Not because I was distracted. I had launched an agent, I had four minutes ahead of me, and standing there watching the bar felt like a waste. It was with the toothbrush in my mouth that I realized I’d already been in the bathroom.
These days there’s an index going around that measures how much time we lose waiting for AI. It counts the minutes. It’s looking at the wrong thing.
In 1987, in Peopleware, Tom DeMarco wrote that you don’t enter flow by flipping a switch: it takes “a slow descent into the subject”, a good 15 minutes before the state locks in. Every interruption starts the descent over from zero.
Fifteen minutes to reach the bottom. Your agent calls you back up every five.
That’s why you’re tired in the evening without being able to say from what. You didn’t work eight hours: you started 90 descents and didn’t finish a single one.
And staying to wait isn’t an option. Four minutes stuck in front of a bar are unbearable, and they feel like a waste: you’ve just bought speed, and it seems absurd to sit there watching it go by. So you climb back up, and go do something else.
When the agent resurfaces with its work, you’re not there. You come back with your head still on the other thing, look at 300 lines, recognize the shape, approve. “Human in the loop” is still written on the diagram. There’s nobody in the loop.
The part that surprised me, though, is something else, and it’s all inside those four minutes.
I have 10 things I could do with them. Going through them, weighing them, picking one: that round eats half the energy I had for the slot. Then I go brush my teeth, which is the only thing I can decide without thinking.
We are the bottleneck, and it stays ours however fast the machine gets. It restarts cold at zero cost. You pay for the descent, and before that you pay for the decision.
I wrote myself a prototype app that makes that decision for me: at every wait it tells me what to do with it, calibrated to the time I actually have ahead of me. The 15 minutes are still lost. But I get to the slot with energy still in my pocket.
It’s not the waiting that costs you. It’s the choosing. Ninety times a day.