Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

These new tools, ahem all that AI, are boosting productivity in our work. And then we hit the bottleneck and come to an emergency inducing crisis.

Yesterday and today I have been using one of these new tools (some folks them AI, I don’t). I have accomplished in an hour what would have taken a week. I am not exaggerating on that. This new tool enables 20 or 30 times the work product in the same amount of time. This is amazing. As a side note, it is a commentary on the work I am doing. If it is so easy to do faster, what good is it?

Back to the topic at hand. Whoosh! I’m done with this task. Now I pass the results on to the next person. Maybe they have new tools and WHOOSH they do their task 30 times faster. We are rolling.

And then we stop rolling. We come to the bottleneck. Sometimes the bottleneck is one person. Sometimes the bottleneck is one task for which their is no new gee whiz tool. Whatever, the bottleneck is the bottleneck.

Nothing happens at the bottleneck. Tasks from three different projects are waiting at the bottleneck. It will be a month before the output of my task is considered at the bottleneck. The rest of us, those for whom new tools provide all this speed, twiddle our thumbs or something.

The bottleneck stalls progress so long that… wait, oh no! We have a crisis. We have an emergency. We all need to work all-nighters to make the big final deadline.

Huh? What happened to all that productivity?

I think we can do better.