---
title: "You're 5x Faster With AI. So Why Does Work Feel Slow?"
description: "Your brain adapts to AI speed until five-times output feels normal, even slow. Why the new pace plays tricks on you, and how to find your Hero Mode hours."
canonicalURL: https://aaronlynn.com/force-multiplication/why-the-new-pace-feels-slow/
date: 2026-09-08T14:00:00.000Z
---

![16-bit retro arcade racing scene: a sports car sweeps off a blurred high-speed motorway onto a sleepy town exit road, the HUD speedometer still reading 120 while the driver looks unimpressed.](https://assets.aaronlynn.com/emails/newsletters/cnt-6469/pixel-racer-highway-exit-velocitation.webp)

_60 feels like crawling after an hour at 120._{.center}

## 1. Why the New Pace Feels Slow

Something strange happens as you start to master AI tools:

Work starts to feel slow again.

I caught this happening to me recently, in the middle of an intense work sprint. I was starting to question if things were moving quickly enough, so I stopped and actually looked at what had shipped that week.

It was somewhere around 5x the same period a year ago.

Five times... and it felt underwhelming.

To someone watching from the outside, that pace looks like witchcraft. From the inside, living with it every day, it just feels normal.

It reminded me of an old Marvel comic where speed-based superheroes (think: Quicksilver) say that they actually experience everything at a normal pace, even when they are moving at super speed.

So yes, this is your mind playing tricks on you.

Your brain has simply adapted to the new normal. Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation — whatever improvement you get, your baseline quietly resets to match it, and the gain stops registering. The term usually comes up around pay rises and lottery winners, but it applies just as well to your output.

It's also the same reason driving feels weird when you come off a highway. You've been doing 120 for an hour, you take an exit into a town, and suddenly 60 feels like crawling — even though 60 is actually pretty fast.

_(The technical term for this is velocitation.)_

Your brain does exactly the same thing with your output speed.

So what do you do about this?

Honestly? You don't need to do anything.

There's nothing to fix here. It's part of your brain's amazing ability to adapt to new situations, and just recognising what's happening is enough.

You _could_ try to speed up even more. But that runs into two problems:

1. It may not be possible.
2. It may not be necessary.

_(If you genuinely want to push the ceiling anyway, [hypertasking](https://aaronlynn.com/ai/hypertasking/) tackles the idea at a higher logical level.)_

What actually works is anchoring against external, objective measurement instead of what you feel.

Objective measurement being:

- What your stakeholders, manager or direct reports say about your output,
- PRs merged or deliverables shipped,
- Tasks and outcomes actually closed each week.

If the external numbers say you're doing five times what you were doing a year ago, then nothing needs to change, no matter how slow it feels from the inside.

## 2. Hero Mode: Find Your Peak Energy Hours

Before you reach for yet another AI tool to squeeze out more speed, there's another higher order lever worth pulling first: knowing when your brain is actually switched on.

Here's the method:

1. Pick a normal working day.
2. At the top of every hour, rate your energy 1-10 and write it down.
3. At the end of the day, chart it and look for the peak block.

That peak block is your **Hero Mode**.

Mine runs from early morning to about noon. Yours might not — only around 10-20% of people are genuinely [early-morning types](https://aaronlynn.com/productivity/waking-up-early/), no matter what the 5am-routine crowd tells you. Your Hero Mode might be 10am to 2pm, or 4pm to 8pm.

Where does AI fit in?

Your Hero Mode hours should go to your most judgement-heavy work. These days that includes reviewing and directing AI output — deciding what's good, what's wrong and what actually ships — which takes far more focus than people admit.

Push the admin, the emails and the AI tasks that just need babysitting into your energy troughs.

The full guide to [energy management and Hero Mode is here](https://aaronlynn.com/productivity/energy-management/), and I walk through the whole exercise in detail in my [_Next Level Productivity_](https://aaronlynn.com/courses/next-level-productivity/) course.

## 3. Courses

I have a range of online courses that teach business people what they need to know about productivity and AI:

[**1. Next Level Productivity**](https://aaronlynn.com/courses/next-level-productivity/)\
A practical, straightforward course that teaches you how to achieve elite-level personal productivity in today's constantly interrupted world.

[**2. The Complete Claude, Claude Code & AI for Work Productivity**](https://aaronlynn.com/courses/ai-for-work-productivity/)\
A comprehensive course taking you from beginner AI concepts like prompt and context engineering, to cutting-edge AI productivity using terminal-based AI tools like Claude Code for non-coding office work. Usable with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other current LLMs.

[**3. The AI Agents, Automations and Agentic Workflows Guide**](https://aaronlynn.com/courses/ai-agents-guide/)\
This non-technical course shows business people and non-coders how they can build and use AI agents in ChatGPT and Zapier.

[**4. The AI Playbook**](https://aaronlynn.com/courses/ai-playbook-for-ceos/)\
This is my longer premium course on how businesses can deploy AI tools and technology across their processes and teams.

[**5. ChatGPT for Managers**](https://aaronlynn.com/courses/chatgpt-for-managers/)\
See how AI can solve complex management challenges in less than 30 seconds. Full prompt library and examples included.

That's it for this week!

— Aaron

> Related course: Next Level Productivity — $97 — /courses/next-level-productivity/