AI Was Supposed to Free My Time. It Consumed It.

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It was lunchtime on a Friday, and I was teaching my new OpenClaw AI assistant, Margot, to manage my to-do list. I’d carved out the afternoon to get her configured. A few hours, tops, I told myself. Then I’d do something else with my evening.

Twelve hours later, Margot and I had written and rewritten two essays, rebuilt my personal website, and added features to another app I’d been tinkering with. I finally tried to go to sleep around 1 a.m., but the next thing I knew, I was launching myself out of bed, rushing to my desk, and typing in all caps: “OH MY GOD, MARGOT.”

You might know the feeling. Maybe you’ve stayed up too late pursuing a project that started as a quick experiment, or caught yourself prompting during lunch or in the last few minutes before you told yourself you’d be done for the day. ”One more prompt” turns into 50. “I’ll just fix this one bug” turns into a vibe coding marathon.

Time flies when you’re having fun with AI. It also flies when you think everyone else is getting ahead without you, because every hour you’re not learning feels like a week you’ve fallen behind.

AI is changing work—and I don’t mean how we’re working, although it’s changing that, too. I mean how the work feels in your body at 1 a.m. when you can’t stop, or at 9 a.m. when you’re afraid you haven’t done enough. Technology has been blurring the line between work and life for decades, but the old tools pulled us back through obligation—you checked that email at 10 p.m. because it felt like you had to, not because you wanted to.

AI feels different. It pulls us back because it feels good. By the time you realize you’re overdoing it, you’ve already been overdoing it for hours.

I wanted to understand what was happening to me, and whether knowing the mechanics could help me break the cycle. So I dug into decades-old and more recent research to find out.

How AI intensifies work

Once AI clicks for someone, they don’t use it to work less. They use it to work more. It happened to me, and early research on how AI is changing the dynamics of work says that I’m not the only one.

Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have been studying how generative AI changed work habits at a U.S. tech company with about 200 employees. Over eight months of observation, they found that AI intensified work in three specific ways—all of which, if you’re like me, sound familiar:

Task expansion. People started doing work that used to belong to someone else. Product managers wrote code. Researchers took on engineering tasks. AI made unfamiliar work feel accessible, so people absorbed responsibilities they would have outsourced or avoided a year earlier.

I recognize this in my own job. Over the past year, my role at Every has expanded to include building AI-powered editorial workflows, wrangling Margot, and constructing networks of apps and integrations that hold my work together. A year ago, this operations work would have been a job description unto itself. AI made it possible for me to do it alongside my writing, so now I do both.