The meeting ends. Thirty seconds later, the summary lands in Slack - clean headers, action items, decisions bolded. Everyone reacts with the checkmark emoji. It feels like progress.

Nobody asks the obvious question: who's turning this into the PRD, the tickets, the stakeholder update?

You are. This afternoon. Or tonight.

The receipts just came in

This week, Lenny Rachitsky and Noam Segal published their second annual tech worker sentiment survey - 5,332 working tech professionals, nearly half of them PMs. The headline numbers should stop you cold:

Burnout jumped from 44.7% to 55.7% in a single year. Career optimism fell below half. And this happened during the exact stretch when AI meeting tools went from novelty to default - when 82% of respondents say AI is measurably making them more productive.

More productive and more burned out. That's not a contradiction. It's a mechanism. And the respondents can describe it better than any analyst:

"I can do more, faster, but not better."

"AI helps with the toil, but then it's also an enabler to do even more toil."

"We just set a new denominator for the job. And it moves higher and higher every month."

Here's the part almost everyone gets wrong. The dominant narrative says tech workers are afraid of AI taking their jobs. The survey says only 22% worry about that - near the bottom of the list. What 51% worry about, the number-one fear in the entire dataset, is being expected to do more for the same pay. Another 46% fear getting trapped in an unsustainable pace.

Nikhyl Singhal calls this "smiling exhaustion." The survey calls it the squeeze. Either way: the fear isn't replacement. It's the treadmill speeding up while the readout says you're winning.

The two-hour tax

So what do AI meeting summaries actually have to do with this? Let's do the math on a real one.

Your summary says: "Aligned on Q3 scope - Sarah to update the PRD." That's 45 minutes of edits. "Ticket out the auth changes." Forty minutes in Linear, because the summary captured the decision but not the acceptance criteria. "Circulate the decision to stakeholders." Thirty minutes of carefully worded Slack diplomacy. "Follow up with design on the empty states." Another thread, another context switch.

One meeting. One tidy summary. Roughly two hours of invisible follow-up.

Now run that across six meetings a day and you've found the missing hours the survey is describing. A summary is not a deliverable. A summary is a list of work you haven't done yet - a work order, formatted to look like a receipt.

Why the gains disappeared

This is the survey's sharpest finding, hiding in plain sight: productivity went up and burnout went up at the same time. How?

Because summary tools compressed the cheapest part of the work - capture - and left you the expensive part: completion. Nobody was drowning in the note-taking. They were drowning in the converting: notes into specs, decisions into tickets, discussions into updates.

And the capture time you "saved"? It didn't come back to you. It got repriced. The bar moved. Every gain became the new baseline — and, as one respondent put it, it moves higher every month. The tools got credit for the savings. You absorbed the difference.

That's the squeeze, itemized. Not a feeling. A workflow.

What if the meeting produced the work?

There's a different way to close that gap, and it's not a better summary.

It's finishing the work while the conversation is still happening. Earmark listens to your meetings in real time and turns what's said into the actual artifacts - the PRD, the Linear and Jira tickets with acceptance criteria, the stakeholder update - before the call ends. Not notes about the decisions. The output of them.

That changes what the productivity gain is. When the deliverable ships during the meeting, the saved time can't be quietly repriced into a higher baseline - it shows up as capacity you can see and defend. The gain becomes relief instead of a new denominator.

The survey's advice to leaders says it plainly: "The fastest way to end up with resentment on your team is to pocket the productivity and turn saved time into more work for them." The advice to everyone else is simpler still - stop mistaking the summary for the work.