Being Busy Is Becoming a Terrible Measure of Productivity | Craig Astill

For a long time, activity has been easy to confuse with productivity.

A full calendar looks productive. A crowded inbox looks important. A team producing reports, presentations, meetings and updates appears busy.

Artificial intelligence is about to make that illusion much harder to maintain.

We can now produce more emails, more analysis, more presentations, more code, more content and more ideas in less time than ever before.

That sounds like a productivity revolution. It can be. But only if the additional output actually creates value.

Output is becoming cheap

One of the biggest changes AI brings to business is that many forms of output are becoming dramatically easier to create.

A task that once required several hours may take minutes. A first draft that required a specialist can sometimes be produced instantly and then refined by someone with the right expertise.

This creates enormous leverage. It also means that counting output becomes an increasingly poor way to measure performance.

If an employee produces ten reports instead of two, are we five times more productive? Not necessarily.

The question is whether those reports led to better decisions, saved money, improved a customer experience, generated revenue or prevented a problem.

The danger of accelerating unnecessary work

Businesses should be careful not to use AI to make bad processes faster.

If a report nobody uses takes four hours to prepare, reducing that to ten minutes is an improvement. But asking whether the report needs to exist at all may be a much bigger one.

Technology can remove friction. It can also allow unnecessary work to multiply at extraordinary speed.

Before automating something, ask what outcome the process is supposed to create.

Productivity should be measured at the outcome

The next phase of AI adoption will require businesses to become much clearer about what productivity actually means.

For a customer service team, it might mean faster resolution and happier customers rather than more tickets processed. For a sales team, it might mean better-qualified opportunities rather than more automated emails. For management, it might mean faster, better-informed decisions rather than more dashboards.

The measurement should move closer to the result. Time saved matters, but only if that time is redirected toward something useful.

Human capacity is the real opportunity

I think one of the least interesting ways to view AI is simply as a mechanism for reducing headcount.

The more interesting opportunity is increasing the amount of high-value work capable people can do.

If AI can handle some of the repetitive research, administration, formatting, sorting and first-pass analysis, people can spend more time on relationships, judgement, creativity, problem-solving and decisions.

The objective should not be to make people look busier. It should be to remove the work that prevents them from doing their best work.

Leaders will need different signals

Managers have traditionally relied on visible activity as a proxy for contribution. Hours worked, meetings attended, emails answered and documents produced are all easy to observe.

But in an AI-enabled organisation, activity becomes increasingly misleading.

A person with a well-designed workflow may accomplish in two hours what once required a day. Another person may use AI to generate enormous quantities of material that nobody needs.

From activity to impact

The businesses that capture genuine productivity gains from AI will probably become less impressed by volume.

They will ask harder questions: Did this improve the customer experience? Did we make a better decision? Did we reduce errors? Did we create capacity? Did revenue improve? Did the work become more valuable?

Those questions bring productivity back to what it should have meant all along.

Not how much work did we produce?

What changed because we did the work?

As AI makes output easier to generate, being busy will become an increasingly poor indicator of performance. The advantage will belong to organisations that learn to measure impact instead.

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