AI Productivity Inflation: Why 10x Output Creates More Work, Not Less

I did not set out to coin a term on a Saturday morning. But somewhere between the walking pad and the garden center, between four Claude Code windows and a Burford holly, the word arrived: Productivity Inflation.

Saturday Morning, Four Windows Open

It is Saturday morning, past 11 AM. I am on my walking pad with four Claude Code windows open. One is building out the Tandem site. Another is a GTM strategy brainstorming session. A third is an architecture diagram I am dissecting to figure out how to connect a complex system: AI gateway, API gateway, authenticating layer, and everything else under the sun. The fourth is a coaching assessment system I have been designing for a couple of weeks.

I am also thinking about the next piece of content for the blog. And pestering Cherie, my business partner, with questions about all of it.

Her contribution to this Saturday morning: “Working in the garden, putting down mulch, a whole truckload of dump truck.”

Fair enough.

Then I remembered I needed to buy a Burford holly. Plant it in the front yard. Almost the end of February. If I did not do it now, I would forget again. Had not even thought about it until that moment. So I went.

On the drive to the garden center and back, something clicked. Not a eureka moment. More like a word finally arriving for something I had been living with for weeks. Not analyzing. Not researching. Living with.

The word was inflation.

Not the kind economists track. A different kind. The kind where your output goes up tenfold and your to-do list goes up twentyfold. Where you are more capable than you have ever been and simultaneously further behind than you have ever felt. Where the excitement is absolutely real (I have not been this engaged in probably a decade) and the math still does not add up.

I had been designing systems. Designing systems that design systems. Doing work that would have required a team of specialists two years ago, doing it before noon on a Saturday morning, and somehow still feeling like I was behind.

Not because I was failing. Because I was succeeding.

What Actually Happened to Productivity

My personal output increased roughly tenfold. That is not motivation-speak. It is a measurement. Projects that would have taken months, I finish in weeks. Problems I would have hired specialists for, I work through with AI tools that understand architecture, strategy, and systems design at a level that keeps surprising me.

Maybe I am not writing code anymore, but I am building again. Not designing systems, but designing systems that design systems, at a pace I could not have imagined two years ago.

The satisfaction is genuine. Most excited about getting things done in a decade. That part of the standard AI-and-jobs narrative is correct: artificial intelligence works. For individual builders, it works dramatically.

But here is what nobody talks about: the backlog expanded to absorb the gains and then some. Not from inefficiency, but from capability. I could now see projects that were previously invisible. Too complex. Too time-consuming. Too dependent on skills I did not have. AI made them visible. AI made them feasible. And every single one of them went on the list.

I had to automate task creation in Things 3 (the app where I track work) because I was generating actionable ideas faster than I could manually record them. The list went on and on and on.

Robert Solow asked in 1987 why computers did not show up in the productivity statistics. The inverse question, the one that matters for builders, is what happens when AI does show up, dramatically, for an individual. The answer is not “everything gets easier.”

“Your currency buys less satisfaction than it used to, even though you technically have more output. That is Productivity Inflation.”

Alex Kudinov, MCC

Like monetary inflation, the raw numbers go up. Like monetary inflation, the purchasing power goes down: what each unit of time actually buys you in terms of completion, rest, or the feeling of enough.

You did not just get a faster horse. You got a faster horse AND a more vast continent to explore. The horse is genuinely faster. The continent is genuinely vaster. Both are true simultaneously. And companies that tried to automate their way to productivity are discovering the organizational version of the same trap.

The Patterns Worth Naming

Productivity Inflation is not one thing. It shows up in four distinct patterns, and naming them matters because the response to each is different.

Backlog Expansion

Before AI, the backlog was capped by feasibility. There were things you could do, things you could stretch to do, and things that were simply out of reach. AI moved the cap. It did not remove it. It moved it. And the cap keeps moving with every model release, every new capability, every incremental cost reduction.

The current cap is cost. Frontier models are expensive enough to create a gap between those who can use them and those who cannot. But that cap is temporary too.

