We’ve seen the 100s of articles, the 100s of prompts, the 100s of cheat sheets focused on saving our time. Theoretically, I don’t have to manage my calendar, to-do lists, follow ups, anything. I don’t have to worry about the responses to queries, or the follow ups to the meetings. All that time spent on these and other tasks is automated, freeing up time to be “more productive.”
For those who know me, I’m obsessed with my personal productivity. I’m always an early adopter to tools that help make me more productive. But there’s actually very little of these AI tools I’m using. Please don’t misunderstand me, I embed AI into massive parts of my work. But the focus on how much time I save by not typing in a to-do or follow up into my task list is missing the point.
First, these things don’t consume hours or even a lot of minutes of my time. So what I save, might allow me to have a couple of longer coffee breaks. But what all these efficiency hacks miss is not the second/minutes save, but the underlying value of these activities.
Sitting down, daily, reviewing my calendar, color coding certain meetings is important to me. It forces me to focus on and reflect on how I’m spending my time. Am I spending my time on the right things? Am I managing that time as effectively as possible. As I look at the meetings I’ve got scheduled for the day, what are the key things I want to accomplish. As I add a meeting to my calendar, I reflect, while typing the meeting into the calendar, “Why am adding this, what do I want to accomplish when the meeting occurs, why is this meeting important enough to have on my calendar?”
Likewise, with my to-do lists. I will maintain these manually. Adding a to-do, I reflect, if only for a second or two, on “Why this needs to get converted to to-done? How does this fit into how I maximize what I get from each minute I spend working? What am I really trying to accomplish by investing time in doing this?”
The problem with the way we are leveraging these tools is the focus is on eliminating keystrokes, dictation time, the seconds/minutes it takes to update our CRM. What we miss is that in doing these things, we are simultaneously thinking, reflecting, looking at how these fit into what we are trying to achieve. We are attributing some meaning to the act of capturing and recording this information.
What do we lose when we don’t do these things ourselves?
We lose the ability to think and internalize what we are trying to achieve and why, the meaning, the purpose, fitting this into everything else we are doing. We have to do this, we have to reflect and think, even if for a few moments.
And if we don’t do this, the work loses it’s meaning, we lose our purpose, we end up going through motions. And if we are just going through the motions, an AI agent can probably go through those motions more efficiently.
Underlying every thing we do is some sort of thinking, some sort of reflection, some sort of sensemaking that helps us create meaning and purpose in our jobs and lives. Not doing these things robs us of our humanity.
So thank you for all these keystroke and time saving tips and AI tools. I’ll keep doing this stuff, the time I spend thinking, reflecting is time I can’t afford to sacrifice. The ability in each of these little activities to connect the dots between an activity, a to do, a follow up note and what they mean is invaluable.
Afterword: There is another issue with these “time saving tools.” I keep asking people, “What will you do with the time you are saving?” 90% of the time, it’s doing more of the same thing. But when we examine this, results keep falling. Causes one to think, are we missing something?
Afterword: Here is a good, very concise AI based discussion of this post. Enjoy!
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