AI productivity gains consume attention, not just hours
June 9, 2026
The central argument is that AI has revived the spirit of Google's 20% time — slack for creative exploration — but the cost is now cognitive load rather than calendar time. For practitioners, this reframes AI adoption as an attention management problem, not a scheduling one.
HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU
●
founderWorth watching because team productivity gains from AI may be offset by fragmented attention, affecting how you structure engineering culture and evaluate output quality.