She Walked Into a Car Door. I Treated the Symptom.
Years ago, one of my top people, someone who could juggle more tasks than anyone I'd ever worked with, was rushing to her car after a long day when she walked straight into the door and split her lip open. Four stitches.
My response? I told her to take a couple of days off and stay off email. She was clearly running on empty, mentally drained from months of moving too fast, juggling too much, never truly stopping.
I thought I was being a good leader. I wasn't. I only treated the symptoms. I never addressed the root cause: the multitasking, blurred boundaries, and relentless pace that I had, at minimum, tolerated or, at worst, quietly rewarded by celebrating her output without ever questioning the cost.
I've been reflecting on that moment lately because a recent Harvard Business Review analysis highlights the same pattern, only now AI acts as the accelerant.
Researchers from UC Berkeley spent eight months inside a 200-person tech company studying how generative AI changed work habits. What they discovered should make every leader think twice. AI didn't cut down the workload. Instead, it consistently increased it. Employees worked faster, took on a wider range of tasks, and worked longer hours, not because anyone demanded it, but because AI made doing more seem possible, accessible, and even naturally rewarding.
That's the seductive part. At first, it feels like a superpower.
But here's what the research also found: once the initial excitement faded, workload quietly crept to unsustainable levels. Workers felt stretched from juggling everything suddenly on their plates. Cognitive fatigue set in. Decision-making weakened. The productivity surge from early adoption gave way to lower-quality work and eventually burnout.
The mechanics are worth understanding. AI blurred the line between work and recovery because starting a task became nearly frictionless, causing people to slip small bits of work into what used to be downtime: lunch, evenings, the drive home. They weren't doing it intentionally; it just happened. Additionally, AI enabled a new kind of multitasking, managing multiple active threads at once, that created a sense of momentum while quietly imposing a huge cognitive load. Workers reported feeling both more productive and more pressured at the same time. As one engineer in the study said: "You just work the same amount or even more."
Sound familiar?
The researchers' prescription, building an "AI practice" with intentional pauses, better sequencing, and protected time for human connection, is directionally right. But it's organizational-level guidance that still leaves the most important question unanswered for most leaders: what do you actually do when you realize your team is running too hot?
Because here's the real issue. Whether it's AI-driven intensification today or a top performer running on fumes in my office years ago, the leadership failure mode is the same: we see the output, celebrate the productivity, and overlook the human cost, until someone walks into a car door.
So I want to ask you directly: is it acceptable leadership to allow your people to multitask aggressively and blur work-life boundaries, even when they're doing it voluntarily, when you know where it leads?
My answer is no. Capability without constraint isn't performance. It's a liability waiting to surface.
The best leaders don't just manage output. They manage the conditions that make sustainable output possible. That means protecting recovery time even when people don't ask for it. It means questioning whether more is always better. It means having a hard conversation about root cause instead of handing someone a few days off and hoping the problem sorts itself out. I know this because I failed to do it, and I've watched other leaders fail to do it, too.
AI has made this challenge harder, not easier. The pressure to do more is now ambient, always available, and increasingly normalized. There is no natural stopping point when your "partner" never sleeps.
That calls for a new kind of intentionality from leaders, one that goes beyond just deploying tools and measuring results. It involves asking: What is this really costing my people, and am I willing to do something about it before they walk into a car door?
What are you doing about it? I'd like to hear from leaders who are actively navigating this.
Angelo Santinelli is the founder of Entrepreneurial Edge Executive Coaching and Advising and a strategic advisor to PE-backed and founder-led companies. He works with CEOs and executive teams on strategic execution, leadership development, and organizational performance.
