You are shipping more than you were a year ago. The work that used to eat a full day now takes an afternoon. By every measure you can point to, you are ahead.
And you still feel behind.
A lot of the people I work with in tech describe some version of this. AI took hours off their week, and instead of relief, they feel more pressure than they did before. Here is why the extra speed did not make the pressure go away.
The hours did not become yours. They became capacity.
The moment the work got faster, the expectation moved with it. You are not being measured against last year’s pace. You are being measured against what is possible now, and what is possible now keeps changing.
That is why the relief never arrives. Relief would require the finish line to hold still long enough for you to reach it.
In my work with clients, this is the part that surprises them most. They assumed the problem was their own time management. It usually is not. The standard moved.
When something takes twenty minutes instead of a full day, it stops registering as work you did.
The sense of having accomplished something is tied to effort, not output. Strip out the hours and the struggle, and your mind files the task under nothing much happened. So you finish more and feel less for having done it.
This is worth noticing, because the obvious response is to do even more. More output will not fix a problem that lives in how the work registers, not in how much of it there is.
It is also why rest stops working. If nothing you finished felt like real effort, taking a break feels unearned rather than deserved.
Whatever you produce, someone nearby produces something that looks bigger.
Comparison to others is doing a lot of the damage here. You are not comparing your week to your own week last year. You are comparing it to a feed of other people’s best output, and that feed refreshes constantly.
The standard keeps moving because everyone is moving it at once. No amount of personal speed catches up to a group that is also accelerating.
I hear this most from people in tech in San Francisco, where the comparison is not abstract. It is the person two desks over, or the demo someone posted last night.
A few things I suggest to clients caught in this:
Measure against your own last year, not the ceiling. The ceiling is theoretical and it rises every quarter. Your own past pace is real and it is the only fair comparison available.
Give effortless work credit anyway. If a task would have taken six hours in 2023, it counts as six hours of value. Write it down that way for a week and see how the tally reads.
Separate output from worth on purpose. Say it plainly when you catch the slide. My value here is not a function of how much I shipped today.
Take the saved time back somewhere visible. Not all of it. One block, protected, used for something that is not work. Capacity that is never reclaimed simply disappears into the next expectation.
Watch what the pressure is costing. Sleep, patience, interest in work you used to like. When those start slipping, this has moved past a pace problem and therapy for burnout is worth considering.
If that kind of pressure is wearing you down, it is worth talking through with someone. The therapists at Good Therapy SF work with San Francisco professionals dealing with work stress, anxiety, and the pace of the industry they are in. Reach out to learn more.
About the Author
Dr. Tom McDonagh, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and the founder of Good Therapy SF. He trained at Vanderbilt and completed his postdoctoral work at Kaiser Permanente. His practice focuses on anxiety, OCD, panic, and work stress, with a special focus on San Francisco professionals. Good Therapy SF is located at 870 Market Street, Suite 617, San Francisco, CA.
