagine, the way a farmer in 1850 couldn't imagine "user experience designer" or "data scientist." The question is whether we'll use this transition to eliminate the nonsense jobs or just create new forms of digital paper-pushing.
Imagine Microsoft or Google not as one massive company but as a thousand small ones. Each with a leader and doers. Each with its own P&L. Internal companies (like HR) charging for their services. If nobody wants to pay for your service, maybe that service isn't needed.
No more promoting engineers to management just to pay them properly. No more strategic thinkers trapped in report-formatting purgatory. Just small teams doing real work, like startups inside the giant's body.
Will people mourn this transformation? Of course. The fear is real and justified. These aren't incompetent people; they're people trapped in incompetent systems. Systems we created, that they inherited.
The Real Question
We built these tools to help us communicate better, work faster, be more productive. Now we're like Lucille Ball in the chocolate factory, desperately shoving chocolates in our mouths, our pockets, anywhere, just trying to keep up with the conveyor belt we built and set to maximum speed.
Artificial intelligence offers us something radical: the chance to step back, breathe, and ask what work actually is. Not email. Not Slack. Not meetings. But the thing we're supposedly doing all this communication about.
The question isn't whether artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs. It's whether we'll use it to eliminate the nonsense that's preventing us from doing our jobs. The assistant I envision doesn't replace workers - it reveals what work actually is.
A Future of Real Work
And maybe, just maybe, we'll discover that when you strip away all the corporate theater, there's still plenty of real work to be done. Work that matters. Work that builds. Work that moves us forward. Work that makes a difference.
Because that's what we've lost in all this cosplaying of productivity - the actual building, creating, solving. We dress up in our business casual, attend our meetings, send our updates, but how much are we actually doing? Forget how much, rather what are we actually doing?!
The alternative is spending the next decade the way we spent the last one: drowning in our own information, mistaking motion for progress, until we've built a tower of process so tall we can't remember what we were trying to reach in the first place.
We have a choice. We can use artificial intelligence to accelerate the madness - more notifications, more dashboards, more tools to manage our tools. Or we can use it to finally admit that the emperor of productivity has been naked all along, and maybe it's time to find him some actual clothes.
Aren’t you tired of cosplaying work?
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