Is AI Adoption Creating an ‘Efficiency Trap’?

AI can help businesses do more, faster. But Dino Tartaglia asks a more important question: are we becoming genuinely more effective, or simply more efficient at doing the wrong things?

By Dino Tartaglia.

You’ve discovered a Claude (or other LLM) skill that cuts an hour-long job down to fifteen minutes. The kind of thing that has you mentally spending your newly-liberated time before you’ve even finished setting it up.

A proper lunch break, perhaps. A walk. Maybe even an afternoon where you close the laptop at a civilised hour and remember what the rest of your house looks like.

Except that, a fortnight later, you’re still at your desk at 8 pm. Your inbox has multiplied, your to-do list is breeding, and you’ve somehow managed to squeeze another two commitments into the space you thought you’d reclaimed.

How the bloody hell did that happen?

Well, there’s a rather useful explanation for it. And, somewhat improbably, it starts with a Victorian economist and a lot of coal…

A Lesson From the Coal Face

In 1865, William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question. At the time, improvements in steam engines meant that industry could get more useful work from the same amount of coal.

You’d think that would mean using less coal overall, right?

Jevons spotted the catch. When coal became cheaper to use for a given job, it made all sorts of additional jobs commercially worthwhile. Industry expanded, new uses appeared, and total coal consumption could rise rather than fall.

An improvement in efficiency had created MORE demand for the very resource it was meant to save. That’s the idea we now call the Jevons Paradox.

It isn’t a law saying every efficiency gain must backfire. The useful point is that making something cheaper or easier to do can change how much of it we choose to do.

Now replace coal with your time, attention, or energy. Things start to look horribly familiar, don’t they?

The Time You Saved Has Already Been Spent

Email became easier on our phones, so it followed us home. Video calls removed the travel, so we found room for more meetings. AI can help you produce content in a fraction of the time, which is terrific until you decide that the answer must therefore be to produce five times as much.

And we’re particularly good at helping this along ourselves. If part of your identity is being the reliable one, the hard worker, the person who can always squeeze something in, an empty hour can feel suspiciously (and often uncomfortably) like a task or job vacancy.

Then there’s everyone else. When you respond to messages at 10 pm and turn work around in record time, people may quite reasonably start to assume that’s your normal availability.

The reward for becoming more efficient? More work.

Not always, of course. But often enough that it’s worth asking whether your latest productivity breakthrough has actually improved your life, or simply given your diary another opportunity to mug you.

But There’s a Bigger Problem Here

Before we get too carried away with clever software and time-saving tricks, there’s a big question I’d like you to sit with.

Are you becoming more efficient at something you shouldn’t be doing in the first place?

I see this constantly with awesome expert practitioners who’ve built a decent business around being brilliant at what they do. They’re flat out delivering for clients, but the business itself still feels fragile. One or two unexpected departures and suddenly the pipeline matters considerably more than it did yesterday.

So they look for ways to do more. More content. More emails. More activity. And, because they’re intelligent and conscientious, they find ways to make all of that faster.

But if the offer isn’t clear, the message isn’t landing, or they’re talking to the wrong people, what exactly have they improved?

Spend two afternoons automating follow-up emails for an offer nobody wants, and you haven’t built a business system. You’ve built a very punctual way of being ignored.

Also, with the ever-increasing adoption of AI, we must understand that the rules of the game have changed and, with that, the old constraints are no longer the new bottlenecks or ‘traps’.

Which raises an important question about how we work and the workflow we’re ‘streamlining’ (but that’s an entire topic for another article, methinks…).

This brings us to a distinction I wish far more business owners would get a grip of.

Effective First. Efficient Second.

Effectiveness means doing the ‘right’ things, the things that will actually move you towards the outcome you want. Efficiency means using your resources well while you do them.

Both matter. But the order matters even more.

First, figure out what you’re trying to achieve, why it matters, and which activities are genuinely likely to help. Then make those activities easier, quicker or less expensive. Optimise before you maximise.

Otherwise, you’re simply accelerating in a direction that may well be wrong. You build a powerful engine, stick it in a fuel-efficient vehicle, then point it at the wrong destination.

