{"id":704,"date":"2026-06-18T16:42:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T16:42:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=704"},"modified":"2026-06-18T16:42:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T16:42:18","slug":"america-is-headed-toward-the-infinite-workweek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=704","title":{"rendered":"America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last year, Steve Yegge started \u201csuddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day.\u201d Without fail, Yegge\u2014a programmer and tech blogger\u2014would \u201chit a wall, fall over, and sleep for 90 minutes,\u201d he told me. Like many developers, Yegge no longer writes code by hand; instead, he manages a legion of bots to do that for him. His productivity has skyrocketed, but so too has his exhaustion. \u201cI\u2019ve fallen asleep slower at the anesthesiologist,\u201d he recently wrote on his blog.<\/p>\n

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In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. But some developers are having the opposite experience. Instead of allowing for greater focus, the latest AI tools are overwhelming workers, frazzling minds and shredding attention spans. Although agents can do plenty more work now than they could a year ago, they still need human oversight. Like toddlers, AI agents ask endless follow-up questions, require detailed instructions\u2014and, if you leave them unsupervised, are liable to make a huge mess. Once you get several running simultaneously, there\u2019s no time for breaks. As Yegge puts it on LinkedIn, his job is to be an \u201cAI babysitter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plenty of people are seemingly starting to feel like depleted AI babysitters. When Boston Consulting Group recently surveyed roughly 1,500 workers across several roles at major American companies, the firm found that many workers were experiencing \u201cmental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one\u2019s cognitive capacity.\u201d Respondents described a \u201cbuzzing\u201d and \u201cfog\u201d-like feeling, sometimes accompanied by headaches, slower decision making, and trouble focusing. One engineering manager told the researchers that managing multiple bots at once was like having \u201ca dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention.\u201d In the survey, 18 percent of developers reported AI-induced exhaustion. But in other roles, too, such as HR and marketing, where AI is also taking over, rates of reported fatigue were even higher.<\/p>\n

In my own experiments with AI agents, I\u2019ve experienced some of this brain fog myself. To get in the mindset of an overstimulated developer while working on this story, I asked Claude Code to deploy a team of agents to supplement my research. I already had done my reporting, but I figured the bot might be able to surface more information. Claude Code spun up a team of 17 researchers. It assigned eight agents to research different subtopics, another eight to serve as fact-checkers, and a final agent to synthesize the group\u2019s findings into a memo.<\/p>\n

The bot promised that the research would be easy. \u201cNothing for you to do,\u201d it wrote. \u201cSit tight.\u201d But the agents were needy from the start. Almost immediately, Claude Code began asking for all kinds of permissions to take actions on my behalf. Because I didn\u2019t understand some of its questions, I started going down different rabbit holes trying to make sense of its requests. I could feel my shoulders tensing. Even once my research swarm finally got going, I kept checking in on the bots to make sure that they were on the right track. The fog was setting in. In the end, the memo that my 17 agents produced wasn\u2019t very good, but neither was the paragraph I\u2019d spent that time writing, because I\u2019d been distracted by my omnipresent agent blob the entire time. (In line with The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s policies on AI use, I didn\u2019t use the tools to do any actual writing.)<\/p>\n

This all felt like multitasking on steroids. In my quest to maximize my own productivity, I was wasting time and producing lower-quality work. As the BCG team found, \u201cjuggling and multitasking can become the definitive features of working with AI.\u201d Fortunately, I am able to use AI tools only when they are genuinely helpful, but other workers may not have that luxury. Across corporate America, companies are pushing people to adopt AI\u2014and some workers are even competing with one another on leaderboards that track individual usage. This has led some people to automate unnecessary tasks to prove to management that they are making use of the technology.<\/p>\n

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Others are finding they can\u2019t stop talking to their agents. \u201cSpinning up all these agents is sort of like pulling a bunch of slot machines at the same time,\u201d Matthew Kropp, a managing director and senior partner at BCG, told me. If you assign work to a team of agents, you never know precisely what they will get back. Sometimes the bots fail miserably, but other times, they do produce great work. That variable reward, Kropp told me, hacks people\u2019s dopamine circuits. \u201cIt\u2019s very akin to gambling,\u201d he said. Rather than taking time for breaks, some people are finding themselves feverishly rotating among different agents.<\/p>\n

For all of the justified concern over the potential for AI to automate work, the rise of AI babysitting points to how the technology is already changing jobs. \u201cPeople are constantly talking about a white-collar apocalypse,\u201d the MIT economist David Autor told me. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s going to look like that.\u201d Perhaps soon, agents will be good enough to do more work unattended. Some people may lose jobs, but Autor expects that for many people, work will simply look different. A preindustrial cobbler who made shoes by hand had a very different relation to his work than his daughter threading laces on the factory floor did, but both were in the business of making shoes. Indeed, the internet is full of workers complaining about how their jobs have become akin to manning an assembly line. There may soon come a day when consultants reminisce about creating PowerPoint presentations by hand.<\/p>\n

Whatever the future of white-collar work, it is likely to be messier and stranger than we can imagine. At the extreme, Andi Peng, an AI researcher, speculated that within the decade, we might not even need laptops at work, because agents will record human conversations and do computer work on humans\u2019 behalf. The idea struck me as hard to fathom. Then again, a few decades ago most office work was done without the internet.<\/p>\n

The more realistic future is, perhaps, less exciting. Now that agents can work for hours on end, workers are likely to face growing pressure to make the most of them. In Silicon Valley, engineers assign their agents tasks to complete overnight, and then check the results even before their morning coffee. Some are staying up late: \u201cThe opportunity cost of going to sleep is too high,\u201d the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said on The Joe Rogan Experience<\/em> last month. \u201cIf you go to sleep, you won\u2019t be with your 20 AI coding agents.\u201d Slack and email have already made workers feel as if they are expected to be available after hours. AI was supposed to alleviate people\u2019s workload. Instead, with bots that can work while you sleep, we may be headed toward something like an infinite workweek.<\/p>\n

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The future of AI and jobs will be so much weirder than you think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":703,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"\nAmerica Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=704\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The future of AI and jobs will be so much weirder than you think.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=704\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-18T16:42:18+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=704#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=704\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-18T16:42:18+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=704\"},\"wordCount\":1206,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=704#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/ad00a382f5bb9b4ab03493a0d6ad79d3.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Technology\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=704#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=704\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=704\",\"name\":\"America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek - 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