Hi Reader!

Someone asked me to ring them back in half an hour last Friday. So I did a few small jobs first, felt the time was up, reached for the phone, and only fifteen minutes had passed. Half an hour's work done in fifteen, and my body clock was still reading thirty. This is time being compressed.

Funny at the time. Less funny by Sunday, once I'd added it to the tiredness, the short fuse and the broken sleep and realised I was closer to burnout than I'd like to admit. Not there yet. Caught in time, I think. But a kind I never met before, and one I suspect plenty of you are walking into as well. Claude and I have started calling this 'compression burnout'.

I'm still doing the same hours but they are denser. Every small pause that used to be there to let my brain digest and catch up is gone. That wait for a file, or for someone to pick up the phone, the queue for coffee, all squeezed out by my superior use of AI.

The cruel part is that none of it shows on the outside. By every business measure it's been one of the best runs the AI Institute has had. New people bedded in, clients booked into next year, a new blended service built from what the data told us people actually need, an on-site engineer, a training deep dive and a compliance report in one (more here). Nobody looking at that list would tell me to slow down.

Are we all working more in one afternoon now than we used to in a whole week?

In our training we say the same thing over and over: when AI hands you time back, don't pour it into more admin. I took my own advice, but instead I filled the space with strategy, finance, hiring, the heavy work, the work that I love and that excites me as I build and scale a business using AI.

But the part the advice missed was that feeding every recovered minute into high-stakes thinking compresses you just as hard, probably harder, and you're worse off than you were before.

Regulation on purpose as a sustainable business practice.

So I've decided that pauses have to be reinstalled back in on purpose and I'm scheduling time to do the things I love that regulate me. Like walking in a forest. Sitting by the lake. Sauna. Watching the world go by from a favourite cafe without picking up my phone. I'm smiling as I plan this: if I can make it happen that I grow the business, while at the same time, spending certain afternoons chilling out, then this is a not too dystopian future at all!

We're all living inside the same experiment: the biggest change to how work feels in a generation, and there's no manual for it. So I'm paying attention to what it's doing to me and saying it out loud, partly to keep myself honest and partly because I suspect I'm not the only one.

Has it hit you in the same way? The denser hours, the protections slipping off one at a time, the tiredness that doesn't match the hours worked. Tell me your experience, hit reply and tell me. We're solving this one as humans comparing notes, because nobody has done it before.

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​This Week on ChattingGPT : Stephen Redmond

Which brings me, with some irony, to this week's guest. Stephen Redmond has written three books since leaving BearingPoint, all inside twelve months! I haven't decided whether he's the answer to this newsletter or the cautionary tale. Either way, his argument on the podcast is a good one, and isn't the one you'd expect from someone who's just published AI: Bowling Bumpers - A Business Leader's Practical Guide to AI Governance.

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🎧 Apple Podcasts​
🎧 Spotify​

His point: don't put your CIO or Head of IT in charge of your AI rollout. Not because they aren't capable, but because the person who owns the technology is the wrong person to own the change. Adoption isn't a systems problem, it's a people-and-behaviour problem, and handing it to the tech function guarantees it gets run as an implementation when it's really a shift in how everyone works.
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I've been saying a version of this for years, so I'm biased, but hearing it from someone who's spent a career inside the machinery of large organisations made it land. The tiredness I've been describing and the CIO-shouldn't-own-it argument are two faces of the same thing. AI keeps getting treated as a technical question when the hard part is always human.

Rules, Tools and Schools >> Free Webinar

That webinar I mentioned is on Thursday 17 September at lunchtime.

Thirty minutes with the AI Institute strategy and compliance leads. The transparency obligations came into force on 2 August, the enforcement structures are in place, and anyone can report you for not labelling AI content. The images in all of our newsletters are AI generated. The writing comes from me, then gets bashed around with Claude, before coming back to me for a rewrite just before it goes out.

Bring your questions. There'll be plenty of time to unmute and our goal is that you walk away with peace of mind and knowing what to do to stay on the right side of the latest requirements of the AI Act.

​Save your place​

Our autumn courses start in 11 days.

Tuesday 15 September, to be exact.

​Core AI Skills is our most popular course, it gets everyone on the right path, any industry, any function. We also offer specialist courses of interest to built environment professionals, so it's introducing AI to your work, using your workflows and examples familiar to you: AEC, Estate agents with IPAV, bid teams, Copilot for finance teams, and Nano Banana for architects and designers. Four mornings spaced across a month, so you get time to digest and practice. Best value at €600 and we offer discounts for bookings of 3 or more.

Because you are subscribers, and you have read to the end (!), we have a special code you can use when booking.
Get 10% off when booking any course with us until Friday.

Use CODE: EARLYSEPSALE

Use it at checkout. Offer is valid until Friday night.

Yours, sustainably sauna'ing

Maryrose