That’s what I mean by Better Thinking. Before buying the tool or adopting the tactic, ask a better calibre of question: “What problem am I actually trying to solve?” and “Why that problem?”

If your real problem is that your pipeline disappears whenever you’re busy delivering, “How do I write social posts twice as fast?” may be a perfectly good answer to an entirely unhelpful question.

A more effective question might be, “What would keep the right conversations happening while I’m looking after existing clients?” The answer may involve content. It may involve referrals, follow-up, an offer rethink or something else entirely. That’s the point: diagnose first.

When Efficiency Feeds the Doom Loop

This is also how you can feel more productive but remain stuck in the same old yo-yo business.

You get faster at delivery, fill the extra space with another client, then discover you’ve no room to work ON the business. Your marketing stops. The pipeline goes quiet. A client leaves. You panic and start selling again… and back around the Doom loop we go.

And if your shiny new efficiency tempts you into promising more than your actual capacity can support, we get into the murky territory I cover in the Capacity Trap chapter of my book, MIS/ALIGNED.

The issue then goes beyond busyness. Deadlines start slipping, communication gets awkward, and trust takes a knock. Your clients’ trust in you, and eventually your trust in yourself.

Being able to do a particular task faster doesn’t magically create more physical or emotional bandwidth, focus or energy. Nor does it turn a week with no buffer or contingency into a sensible business model.

Give the Saved Time a Purpose

So, what can you do with all of this? Here’s a simple exercise I’d suggest before you buy another app, automate another process or decide that AI is going to give you your life back.

• Pick one thing you’ve become more efficient at recently. Has it actually reduced the time you spend on it, or are you now doing more of it?
• Ask whether the activity itself is effective. What outcome does it serve, and what evidence do you have that it’s moving you towards What Matters Most (to you)?
• Decide what the time you’re about to save is FOR. More of the right work? Thinking Time? A proper buffer? The people and things you started this business to have more room for?
• Protect that decision. If you save an hour and immediately make it available to everyone else, don’t be surprised when everyone else spends it for you.

There’s nothing wrong with using efficiency to grow. If more of the right activity serves a goal you’ve deliberately chosen, crack on.

But if you wanted your Tuesday afternoon back, or to never work on Fridays, put it in the diary before somebody – or something – else does. And remember that “available” and “obligated” aren’t synonyms.

The Takeaway

Efficiency is a brilliant servant and a fairly dreadful boss. Without direction, it can make an already misaligned business run faster, pile more onto your shoulders and leave you wondering why all those time-saving tools haven’t saved you a damn thing.

Start with effectiveness. Choose the right work. Then make it efficient, and be deliberate about where the gains go.

Avoid the Efficiency Trap.

As I often say to my people when they come into my world, “You started a business to get more Life… so why does it feel like it’s taking it from you?”

The objective was never to squeeze more work into every waking moment. It was to build a business that gets you closer to What Matters Most. Remember that bit? Let’s make sure we honour it.

Come and Say Hello

I go into this business of asking better questions, finding the real problem and escaping the Doom Loop in MIS/ALIGNED, which you can currently find on Amazon. If you’d like a clearer way of looking at your own business, that’s a good place to start.

And if you’re trapped under a glass ceiling, unable to punch through it or simply unsure of your next best move and would like another pair of eyes on what’s really going on, feel free to message me or come and find me inside The Success FORGE on the Skool platform.

I’m always happy to have a proper conversation about what needs fixing, what’s already working and what you can safely stop doing.

If I can help you directly, I will. If I can’t, I’ll give you ideas, resources or connections that can.

To your inevitable success.

Dino Tartaglia is a former Electronics Engineer, now a businessman, mentor, coach and troubleshooter working to help you, if you’re a coach, consultant, creative or service provider, to Build a Joyful, Dependable Business around Being Brilliant at What You Do. 

In his own coaching, and together with world-class coach Simon Hartley, the other half of Success Engineers (their joint business), he helps you to improve your thinking to ask better questions, so that you solve the right problems in your business at the right time, develop your own personal performance as a business owner and get closer to What Matters Most. 

You can find Dino in his low-cost/high-impact Facebook Group , on the Success Engineers website or on any of these other locations: Facebook | LinkedIn| Instagram |PodCast - Back Bedroom to Big Business