I’m a tremendous fan of Azeem Azhar’s Substack posts Exponential View. While I may not always agree, in each post I learn a huge amount. I encourage you to subscribe.
Recently a post, How To Use AI To Reclaim Deep Work caught my eye. Azeem, was posing the question, “Can AI finally clean my inbox (Slack, etc).” Another very insightful person addressed this and how he has developed the tools to help him manage this problem. He provides a series of prompts you can cut and paste to achieve the same goals.
But, as I read it, I thought, “What are we really doing, and is this really important?”
I don’t want to disparage George’s comments in this post, but sometimes, I think we tend to get enamored by the an idea, without really understand if it’s really important.
In this post, George cited the problem all of us have, dealing with our inboxes, Slack messages, calendar requests. As we all do, he wanted to find a way to handle it much more efficiently, saving him the time of doing it himself. He cited the problem, “I get about a thousand of these requests a year.” I was shocked, thinking, “Why so few, I get hundreds a day.” He then went on to say, “Even if I only spend two minutes on each, that eats up a lot of my time.”
I started doing the math, 1000/year, 2 minutes each, that’s 2000 minutes a year, or a little over 33 hours a year. That’s almost an entire word week! The savings can be huge, let me jump on board!
Then I thought, this doesn’t happen at one time, it’s not as if I could discover this massive chunk of time, maybe even to take a vacation. It doesn’t even happen in smaller chunks every month–there I could save close to 3 hours a month.
It happens every day. Using George’s numbers, handling these messages sucks 8 minutes out of each of his days. (assuming a 250 day work year)
But the AI tool manages the inbox, Slack messages, and his calendar. All he has to do is look at the summaries. I wonder how much time that takes, hopefully less than 8 minutes.
But, I often find myself doing, I need to go back to the original, because it provides me a much richer context. For example, I just received a note from a client, following up a discussion. The note was about scheduling something with her team to discuss the issues we had discussed. The note didn’t identified the issues, but I knew them from our discussion, I also had the context about why the meeting was so important. We didn’t record the meeting, so there was no transcript. I entered a few summary thoughts into CRM, mainly to remind me about next steps. I had the handwritten notes in my notebook–I could refer to them if I needed to.
It’s so easy for all of us to get distracted by what these tools can do. I constantly fall victim to this. Even wickedly smart people like Azzem and George get distracted. And I’m not suggesting there isn’t a use for these types of tools to better organize our day, our inboxes, and use our time.
But I wonder, do these things distract us from the real impact and power of these tools. Can we use them in ways that are more impactful–and that may not be saving time, but helping change the way we think and approach each task that we do? Can we use them to re-imagine our work to focus on impact, rather than saving a few minutes here and there.
I continue to follow Azeem and am now following George, because I can learn from them–and sometimes it’s learning what not to do.
Afterword: This is an outstanding discussion of this post. It is a great discussion and I encourage you to listen to it. Ironically, it’s roughly the “8 minutes” we talk about in the post. Enjoy.
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