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.

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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.

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock this piece and learn about:

Why UC Berkeley researchers found that AI didn’t give workers their time back
The slot-machine psychology that makes closing the laptop feel irrational, even when you know you should
What Katie’s complicated relationship with her AI agent Margot reveals about finding balance with AI