Steve Prentice

Everyone’s talking about Generative AI in terms of its superpowers and its risks, but one of its most seductive promises is about how it will make us all more productive. That idea sounds great. Unfortunately, it has a risk of slipping away from us precisely because of the way we are wired. Unless we change the way we see our relationship to technology and time, all this speed and power might amount to nothing. Or worse, it could make everything even busier, more messy, and even more overwhelming. 
 
Induced Demand: Why More Isn’t Always Better

Consider the concept of induced demand. When cities try to solve traffic congestion by building more highways, it often returns the opposite effect: because there are more highways, more people start driving. Consequently, more cars and trucks hit the road, and congestion returns. A new highway doesn’t solve the traffic problem; it simply creates more opportunities for more traffic problems.   
I live near a famous toll highway outside Toronto – the 407. It’s smooth, empty, and fast. Why? Because it’s expensive; possibly prohibitively expensive for daily commutes for most people. I once asked an executive for the 407 – he was attending one of my management classes – why the tolls were so high. His answer? If it were free, it would jam up immediately, without reducing traffic elsewhere. The total number of drivers would just increase. That’s what induced demand is.  
 
The same thing is happening with technology and has been happening ever since it became part of the work environment. Email is one of the best examples of work-related induced demand. 
 
Email: A Cautionary Tale 

Email didn’t improve communication, it simply sped it up. In the pre-digital age we wrote letters, placed them in envelopes and entrusted the postal service to carry them to the recipients. Email does exactly the same thing, only faster. Not cheaper, just faster. Because although you might not be asked to pay postage on an email, you pay just the same – with your time. 
 
In my workshops and speeches, I often ask people how many emails they “deal with” on a daily basis. To “deal with” encompasses reading, replying, composing, and doing tasks related to the email such as working on an attached document or scheduling meetings. Some say they deal with 30 emails per day. Others say 150. If you were to identify the average time spent between the quickest emails and those that take more of your time, and if you were to generously make the average, say, two minutes of your time per email, 30 emails will take you an hour and 150 emails becomes five hours a day. That’s not productivity. That’s overload as a result of unscheduled tasks – and that’s what every email is: an unscheduled task travelling in disguise.   
In just the same way that free highways attract more cars, free email invites more messages. It's inflation by convenience. And like money or calories, we rarely keep track until it’s too late. 
 
Collaboration Tools and the Myth of Efficiency 

Slack was supposed to fix email. Now, people drown in chat threads. Zoom and other video chat technologies saved us travel time but created meeting inflation along the way: more meetings, less meaning, all in the name of productivity. The problem is productivity isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing the right things and doing them more efficiently. 
 
Generative-AI tools like ChatGPT can draft content fast. But you will still need to edit, fact-check, and refine the document. It will likely save you time, especially helping you avoid writer’s block or procrastination, but the full process? That will depend on what you do with the time you have just saved – or what you feel you are allowed to do with it. 
 
We have always been attracted to tools that promise to save time, but even when this happens – when a short video chat meeting takes less time than traveling to an in-person meeting, or when Generative AI can come up with discussion points for your next report faster than you can – the time we save gets filled with more busy work: more emails, more messages, more meetings. We end up with more stuff, but not better outcomes. That’s induced demand in the digital workplace. 
 
Redefining Productivity 

What is productivity, really? Is it about doing things faster, and therefore being able to do more things? Our obsession with output has warped our expectations. We stack meetings back-to-back. We reply to every message as quickly as possible. We equate being “always on” as being successful or committed. Even when tools warn us to slow down, we tend to overrule them out of the fear of looking lazy or unavailable. The real productivity bottleneck isn’t found in the technologies, it’s within us. We humans automatically and obsessively need to fill the spaces that technology frees up.  
 
In fact, it’s quite an irony that one of the key selling points of current AI-based technologies is the capacity to summarize meetings quickly and efficiently. Sure, that sounds like a great idea, but just like the new highway being built around the city, will the ability to take minutes more effectively simply entice people to spend more time in meetings?  
 
Sometimes these pressures go too far. Most cybercrime happens by exploiting the overly busy worker: the phishing email with the malware-laden attachment, the deepfaked message, the lure of social engineering. These are all criminal techniques that exploit the single reality that a person who has no time to think has no ability to think critically at the moment it is needed most.  
 
Technology Isn’t the Enemy 

I love technology. I’ve built a career helping people understand it, and overall, I love the myriad ways it can help people do things better and more efficiently. But the glitter of innovation sometimes blinds us to the real challenge: redefining what productivity truly means. Perhaps the quality, efficiency, and productivity that people are looking for inside their new AI tools has been with them all along, hidden within the minds of employees, needing only opportunity and support to grow into something powerfully efficient.  
 
If an AI technology allows an employee to free up 15 minutes, those 15 minutes would be better spent not returning emails, but instead taking the time to prioritize, to talk to – and listen to – colleagues and customers, and to allow the mind and body a small window of time to decompress and think clearly. That’s where quality truly exists. 
 
Steve Prentice is a speaker, writer and consultant who specialized in the psychology of technology-induced change in the workplace. He is the author of three books, on time management, stress management and fear management. More information is available at steveprentice.com.