  Unitary processes allow for the transfer of work to and from Hamiltonian
systems. However, to achieve nonzero power for the practical extraction of
work, these processes must be performed within a finite time, which inevitably
induces excitations in the system. We show that depending on the time scale of
the process and the physical realization of the external driving employed, the
use of counterdiabatic quantum driving to extract more work is not always
effective. We also show that by virtue of the two-time energy measurement
definition of quantum work, the cost of counterdiabatic driving can be
significantly reduced by selecting a restricted form of the driving Hamiltonian
that depends on the outcome of the first energy measurement. Lastly, we
introduce a measure, the exigency, that quantifies the need for an external
driving to preserve quantum adiabaticity which does not require knowledge of
the explicit form of the counterdiabatic drivings, and can thus always be
computed. We apply our analysis to systems ranging from a two-level
Landau-Zener problem to many-body problems, namely, the quantum Ising and
Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick models.
