The Productivity Paradox Is Not About Technology
Monday morning has arrived faster than the product manager of an enterprise tech company would have anticipated. Opening up their laptop at around nine, and before they can actually begin the work, a busy screen welcomes the manager.
Slack messages from teammates popping up from different time zones, meetings and calendar slots for the week are already blocked. An email with an AI-written summary of the previous week’s meeting is already within a large volume of emails. A task board highlights what is “due today” and what is already falling behind.
Nothing here feels unusual. This is simply what work looks like now. The AI summary is helpful. It saves time reading long notes. But it also changes the rhythm of the day. Because everyone has the summary, decisions are expected sooner. Questions arrive earlier. The next meeting is scheduled faster. What initially appears to be time saved quickly becomes time spoken for.
This pattern sits at the centre of something economists have been talking about for decades, often called the productivity paradox. Back in the late 1980s, an economist named Robert Solow pointed out that computers were everywhere, yet the big productivity gains people expected were hard to see in the data. Companies were investing heavily in technology, but overall productivity growth looked disappointing.
Later, economists such as Erik Brynjolfsson showed that computers did improve productivity, but only over time and only when organisations changed how work was structured. Technology helped, but it did not magically make work easier on its own.
What these studies did not fully capture was how work would begin to feel. As tools improved, expectations changed with them. Email made communication faster, but it also made being reachable feel normal. Messaging tools pushed response times even lower. Video calls removed travel, but filled calendars. Each tool fixed a problem, and each one quietly raised the bar.
The product manager’s day continues. Meetings stack up because they are easy to schedule. A video call ends with an AI-generated action list, which is immediately added to the task board. Progress is visible to the entire team. If something is delayed, it shows up in red.
There is no crisis, and yet there is simply no space. By mid-afternoon, the product manager is switching between documents, chats, dashboards, and calls. Much of the work now involves keeping systems updated, staying responsive, and showing momentum. This effort is real, but it is hard to point to. It does not always show up as a finished task, yet it consumes attention and energy.
AI tools were meant to help with this load. In many ways, they do. Drafts are faster. Analysis is quicker. Summaries save time. But very quickly, these tools stop being a bonus and start becoming the baseline. A document that once took two days is now expected in one. A rough first draft is assumed to exist almost immediately; no one needs to say this out loud. The expectation settles in on its own.
Remote and hybrid work make this even clearer. Without a commute, there is more time at the edges of the day. That time rarely stays empty. Messages arrive earlier in the morning. Calls run later in the evening. Work spreads out rather than shrinking.
By the end of the day, the product manager has done more than they would have ten years ago. The tools worked. Productivity went up. Yet the day feels heavier, not lighter.
This is the productivity paradox as it exists now. Technology improves efficiency, but organisations treat efficiency as available capacity. That capacity is filled with more tasks, faster responses, and higher expectations. The gains flow into output, not into rest or control over time.
The paradox is not that technology fails. It is that the system around it never allows work to feel finished. Until productivity gains are shared as time, space, or flexibility for people, better tools will keep making work faster without making it easier.