The dogs are acting strange

Hi! I’m Peter, CEO of Kickresume, and these career-related stories caught my attention this month — and might catch yours too.

Remember this thing called a diary? I remember mine. It had all my plans, tasks, scribbles, even passwords in it.

Now? I seem to have a separate app for everything. Got an app for tracking stuff, storing stuff, sorting stuff, organizing stuff.

Hell, when I go running I need Strava AND Nike Run. There’s even an app that tracks your poops. (Multiple apps, actually. At least so I’ve heard. From a friend.)

The problem is: I still had to do the actual work. Create the substance that gets sorted, stored, or tracked. 

Then AI shows up.

And it’s supposed to finally do everything for me. Write reports. Analyze data. Code an entire app even if I've never written a line of code in my life.

This is it. The moment you and I've been waiting for. Now we can all kick back a little and enjoy that 4-day workweek everyone promised.

...Right?

Well, not so much, eh. The workweek is still 5 days long. The work isn't any easier. Nothing's going faster. Maybe you feel the same.

But still, AI did deliver some results. Plus a surprise no one wanted.

2023 called, it wants its optimism back

Let's rewind to 2023, when everyone (Including myself) was still high on AI hopium.

Microsoft released their Work Trends Report saying AI would lighten workloads and reduce burnout. 

And employees believed it themselves, too. 58% of global workers in a UiPath survey said they believe AI can address burnout and improve their job fulfillment.

Even Nobel Prize-winning economist Christopher Pissarides jumped in: "We could increase our well-being generally from work and we could take off more leisure. We could move to a four-day week easily."

The setup was perfect. The future was bright.

Now, quick question: In the past two years, has AI made your job easier? Are you working less? Taking longer vacations?

No? Weird.

Good news, you're not alone in this. Bad news is that's because it's actually happening:

• A recent survey found that 77% of employees report AI tools have increased their workload. Not decreased. 

• 47% of employees using AI say they don't even know how to achieve the productivity gains expected of them.

• 61% believe using AI at work increases their risk of burnout. For workers under 25, that number jumps to 87%.

• And 43% reported that AI negatively impacts their work-life balance.

So let's recap.

AI was supposed to alleviate our workload, reduce stress, and make us more productive along the way.

Instead, we have higher workloads, can't meet the impossible productivity goals, and we’re getting burnt out like matchsticks.

There seems to be something off about this AI situation. (To borrow from Charlie Sheen in Scary Movie 4: The dogs are acting strange.)

So... what went wrong?

AI benefits for me, burnout for thee 

Turns out there are four (in hindsight) extremely predictable reasons this went sideways.

Firstly, (apart from the small matter of wondering if you're about to be replaced by AI entirely), there’s something we can all agree on: AI does make individual tasks faster. It can increase productivity.

So when companies understood this potential, they had two options: share the benefits of increased productivity (for example, by cutting work hours) or focus entirely on that "increase productivity" part.

(I'll give you three guesses which one won.)

Basically, those productivity gains never meant less work. They just meant higher expectations. You finish something in half the time? Great. Here are three more things to do. 

In fact, 81% of executives acknowledge they’ve increased demands on workers over the past year.

And look, it's not really AI's fault. AI could be used to ease burnout. Companies just chose to make things much, much worse.

Secondly, it's not just about doing more work faster. AI can also handle the boring, repetitive, administrative stuff that used to eat up your time. Which means you get to focus on the complex, meaningful work. Sounds great, right?

Except experts agree that our brains actually need those admin, lower-level tasks as recovery time between high-focus work.

Turns out, you can't sprint for 8 hours straight. Kind of like sprinting a marathon doesn't work. 

Thirdly, there's also the clarity problem.

With AI changing everything about how work gets done, nobody knows what they're supposed to be aiming for and what success looks like for their employer.

Should you deliver work faster? Be more strategic? Do more with less? All of the above? Something else entirely?

This advice for avoiding burnout is fire

So yeah, I realize that all this sounds pretty depressing. The AI-induced burnout is real, and even I—a huge fan of AI—feel it lurking around. Maybe you do, too.

So can anything be done about it? 

Well, I'd love to announce I've solved systemic corporate greed in one newsletter, but shockingly, I haven't. 

But I do have some advice that might help with the AI burnout part:

The easiest one is simply to keep some of the boring, mindless stuff. It looks like our brains need that.

Also, just because AI makes you faster doesn't mean you need to run at 100% capacity all the time. If AI makes you 40% faster, maybe give your company 20% of that and keep the other 20% as breathing room. 

(Would this be a popular advice among fellow CEOs? Probably not, but pushing your employees to burn out is not really a good strategy.)

And finally, you can ask your manager to clarify what success looks like to them, now that AI is around. Ask them to properly define their expectations. 

And if they have their humanity switch on – even have a conversation about it. 

Which I should probably do with my own team too before they read this newsletter.

As a token of appreciation for your excellent scrolling skills, here’s a 30% discount code for Kickresume Premium.  

Catch you later!  

Peter