This is my dominant pattern. Backlog expansion, all day long. I automated bullet-point creation in my task manager because the list of things I could now plausibly do was growing faster than I could type them in. The backlog did not just grow. It grew in a direction I had never looked before. Things that were not on my radar because they were not on my capability map suddenly landed on my desk. Not as aspirations. As actionable items.

Capability Trap

Capacity scaled. Ambition scaled faster. The gap between what is now possible and what you are actually doing: that is the source of the discomfort. Not overwork. Not burnout. The awareness that you could be doing more, because you genuinely can.

There are so many things on my backlog now that I would have never put there before, because I simply could not do them. I would have never dreamt of creating my own LMS. I would have never dreamt of having AI draw a system architecture and redesign and rearrange pieces as complex as Azure components at the speed of uttering a sentence. I stopped doing minutiae. I do not do PowerPoints anymore. I drop them into Gamma and it handles the slides, but I actually do the work that is behind those slides. Empowerment is the right word. I do not feel godlike, no, but I feel so much more capable.

This is categorically different from old-school workaholism. The workaholic grinds through tasks that take fixed effort. The capability-trapped builder stares at an expanding horizon of feasibility and feels the weight of every path not taken.

Opportunity Cost as Feeling vs. Fact

The math version says every idle hour costs you 10-20x what it used to. But that math treats all potential hours as having equal value. They do not.

The first three hours of focused work generate enormous value. Hour twelve is busywork that feels productive because it moves fast. Speed masks diminishing returns. Throughput scaled; value creation did not scale with it. The feeling of opportunity cost scales infinitely. The actual opportunity cost is bounded by attention, decision quality, and energy.

“Every time I take a minute for rest, for leisure, I trade 10 minutes of stuff I could do for my company, my people, my business, my personal and professional growth.”

A client said that to me recently. The feeling is real. The arithmetic behind it is not. But try telling someone trapped in that cognitive cost of multi-threaded work that their anxiety is miscalculating.

Infinite Game Trap

Builders wired for productivity treat it as a winnable game. AI makes the game feel more winnable than ever, and simultaneously unwinnable, because the finish line keeps moving. Ship the feature, and the next three are already visible. Launch the product, and the market just expanded.

This one is not mine, for what it is worth. I am in it for the process, not the win. But I see it in others constantly.

These four patterns are not mutually exclusive. Most builders experience two or three at once. The value of naming them is not to solve them with a productivity hack. It is to examine what moved onto the list and why. You do not fix Backlog Expansion with better productivity systems that actually hold. You examine what expanded the backlog in the first place.

The Fish in the Ocean

Here is a metaphor that sits with me.

The fish grew 10-20x in its pond. But the fish was not just growing. It got dropped into a completely different ocean. The fish still needs to breathe. It still has biological limits.

The ocean being bigger does not change what the fish needs to thrive. It changes how inadequate the fish feels.

Before AI, I was operating at maybe 30% of my cognitive capacity. Not laziness. Friction. Most of the capacity was consumed by mechanical work: research, formatting, synthesis, the distance between having an idea and executing it. AI stripped away most of that friction. My effective utilization jumped to something like 80%.

That is real. That is extraordinary. And it is also where the inflection point hides.

The jump from 30% to 80% was real, and it was extraordinary. The push from 80% to 95% does not feel different in the moment, but the gains are diminishing and the effort is increasing. My economics classes would call it diminishing marginal utility: each additional unit of effort buys you less than the one before. Where real capability meets biological constraint, that is the dot worth connecting. You are not getting lazier. You are approaching a ceiling that AI did not move. AI moved you closer to it.

For entrepreneurs who already had a complicated relationship with rest, AI did not introduce the guilt. It gave the guilt better ammunition. Same voice, bigger megaphone.

If you were the person who checked email at dinner before AI, you are now the person with four windows open on a Saturday morning. The guilt did not arrive with the tools. It was already there. The tools just validated it.

