Shallow work: be aware of over-productivity

One angle I expected the post to touch on is the systemic effect.

If AI reduces the marginal cost of writing emails, summaries, updates, etc., the rational move for each individual is to produce more of them. But if everyone does that, the total communication volume increases — and now everyone has more inbound messages to process.

So even if AI makes me faster at drafting emails, it may simultaneously increase the number of emails I have to read and respond to. The bottleneck shifts from production to attention.

It feels similar to Jevons paradox: efficiency gains increase total consumption. Here the scarce resource isn’t writing time — it’s cognitive bandwidth.

I’m curious whether AI will actually reduce shallow work, or whether it will amplify it at the system level by lowering the cost of generating it.

Has anyone observed this dynamic already in their org?