A beer earned tastes better.

What happens to people’s sense of value and achievement when AI automates the tasks that gave work its rhythm, progress, and closure? (This is part two in my series of open questions about work, AI and value. For the full list of questions click here) 

Sunday at 2pm. 

I’m in my Temu Crocs (don’t judge). I’ve got a podcast on (usually that’s my Hard Fork timeslot) and the air is thick with the smell of my petrol mower.  

My front yard’s a bit complicated.  

There are stumps that I’ve never got around to removing, a brick mailbox that someone 30 years ago thought was a great idea, and one of the trees overhanging continuously drops these huge nut things. 

There’s nothing straightforward about mowing my lawn. 

But I like it. 

Actually, I don’t just like it.  

It’s good for me. 

I’m sure that sometime in the not-too-distant future, my humanoid assistant will offer to ‘free me up’ from this as another one of my ‘busy-work’ jobs. And I’m sure there’s lots of people out there looking forward to a Sunday afternoon of sipping beer, watching the robot do their lawn. 

But I think I’ll keep mowing.

This is what ChatGPT thinks I look like. It's hallucinated.

There’s something that mowing the lawn gives me. It closes a loop.  

It’s not creative. 

It’s not relational. 

It’s not particularly, uniquely human. 

But it gives me a sense of achievement. I can close a loop. I open my Sunday arvo beer with proof, in my own body, that I’m someone who can start a thing and finish it.

I take that into Monday with me.

It makes me better at all the human things I need to do: having a hard client conversation, having patience in a workshop, coaching my team… because those things don’t exist in a vacuum.

I bring something to those interactions that comes from knowing I can close a loop. Even small ones. Even a lawn. 

Every Tuesday morning, Christina does the bank recs. She scrolls through two screens, carefully working out which payments connect to which invoices when a customer hasn’t taken the time to label them properly.

She’s scanning for any clues around where the money has come from. A mistyped account number or some word that might make it clearer. If she can’t work that out, she has to try and match the amount paid to the invoices listed in the ERP. It’s a puzzle.  

There’s a smug ‘Ha’ from Christina’s desk every time she finds a match. 

It takes time. A fair bit. That’s why it was an obvious use case for agentic AI at her organisation. The agent could use logic to match the payments in a fraction of the time that it took Christina, and she was ‘freed up’ to do the really ‘valuable human’ work of accounting – calling customers to chase bad debt, talking to Sales Reps about accounts, unblocking orders where she knows the customer and that a payment is coming. 

When the agent first started, Christina seemed unsure. She wanted to go back carefully through the records the agent had matched. We had spoken to the team about the importance of checking the agent’s work.  

But in the way she would pore through the reports, I think I sensed something else. Grief.   

Christina, and lots of people, enjoy busy work. The efficiency frame misses this completely. 

Whether its lawns or bank reconciliations or data entry or clearing an inbox, busy work gives us the joy of small, closed loops. 

These are the things that stop my day feeling floppy. More than that, they actually make me better at the ‘human value’ things I do. They help me feel like I’m good at my job.

Christina knows she’s a good accountant because she can see the debt that she has reduced, but she feels like a good accountant because she reconciled the bank balance.  

I can’t exactly tell you why mowing my lawn makes me a better consultant. But I know it does.  

As every workplace looks for the next chunk of busy work to automate and delegate to an agent, we have a question to sit with.  

What are we losing? 

What is Christina losing?

Where are the places our team say ‘Ha!’ at their desk?

How do we protect them?  

I don’t know yet. But I know a beer earned tastes better.   

If this kind of thinking is your thing, I send a weekly email with reflections, questions I'm wrestling with, and a few worthwhile resources I've come across that week. You can subscribe below.

Written by Dan Godden