But this applies to a subset, and the distinction matters. Others had a perfectly healthy relationship with “enough.” They worked their hours, took real vacations, enjoyed their evenings. Then AI expanded the playing field so dramatically that their old boundaries stopped making sense. For them, Productivity Inflation is not a megaphone for existing dysfunction. It is genuinely new territory requiring genuine recalibration.

Both are real. The question is which one you are in.

When I work with someone experiencing this, there is one question that surfaces the distinction every time: “How did your experience change?”

They usually say one of two things.

“I have always been like that, and now I am even more like that.”

Or: “I was fine. I had my family life and all that, and now I have absolutely no time for that.”

One question. Two response patterns. The first tells you the megaphone got louder. The second tells you the ocean is genuinely new. That is not a diagnosis. It is a signal that AI is reshaping your role, or amplifying what was already there. The distinction changes what comes next.

The Question That Changes the Calculation

The default question most builders ask is: “How do I use this capacity better?”

Reasonable question. Also a trap. It optimizes within the inflated framework. It accepts the premise that all this expanded capacity should be fully utilized and asks only about allocation. It is still inside the game.

The more interesting question, the one that changes the entire calculation, is: “What is driving my calculation of what I should be doing?”

There is a difference between “Did you do X or did you do Y?” and “What is driving that for you?” The first is diagnostic and leading; it assumes the answer space and narrows it. The second is open and generative; it creates space for someone to discover something they did not know they knew.

The calculation of what idle time “costs” is not math. It is a value judgment. Often unconscious. Almost always unexamined. When someone tells me they cannot rest because every hour of rest costs them ten hours of output, I do not challenge the arithmetic. I ask what is driving that calculation.

Usually, what surfaces is not about productivity at all. It is about identity. The story they tell themselves about what productive people do. The delegation question they have been avoiding. The difference between the business needing their output and them needing to produce it. What other people are expecting of them. I had a client say it last week: “If I do not work hard enough, it does not feel like I earned it. I do not deserve it.”

“With solutions, we do more. We go farther. We perform.
With awareness, we build the foundation for all of those.”

Alex Kudinov, MCC

“How do I do more?” is a solution-driven question. It has its place. But it skips the foundation. “What is driving this?” is an awareness question. It does not replace the solutions. It makes them land differently. When you understand what is actually driving your version of Productivity Inflation, you stop patching symptoms and start evaluating what AI is actually worth investing in versus what it is feeding.

Naming Productivity Inflation is step one. Understanding what drives YOUR version of it is the actually interesting work.

What Comes After Naming It

I drove back from the garden center with the holly in the back seat and the word in my head. Productivity Inflation. I did not have a solution. I still do not.

That is deliberate.

This article is not going to give you a five-step framework for overcoming Productivity Inflation. Anyone offering that is either selling something or has not sat with the problem long enough to realize it is not a problem to solve. It is a structural feature of what happens when genuine capability expands. You can manage inflation. You cannot eliminate it without eliminating the capacity gains that created it, and nobody wants to do that.

What I have found useful, personally and in working with others, is to stop treating the feeling as evidence of failure.

The feeling of “I could be doing more” is not a moral failing. It is not a sign that your systems are broken or your discipline is lacking. It is data. Data about your values, your ambition, your relationship with enough, and the specific story you tell yourself about what a productive life looks like.

That data is worth examining. Not optimizing. Not hack-and-solving. Examining.

So here is the question I sat with on the drive back, the holly wrapped in a black trash bag in the back seat: if I am more productive than I have ever been, more excited than I have been in a decade, and still feel like I am behind, what is that feeling actually measuring?

Not productivity. Something else.

I do not know the answer yet. But I think the question is the right one. And I think having a word for the experience, Productivity Inflation, makes the question possible in the first place. You cannot examine what you cannot name.

The career strategy conversation is adjacent to this. So is working with someone who asks better questions than you ask yourself. But those are next steps, for when you are ready for them.

For now: the word. Productivity Inflation. See if it fits.

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