Right now as I’m writing this post, I am running four tasks in parallel, five if you count this writing workstream. Not one after another, the way I used to work. All four, simultaneously, moving forward while I am thinking about and doing something else entirely. One involves code. One is a document taking shape. Two are in the idea-and-iteration stage, where questions are coming back to me faster than I can process (that is a whole other post).
I check in, answer a question, redirect the thread, and move on. The work keeps going without me. After this post I jump into a workstream only I can do with Fabric, while my other processes continue to move forward. And so the day goes.
That is the texture of my work right now, and I am finding it hard to describe without sounding either like an AI productivity evangelist (I’m not talking about how that three hour task only took me an hour, so I got more done today) or someone who does not sleep. Neither is accurate. Something has shifted, many others are also seeing and living this new paradigm, I understand I am not alone.
This is thrilling. This is exhilarating. It is worth understanding, trying to name.
Every idea I have ever had came with a tax
Not a creative tax. The thinking part, the having of the idea, has always felt free. The tax came after. The hours of sitting down and doing the actual work to turn the idea into something real. Code. Documents. Emails. Slide decks. Research. Whatever building it out meant in that context.
Most ideas do not survive that tax. They happen on a run, brushing teeth, during a commute. They feel important for a few days (or hours, or minutes). Then life fills back in and the gap between having the idea and being able to act on it stays just wide enough that the idea fades. The ones that did survive had to wait their turn. I would get to them when I had focused time, a block of hours, the right headspace. One at a time.
If you have spent any time doing knowledge work, you know exactly what I mean.
That tax has collapsed
Not to zero, to be honest. There is still a cost. You pay it in attention, in the time it takes to return to a stream, in the decisions about which ideas deserve motion and which do not. But the dominant cost, the labor of building, is dropping fast enough that the behavior it enables looks qualitatively different from anything I have done before.
The mechanism is straightforward enough. When I have an idea, I can hand it to an AI session (mostly a Claude variant, sometimes Copilot) and it starts to move. It does not wait for me to sit down and block out three hours. It starts percolating immediately, asking clarifying questions, generating early work, surfacing decisions I need to make. I answer those questions when I can, from wherever I am, at whatever level of attention I have available. And it keeps moving.
Four streams at once is the current reality. Not metaphorically. Literally four active streams in motion right now, each making progress, each waiting on different things from me. I’m not comparing this to fifteen email messages waiting for responses, or eight async teams messages. I mean four truly active workstreams that move at my pace with no other dependencies. We all multitask, though when you can do more than one thing truly at once, that is something to look at.
Many of the ideas are going to be crud. That is fine. That is actually the point. When the build-out tax was high, I had to pre-judge ideas before investing enough in them to actually know if they were worth pursuing. You do/did this too. Now I can let more of them breathe. The bad ones become obvious faster. The good ones get further than they ever would have otherwise.
Here is a number that recalibrated something for me
I pay roughly $150/mo for the AI tools that make this possible. Across Claude, Claude Code, OpenClaw (Falcon), Synthetic, and Copilot, that is the ballpark.
The comparison I keep reaching for is a team of people who could explore ideas in parallel with me. Not a full organization. Just the functional equivalent of what I am doing now. Research, code, writing, iteration, questions, feedback loops, across multiple workstreams, all of it synced to my thinking and available on my timeline.
That is not $150 a month. That is $50,000 to $100,000 a month, conservatively, for people who would also need meetings, onboarding, context, and sleep.
But here is the part that makes the comparison imprecise: you cannot actually hire that. The work-shape I am describing, available at the moment an idea surfaces, context-switching instantly across projects, running from 6am to 11pm in sync with a single person’s thinking, does not exist as a staffing model. It is not cheaper than what existed before. It is a thing that did not exist before at any price, now available for the cost of a few streaming subscriptions.
Is my workstream costing jobs? I’d argue a huge no. I still need my team around me, it is that my new paradigm allows me to explore more opportunities, many with an ROI that can’t yet justify a team of 8-12 additional people.
Another productivity sermon?
I want to be careful not to make this sound like a productivity sermon. It is not. It is an observation about the texture of the work.
My mornings used to start with Teams/email and a slow ramp into the day. Now they start with a check-in. What did my agents do overnight? Where did they stall, waiting on a decision only I can make? What could use my attention in the next two minutes that can unlock the next big push before I turn to something else? There is a quality to it that I did not expect. I am not dreading the inbox. I am looking forward to seeing what happened.
My phone is part of this in a way that surprised me. I spent real effort over the past year trying to make my phone less toxic. Cut the morning news. Reduced the scrolling. It was a habit costing me more than I realized. What is there now instead is different. I am checking in on work that is mine, following ideas I started, answering questions that move something forward. Same device, completely different relationship.
The rate limits on AI tools are interesting as well. When I hit the ceiling on my credit window, the work slows and I am forced to stop. Most people treat this as friction to overcome. I am starting to think it might be a feature. The energy of having so many streams in motion is real, and the forced pause gives me something I am not sure I would take on my own.
Every answer you ever needed! Not quite…
I want to be honest about what I do not know yet.
Am I developing an addiction to the rush of productivity? Possibly. The feeling of four+ streams moving forward, of ideas making it into the world that would have faded before, is genuinely satisfying. Whether that tips into something less healthy is a question I am watching.
Is working 6am to 11pm sustainable? Almost certainly not as a permanent state. Right now I am in what feels like a new-relationship phase with this way of working. The energy is high. I am enjoying it. I do not want to project that forward as evidence that it will always feel this way.
The discipline around family time still matters. More, maybe, not less. When work can follow you anywhere on a phone, the time that does not belong to work has to be protected deliberately. I am still working that part out.
And this is not for everyone. Some people want a clean handoff at the end of the workday and that is a healthy choice. The always-available work-shape only makes sense if you actually want your ideas moving around the clock. Not everyone does, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Here is what I can say without hedging
The build-out tax used to filter out most of my ideas before they had a chance to prove themselves. The cost was too high and the queue was too long. More of my ideas are making it into the world now than at any other point in my career. Some of them are going to be worthless. Some are going to be worth more than I expected.
I do not fully know what working at the speed of thought is going to mean long term. I know what it feels like right now, and I know the bottleneck moved. The ideas are not waiting anymore.
I am watching to see where they go.
Speak Your Mind