A new research study recently caught my attention.

It came from a software company called Avatrack, which analyzed the digital activity of 164,000 workers spread across more than a thousand different employers.

And what they wanted to do was measure the impact of new AI tools.

So what did they find?

Here's a summary of their results from a Wall Street Journal article that came out last week.

Avivetrak found AI intensified activity across nearly every activity category.

The time they spent on email messaging and chat apps more than doubled, while their use

of business management tools such as human resources or accounting software rose 94%. Meanwhile,

the amount of time AI users devoted to focused uninterrupted work, the kind of concentration

often required for figuring out complex problems, writing formulas, creating,

and strategizing, fell 9% compared with nearly no change for non-users.

All right.

So this research results describes in some sense a worst case scenario for knowledge work.

These employees are spending more time on exhausting

shallow tasks that don't have a huge impact on the bottom line and less time on the deep

tasks that can make the most difference. The efficiency gain of these new tools seems to have

made everyone busier, but not necessarily better.

Now, here's the thing.

This outcome is not unique to AI.

As someone who has studied the intersection of digital technology and office work for more than a decade now, I can tell you from my experience that this matches a pattern that I have seen unfold many times before.

Here's how this pattern goes.

One, a new technology promises to speed up some annoying aspect of our job.

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