Busier with AI

How to thrive in a world that was already too much…and then AI accelerated everything.

Busy was always a choice. That was the uncomfortable truth at the heart of ‘Busy: How to thrive in a world of too much’. However much we might feel like helpless victims,  busyness is a result of some bad habits, a dumb strategy and our preference for the easier life. That truth hasn't changed. AI has just made everything worse…while also raising the stakes.

The result is that most of us are working harder and producing more while becoming more exhausted and less valuable. This talk applies the Busy framework and the latest psychological research to the AI era. To help you thrive in the AI era…not simply survive.

Attention management

The opposite of busyness isn´t relaxation on a beach; but the ability to bring sustained focused attention onto what matters. Digital communication had already scattered our concentration, but AI has taken this to the next level. We´re in a whole new attention crisis. More work is hitting us than ever before, at greater velocity. We find ourselves spinning more and more plates; partly because AI makes starting projects so easy (whether or not they are useful). As AI gets smarter, we increasingly offload thinking to the machine. Focus and critical thinking have become optional, requiring active effort to protect. Multi-tasking has gone from bad to worse: running multiple agents and multiple threads. Hyper-paralleling and the relentless pace of AI-enabled work fragment attention more than ever, leading to a new state of extreme mental exhaustion: AI brain fry. This section gives people the tools to see what's happening to their attention, and the strategies to reclaim their ability to focus on what matters, more deeply and for longer.

Strategic focus

In a world of almost infinite AI possibilities, personal effectiveness no longer comes from working harder, longer. AI can help anyone produce more volume, more white noise. As people do more, the ‘efficiency trap’ converts every productivity gain into raised expectations. Doing things faster doesn't free time for quality work, it is converted into more busyness. Success today isn´t about quantity: that´s the path to becoming a commodity. It comes from impact, insight, differentiation. There are some important lessons individuals can learn from corporate strategy about how to do this. Perhaps the biggest one being that the most important part of strategy isn't deciding what to focus on; it's deciding what not to do. We have a natural bias for ‘addification’: adding tasks and projects. This section explores what it means to be the editor-in-chief of your own working life: applying strategic subtraction as a discipline, prioritizing for impact rather than acceleration, and zero-basing your workflows: asking not "how do I do this faster?" but "should I be doing this at all?" The strategies here are concrete: the Big 3, pre-committing time savings, and the opportunity cost pause that AI never builds in for you.

Taking the harder path

The third layer is where busy gets personal. Behind almost all busyness is a tough decision not taken, or a difficult conversation avoided. Staying busy is the easier option. There are a lot of challenges we face. Expectation creep from our managers, workslop cascading from AI-enabled colleagues, and the efficiency trap operating at team and organizational scale. These create real friction that most people avoid addressing. A big reason for this are our ‘busy magnets’: emotional commitments (often stemming from childhood) that stop us from addressing our busyness. The most common are perfectionism, people-pleasing and prevention. Increasingly, as a result of AI, there's a fourth magnet: fear of becoming obsolete. FOBO drives performative busyness: working harder to prove relevance rather than to create value. This section gives people the tools and the language to make the tough choices and have the conversations they've been putting off. After all, we don´t live in a vacuum. Real progress on busyness involves choices that may be different from your peers; renegotiations and realignments on expectations. When this is handled with candor and consideration, it unlocks lasting change but also better, more honest relationships. 

Three things you'll take away

• A new diagnosis. The language to name what's actually happening: pluscrastination, amplifatigue, addification, the efficiency trap. Most people know something is wrong; this talk gives them the precise vocabulary to see it clearly and talk about it honestly.

• Practical attention strategies. Concrete tools across all three dimensions of attention: direction (the Big 3, opportunity cost pause), depth (singular versus parallel mode, the depth test), and duration (habit sprints, strategic subtraction). Each one grounded in research and immediately applicable.

• The courage to choose differently. You'll leave with more than strategies; you'll leave with permission. Permission to subtract, to push back, to renegotiate, and to stop measuring your value by how busy you look. Because in a world where AI can make anyone look busy, genuine impact is the only thing that still counts.