Dearest Gentle Reader:
It has come to this author's attention that certain members of our industrious professional class have questions.
So this week, I will answer your letters—dispensing counsel on writing, dealing with nincompoops & nincom-bots, and sharing
a tale as old as a dowager: the tension between humanity and AI.
In other words, I've just finished the new season of Bridgerton. You likely sensed this already, did you not?
I'll resist the urge to write this entire newsletter in the tone of a Regency-era scandal sheet.
But kindly
imagine me writing this with quill scratching across parchment, seated at a too-small desk while wearing a dress engineered to restrict both oxygen and female ambition.
Without further ado...
* * *
With so much AI-assisted content out there
now, what do you think is the one human element in writing that still makes someone stop scrolling and actually feel something? —Amanda
Not sure there's only one thing. But for me it's probably this: specificity of observation.
A detail that's yours—neither generic nor general.
One particular person paying close attention in one particular moment—then holding it out like an outstretched hand: This is how it feels for me. You too? (To paraphrase the great Kazuo Ishiguro.)
The goal
of everything we write is to make someone think: So it's not just me.
Specific enough to be true. True enough to be universal.
I talk about this a lot in Everybody Writes 2,
BTW.
* * *
I've been using AI tools more and more at work, and at first it felt kind of fun, or like a superpower. But lately I just feel buried. Like I'm doing more than ever but somehow never caught up. Is this just me adjusting, or what? —Simone
A short and declarative sentence: It's not just you.
We've seen this before. Every time a tool promises relief, it somehow ends up raising the bar.
Email was supposed to streamline communication—and ended up being our whole job.
Smartphones
were supposed to untether us from the desk—but now we are never untethered at all.
Slack was supposed to lift the burden of email—and now we are (ping!) immediately (ping!) accessible (ping!) all day long.
Even outside of work:
Streaming was supposed to free us from rigid TV
schedules—and now we spend 20 minutes deciding what to watch.
Each one delivered on its promise—and then hot-glued a larger obligation to it.
Now in waltzes AI, promising to give us time back. But what's actually happening is that AI seems to be intensifying work.
Last week I
saw some new research that tracked how generative AI changed work habits at a real company over eight months. (Pause to underscore: Actual people. An actual workplace. Not vibes. But lived experience.) It was published in Harvard Business Review.
The researchers found something remarkable. Or maybe striking is a better word:
AI didn't reduce work. It intensified it.
People moved faster. Took on a broader scope of work. Let that work seep into hours that used to be off-limits. They multitasked like crazy.
Product managers and designers writing
code. Researchers taking on engineering tasks. Individuals across the org doing work they would have previously outsourced, deferred, or avoided entirely.
All because AI made "doing more" feel possible—enjoyable, even. And empowering! Right up until... suddenly, it wasn't.
That "workload creep" is the oldest story in the productivity playbook—now wearing a new
gown from the modiste.
It's not just that work spilled into our off hours.
It's that the definition of what one person can attempt expanded like Sea-Monkeys the moment you add water.
The tool is always there. Always on. Always easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy frictionless.
Yet frictionless, it turns out, is not the same thing as easier. It's not the same as relief.
Which is why I suggested a few weeks ago that AI might benefit from slower, more considered adoption. Not to resist the technology—but to give
ourselves time to decide what work is actually worth expanding.
Efficient is not the same as effective.
So no, Simone: you're not merely adjusting. I think we are all experiencing something profound and structural.
The question isn't whether AI is useful. It clearly is.
The question is
whether you are shaping how you use it—or whether it's shaping you instead.
Something tells me that may become the defining workplace question of this decade.
