The Office Chair is the bottleneck

The new AI 40-hour work week

My day typically starts by checking how my sessions line up with my tasks. But the sessions shift throughout the week, no two days are the same, and most mornings I catch the tail end of one.

The session trap

> finish the migration and open the PR

  · reading 41 files
  · rewriting the adapter layer
  ⚠ session limit reached
    further usage this session will be billed

crunched for 1 hour 30 minutes.

Coffee break time!

A partial session with most of its limit unspent is money left on the table. And often that deficit carries into the next full one, pushing me straight past that session's limit into the overage — and Big Silicon profits on both ends.

I work the tide now.

06:00 Monday · 07:00 Tuesday · 08:00 Wednesday — the windows return an hour later each day, like a tide

Following the tide means some days start at six and some at ten. But now every window lands whole, instead of half-burnt before I even sat down.

Five whole sessions a week to ten

from one a day to two. And yes, ten hours of session time does not fit an 8-hour workday, but I make it work

Same-sized sessions meant I could finally plan. Work gets cut to fit five hours, twice a day, every day. The next goal was obvious: spend the whole weekly limit.

The final frontier

Sure, I could fit the weekly limit inside the hours I already work. But I’ll bet money you’ve also said the other thing: “with more time, I could’ve built it better.” Now give the same task the other fourteen hours a day. The question is how to claim those hours without becoming an AI vampire.

The handoff

Days are mine; the nights and weekends go to the agents. The wiki brain already takes its shift — borrowing an idea from Karpathy, it tends to the maintenance work people usually abandon, while I sleep. I'm also looking at everything-claude-code as inspiration for the rest. After that, the only clock still ticking is the weekly session limit.