Building Block: AI Should Give Us Time Back—Not More Work
One of the great promises of AI is productivity.
Emails written faster. Meetings summarized automatically. Research completed in minutes. Reports created in seconds.
So here’s a question:
What are we doing with all the time we’re saving?
There’s a danger that AI simply allows us to cram more activity into an already crowded day.
Answer more emails.
Attend more meetings.
Produce more reports.
Complete more tasks.
That’s not necessarily productivity. It’s just being busy at a higher speed.
The real opportunity with AI is to eliminate or reduce lower-value work so people can spend more time on things that matter.
For leaders, that might mean thinking about strategy, developing employees, talking with customers, or simply having uninterrupted time to think.
For technical professionals, it might mean spending less time writing routine code and more time understanding requirements, designing solutions, and solving difficult business problems.
There’s also a personal side to this.
If technology helps you finish the day’s work earlier, you don’t necessarily need to fill the newly available hour with another hour of work.
Go exercise.
Have dinner with your family.
Read a book.
Or do absolutely nothing productive. There’s a novel idea.
Technology should help us become more effective—not simply more occupied.
Building Block: Doing Less Can Produce More
In The 100: Building Blocks for Business Leadership, I wrote about what I called the “activity traps” that consume time and energy while accomplishing surprisingly little.
I also described Stephen Covey’s familiar metaphor of putting the “big rocks” into the bucket first. For me, those big rocks included important meetings, daily huddles, family time, and exercise. Everything else—the sand—filled the space around them.
My takeaway then was straightforward:
“Learn to smile and explain that the secret is working smarter, not longer.”
AI gives us perhaps the greatest opportunity we’ve had in decades to put that principle into practice.
The goal shouldn’t be to see how much more work AI allows us to squeeze into a day.
The goal should be to accomplish what matters—and get some of our day back.
