Decision surplus

I think I’ve spotted something, and I want to name it.

This afternoon I did about seven or eight hours of work in roughly two. Claude and a few agents did most of the heavy lifting. On paper, a brilliant afternoon.

I am absolutely wiped.

Not the “nice tired, earned my cup of tea” kind. The kind where my head is full of too many live threads and I can feel every one of them at once. Which is strange, because the point of the tooling is that I’m doing less.

Except I’m not. I’m doing more. That’s the thing nobody tells you.

A note for readers not deep in this stuff. “Claude” is Anthropic’s AI assistant. Similar tools include ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. “Agents” are the newer generation: AI that doesn’t just answer but acts. Sends the email. Drafts the spreadsheet. Fills the form. Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex are the examples most people in tech will have heard of. I’ve been running a small team of them for months.

The assistant paradox

There’s an old observation that hiring your first assistant doesn’t reduce your workload, it changes its shape. You swap doing for briefing, reviewing, and deciding. More importantly, you start saying yes to things you’d previously have said no to, because now there’s capacity to absorb them.

AI behaves exactly like that assistant. Except this one is instant, tireless, and available at 11pm on a Tuesday. The yeses stack up faster.

I’m running a project right now that’s materially bigger than anything I’ve run before. Not because I planned it that way. Because every time something came up, I had the capacity to take it on. Each individual yes was sensible. The cumulative weight is something else.

Where the load goes

The AI handles the admin brilliantly. Emails, proofing, research, spreadsheets, first drafts of almost everything. What it cannot do, and should not do, is make the decisions. Those still land on me.

So the job has quietly transformed from doing into deciding. The proportion of my day that is high-stakes judgement has gone up, while the tedious admin that used to act as cognitive rest between decisions has been stripped out. There’s no more “I’ll just tidy this spreadsheet for ten minutes” as a mental palate cleanser, because the spreadsheet tidied itself.

It’s all signal and no noise. Which sounds efficient, and is, until you realise the noise was doing something.

The literature is circling this

The academic crowd are noticing. Berkeley published a study this year finding that workers who offload rote tasks to AI are left with only the high-stakes decision-making, and the human brain isn’t designed to run at peak cognitive load continuously. Philippa Hardman has written about the offloading paradox. A recent arXiv paper names it “autonomy depletion through cognitive load.”

Nobody’s given it a clean name though. So I’m calling it decision surplus.

What it is

Three things colliding.

One, cognitive load concentrates. Your working day shifts from a healthy mix of decisions and mechanical tasks to almost pure decision. The mechanical bits were doing unacknowledged work as recovery.

Two, scope inflates. You commit to more because you can. Each commitment is rational. The aggregate is not.

Three, the reviewer role is relentless. You’re no longer the person writing the email, you’re the editor of every email, across every workstream, all day. Reading, ruling, revising, with no recess.

It isn’t burnout in the clinical sense. It’s its own thing. Too much mattering happening at once, with none of the reprieve that used to come baked into the work.

What I’m going to try

Put some of the boring admin back in. Deliberately. Not everything needs the AI treatment. Sometimes folding the laundry is the bit that lets the brain settle.

Hold the scope. When I notice “we could also do X because the tooling makes it easy,” that’s the signal to pause, not accelerate. The right question isn’t whether I can execute X, but whether I want to make the decisions X will generate.

Protect decision windows. Batch the real calls into specific times rather than letting them pepper the day. If I’m going to be a constant reviewer, let me at least be one on my own schedule.

And notice when an afternoon of apparently brilliant productivity has left me emptier than a harder, slower one would have. That’s the tell.

More to come. For now, I just wanted to put the phrase down. Decision surplus. If you’ve felt it, you already know.