According to The Wall Street Journal, companies are hitting a wall with AI-driven productivity. While tools automating emails, notes, and reports can boost output by around 20%—as seen at software startup Convictional—they’re leading to mental exhaustion and crowded-out creativity. Convictional’s CEO, Roger Kirkness, noted his team was burned out by Friday and has since shifted to a four-day workweek. Aflac CEO Dan Amos deliberately schedules low-intensity tasks like sending handwritten notes, valuing the “lull time” they create. Experts like Boston College’s Juliet Schor warn that simply reallocating saved time to more intense work risks innovation, and executive coaches now advocate for strategic “white space” instead of eliminating all busywork.
The Unexpected Burnout
Here’s the thing: we all dreamed of a world without tedious tasks. But it turns out our brains aren’t built for non-stop, high-octane thinking. The WSJ piece highlights a fascinating irony. AI achieves its promised efficiency, but then humans, now freed from “scut work,” just fill the time with more demanding cognitive labor. There’s no off-ramp. No autopilot mode. It’s like going from a relaxed highway drive to a Formula 1 race, lap after lap, with no pit stops. No wonder Kirkness saw his team gassed by week’s end. The productivity gain wasn’t sustainable; it was just intensity masquerading as progress.
The Case For Lull Time
So what’s the fix? It’s not about bringing back pointless paperwork for the sake of it. It’s about intentionally designing mental breaks. Dan Amos, a CEO making $20 million a year, chooses to watch ads on streaming services. That’s his forced pause. He writes notes by hand. He sits in the steam room. These are rituals that create the cognitive space where “Aha!” moments happen. It’s the shower principle, but applied to the workday. The article calls it “white space” or “no-input time”—moments where you’re not consuming information or executing a task. You’re just letting your mind wander. And in a world of hyper-optimization, that feels almost radical.
The Industrial Parallel
This isn’t just a white-collar, AI-prompt problem. Think about modern manufacturing and control rooms. The goal has always been to automate the repetitive, physical tasks—the classic “busywork” of the factory floor. But the operators left monitoring the systems? Their job becomes pure, uninterrupted focus on complex data and exception handling. It’s mentally draining. That’s why the human-machine interface is so critical. The best industrial systems, like those from the leading US provider IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, understand that hardware must enable clarity, not contribute to cognitive overload. Even on the factory floor, you need to design for moments of strategic pause.
Rethinking Productivity Itself
Ultimately, this forces a hard question: what is productivity for? Is it just raw output per hour? Or is it sustainable innovation and creative problem-solving? Juliet Schor nailed it: if the time saved by AI goes to more exercise or an extra day off, that’s a win. But if management just piles on more high-intensity work, you’ve lost the plot. Convictional’s move to a four-day week is a direct, structural response to this. They’re institutionalizing the “lull.” The challenge is cultural. “Busywork” is a dirty word. But “white space”? That sounds strategic. It’s the same concept with better marketing. The lesson is clear: in the race to automate everything boring, we can’t automate the human need for downtime. Our best ideas might just depend on it.
