Designed Recovery

Designed recovery is the operational prescription the simulation draws from Perlow's framework for the AI era. The compilation waits, commutes, documentation searches, and walks to a colleague's desk that once provided involuntary recovery points have been progressively eliminated by tools that remove friction. Each elimination was experienced as a gain. The cost is the removal of the involuntary rest that the friction provided, and the cost is invisible because the rest was never recognized as rest. Designed recovery creates artificial periodization — structured, scheduled disengagement that replaces what the tool has consumed. The design must contend with the fact that the natural recovery points were invisible even to the people who benefited from them, so designed recovery will initially look, from the outside, like inefficiency.