The More AI Helpers You Open, the More Tired You Get

You might do this too: you fire up one AI assistant, then another, hook up your calendar, connect Telegram. Three agents, five, eight. In the moment it's exciting, and you feel like your productivity is about to multiply. Then a few days later you open that window, see eighty items waiting for review, and quietly close it again. There's a hidden cost here that people often miss. Call it the "orchestration tax": AI can run in parallel, but you can't. You can put twenty agents to work at the same time, but every piece of output still has to pass through your eyes, and every decision still comes down to you. The more agents you have, the longer the line of things waiting for your approval. The core of it: human judgment is single-threaded. You can only really think about one thing at a time. And "reviewing" is usually more draining than "doing." The doing part is what AI takes off your plate, which leaves you with "deciding what to do" and "checking it was done right," the two most mentally taxing parts of all. Your attention is limited; AI's isn't. When those two facts collide, they breed a strange kind of fatigue: it feels like you did nothing all day, yet you're worn out. Instead of opening up a few more agents, it's worth getting clear on this first: which one thing actually deserves the attention it takes you to review it.