Reaction: Boredom is the new burnout, and it’’s quietly killing motivation at work
Boredom masks deeper issues in the workplace. Discover how redesigning roles can revive motivation and combat burnout effectively.
This article nails something most leaders miss: we’ve made burnout socially acceptable while boredom feels like confession of inadequacy.
But here’s what matters more. The real problem isn’t that people mistake one for the other. It’s that both signal the same failure: we’ve stopped designing work that demands human judgment. When AI handles the routine and leaders don’t redesign roles around what actually requires thinking, you get cognitive underload dressed up as exhaustion.
The fix isn’t better diagnosis. It’s better work. Give people problems worth solving, decisions that matter, ambiguity they have to navigate. Boredom disappears when the work requires you to be human.
Boredom is the new burnout, and it’s quietly killing motivation at work
The agent-shaped org chart
Every real org has the same topology: principal, role-holder, specialists. Staff AI maps onto it, node for node, and the cost collapse shows up in the deliverables that were always just human-handoff overhead.
AI as staff, not software
Two frames for what AI is doing to work. The tool frame makes tools smarter. The staff frame makes roles unnecessary. Those aren't the same product, the same company, or the same industry.
Knowledge work was never work
Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn't share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.
The work of being available now
A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.
The practice of work in progress
Practical essays on how work actually gets done.
How do I get my dev team to adopt AI?
A stub on helping mixed-interest development teams find their own useful ways into AI.
Want to learn about agents? Talk to someone who ran an agency.
I spent 20 years running consulting engagements at Fortune 500 companies. Turns out that's the best preparation for running a fleet of AI agents ... because the problems are identical.
Your AI agents need a water cooler
We run a twelve-session AI fleet that coordinates through an IRC breakroom. A friend asked: why are you making AI agents act like humans? The answer turned out to be more interesting than the question.
Is automation the key to organizational resilience?
Discover how automation enhances organizational resilience while emphasizing the vital role of human creativity in driving true innovation.
Artificial intelligence could hit three in five workers — Possibly replacing their jobs. The warning comes in a new international monetary fund report on the future of work. It warned of lower sala…
AI could replace three in five workers, warns an IMF report, signaling potential job loss and lower salaries. Discover the implications for the future of work.
Atlassians choose where they work, every single day. Download our free report to see what we’ve learned as a result.
Explore Atlassian's insights on flexible work policies and employee satisfaction. Download the free report to learn from their distributed work experience.