The AI Side Effects I Noticed After 18 Months of Daily Use

My AI sessions started feeling like doomscrolling Facebook.

The same compulsive pull. The same sensation of being productive while actually just consuming. Generating. Opening loop after loop after loop. 3 hours would pass, and I'd have six new drafts sitting in separate documents. The thing I sat down to finish? Still unfinished.

I was the first person I knew to say it out loud: AI is addictive technology, and it needs the same boundaries we set for social media.

That was 2023. I had no idea how widespread the side effects would become.

More Output. Less Progress.

3 years later, the pattern I named in myself is everywhere.

Professionals using AI report more output but less progress. More first drafts but fewer published pieces. More brainstorming but less execution. The inboxes are fuller. The project lists are longer. The cognitive load is higher.

The promise was that AI would simplify work. The reality is that AI multiplied work by making every idea feel cheap enough to pursue.

Before AI, starting a new project had friction. You had to research, outline, draft, revise. That friction was a natural filter. It forced you to ask: is this worth the effort? Most ideas died on the vine because the effort of execution exceeded the enthusiasm of the idea. That friction was a feature.

AI removed it. Now every idea gets a first draft in minutes. Every tangent gets explored. And suddenly you're managing 15 active projects instead of 3, and none of them are finished.

The elimination discipline that defined the pre-AI era, saying no, cutting scope, protecting focus, finishing before starting, is now the highest-leverage skill a leader can develop.

The Greediness Is a Body Signal

That sensation when AI generates faster than you can process? The buzzing urgency to capture everything, explore every angle, develop every thread? That feeling has a name in my coaching practice: greediness.

I described it in 2023: "The productivity I'm able to achieve when using AI is so addictive that it can make me almost 'greedy' about wanting to get even more done."

That greediness is a body signal. The same neurological pattern as compulsive scrolling. The dopamine hit of "new output" fires in the same reward circuits as "new notification." Your body can't tell the difference between generating a draft and refreshing a feed. Both feel like progress. Both deplete without completing.

Your body knows the difference between creation and consumption. Creation feels grounded, focused, present. Consumption feels buzzy, scattered, never-quite-satisfied. When you finish a genuine AI-assisted creation session, you feel done. When you finish an AI consumption session, you feel wired and vaguely anxious about all the threads you opened.

That distinction is the whole practice.

The AI Elimination Audit

I asked myself a question in 2023 that I still return to: "How is AI helping me become an even better human?"

That question led me to the AI Elimination Audit. I do this monthly. It takes 20 minutes.

Review your last month of AI usage and answer three questions:

What did AI help you finish? These are the wins. The projects that went from draft to done. Celebrate these.

What did AI help you start but not finish? These are the warning signs. The drafts sitting in folders. The brainstorms that never became decisions. Count them. The number will surprise you.

What did you create with AI that you never needed in the first place? These are the ghosts. The side projects born from tangents. The content generated because AI made it easy, not because it mattered.

Delete the projects in category 3. Set a completion requirement for category 2 before starting anything new. For your next AI session, write your intended outcome on paper before opening the tool. One outcome. Finish it. Close the tool.

The discipline of 2026 is learning what to stop doing with AI.

I started my 3.5-day workweek on March 16, 2023. 36 months later, the biggest threat to that schedule has never been a client demand or a market shift. It's the temptation to fill every open hour with one more AI-assisted project that feels productive but moves nothing forward.

The side effects are real. The antidote is elimination.

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