Today, I read more than I wrote intentionally...

Table of Contents

• 1. Brick Update
• 2. Book Recs: Private Equity
• 3. Does AI Reduce Work?

1. Brick Update

I mentioned in one of my previous TILs about this product called Brick. I actually bit the bullet and bought it. So far, it has worked fabulously in stopping me from doomscrolling. It has brought into my awareness of how much I doom-scrolled out of habit — I would instinctively pull my phone out and doom-scroll when I was bored or just needed a break.

To put some numbers for context, I am able to "brick" myself out of these apps for at least 20 hours in a day (!!), even when I am at home. I feel I am more conscious and more in control of when I want to use these apps than before. I did face slight issues with NFC (wirelessly tapping the phone to the brick product): I needed to tap multiple times or align my phone at awkward angles to brick/unbrick. But, it actually adds to the experience of making it more difficult and more inconvenient to brick/unbrick a lot. So far, I am impressed. I will keep monitoring how it pans out in the coming months.

2. Book Recs: Private Equity

Yesterday, after learning that a private equity's business model can have a negative impact in dentistry, I became curious about how PEs actually operate. Wendy's Production's [video](How Private Equity Consumed America) is decent, but it didn't particularly help me understand it deeply. After some searching, I curated the following books to dive deeper later:

1. Private Equity Laid Bare by Ludovic Phalippou (Goodreads): This seems like a decent intro on how private equity actually operates.
2. Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street by Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt (Goodreads): This seems like a well-researched academic overview of the effects of private equity on the business and workers.
3. Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream by Megan Greenwell (Goodreads): An anecdotal take on how private equity affected particular individuals working in retail, healthcare, newspapers, and housing.
4. Ethically Challenged: Private Equity Storms U.S. Health Care by Laura Katz Olson (Goodreads): A deeper dive into how private equity specifically affected U.S. Health Care.

Next, I am interested in the U.S. Healthcare System — how it operates and issues within it more broadly. But, I will reserve my curiosity for later.

3. Does AI Reduce Work?

A recent article from Harvard Business Review (HBR) argues that AI Doesn't Reduce Work — It Intensifies It.

In an ongoing 8-month researched study, the authors found out that workers enthusiastically embraced AI tools because it made them feel they are "doing more" — an intrinsically rewarding experience. These workers:

• worked at a faster pace;
• took on broader scope of tasks; and
• extended work into more hours of the day (often without being ask to do!)

Yet, the authors argue that this actually led to work intensification:

1. Task Expansion: Workers felt more empowered to take on wider responsibilities. It also reduced dependence on others, and offered immediate feedback and correction along the way. But, this understandably led to scope creep. Also, it had a knock-on effect downstream where, for example, engineers had to spend more time verifying and correcting "vibe-coded" work.

2. Blurred Boundaries between Work and Non-Work: Since AI made beginning a task so easy — by reducing the friction of starting — workers slipped small amounts of work into moments that had previously been breaks. These small amounts of work quickly add up, thus resulting in work spilling into evenings or early mornings. Work for these workers also felt less bounded and more ambient.

3. More Multitasking: AI made workers feel like they have a collaborative "partner", resulting in more multi-tasking sessions: write manual code while AI generated an alternative version, run multiple agents in parallel, and revive long-deferred tasks because AI could "handle them" in the background.

   This sense of having a "partner" resulted in continual switching of attention, frequent checking of AI outputs, and a growing number of open tasks.

   Thus, cognitive load increased and a sense of always juggling, even as the work felt productive. Over time, this rhythm raised expectations for speed. More workers noted they were doing more at once and feeling more pressure than before using AI, even though time savings from automation had ostensibly meant to reduce such pressure.

The authors nicely captured the flow:

1. AI accelerated certain tasks;
2. This raised expectations for speed;
3. Higher speed made workers more reliant on AI;
4. Increased reliance widened the scope of what workers attempted; and
5. A wider scope further expanded the quantity and density of work.

The authors recommended organizations to adopt an "AI practice". You can read the full article to know more about it.

My overall thoughts are that, understandably, expectations from workers regarding speed, responsiveness, and scope of work will increase. What workers are doing voluntary out of experimental joy could become mandatory. The quest for "efficiency" will expand resulting in less workers doing more. Scope creep and increasing verification time+correction are real concerns. For some reason, this is reminding of Byung-Chul Han's The Burnout Society (Goodreads).

Also note that this study was done from April to December last year. Some AI tools have increased dramatically (supposedly) in the past few months, like Codex and Claude Code. I wonder if these tools will only exacerbate the patterns noticed by the authors here or change it in a more "productive" direction.