Hi Reader,
AI was sold to every business on the same promise. Your team gets time back. The busywork disappears. Everyone finally does the work that matters.
This year the data came in. It says the opposite happened.
One study tracked the real workdays of thousands of people, comparing the 180 days before and after they started using AI. Every category of activity went up. Not one went down.
Email more than doubled. Messaging rose 145 percent. Time in business software rose 94 percent. The study put it plainly: the data is unambiguous, AI does not reduce workloads.
And the one thing that fell? Focused, uninterrupted work. The kind of effort that actually moves a result. It dropped 9 percent. For the people who did not adopt AI, it did not move at all.
So the tool that was meant to create time for real work did the reverse. More activity.
Less of the work.
Here is the part most leaders will miss. This is not an AI problem. AI only made an old problem louder.
Companies have always measured activity. Hours logged. Emails sent. Meetings attended. Whether the team is using the new tool. Every one of those numbers climbed this year. The screen looks busier than ever.
But activity was never the work. The work is the small number of focused actions that actually move the result. In most companies, that is the one number nobody measures.
There is a different way. For each role, find the one or two actions that genuinely move that person’s result. Put that number where everyone can see it. A scoreboard with every person’s effort count, updated through the day, visible to the whole team. Call it the wall.
Now a busier inbox fools nobody. You can see, in real time, whether the work that matters got done, or whether the day was spent feeding tools.
AI is not the threat. Mistaking a busier team for a better one is the threat. The wall is how you tell the two apart.
Next Sunday on the YouTube channel. Why your team hands you an excuse instead of the truth, and the one word that fixes it.
Don’t set goals. TAME the effort.
BJay
See you next week!
PS – If a friend forwarded this to you, you can subscribe at tameyourgoals.com.
