By Anfernee Chansamooth
As artificial intelligence takes over more repetitive tasks, knowledge workers are facing an unexpected dilemma: without busywork to pad out the day, what does being productive actually mean?
Eric Doty, Head of Community at Superpath, shared his struggle on LinkedIn.
“Something I’ve struggled with in recent weeks: I’m not sure what a ‘productive’ workday as an in-house content marketer looks like anymore,” wrote Doty. “I’ve AI-ed and automated so much busy work out of my work life that I’m left with almost only cognitively demanding tasks that I can’t possibly spend eight hours per day doing.”
Doty’s experience reflects a growing reality for many people working alongside AI. The eight-hour workday, long taken for granted, feels increasingly out of step when machines can generate outputs in seconds.
Neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology (UNSW) Joel Pearson said this shift exposes a deeper challenge.
Pearson explained that our brains are wired for a mix of routine and problem-solving. Remove the routine, and workers are left in a constant state of high-level thinking.
“That’s exhausting if you try to do it all day,” he said.
Pearson warned of the risk of what he calls cognitive offloading, where too much thinking is handed to machines and the habit of challenging ourselves is lost.
“If you offload your work to AI, get in the habit of doing nothing and stop the habit of being challenged, that will have a negative effect on your brain,” he said. “You’re not engaging it the way you would normally. Parts of your brain will shrink; the structures will change.”
This can slide into what Pearson described as cognitive complacency, when the brain becomes lazy because technology is doing too much.
The solution, he argued, is what he calls cognitive upsizing.
“As soon as we offload to AI, we need to take on newer, bigger, juicier problems. We want to keep that tension there, that feeling of having to think, to push against something.”
For knowledge workers, that means focusing on strategy, creative problem solving, connecting ideas, and leading the conversations that AI cannot.
Pearson suggested the future of work may not be about doing more. It may be about thinking better.
Featured image: A worker stares at a laptop, uncertain what productivity means in the AI era. Photo: Michael Burrows/CC/Pexels
