đ Stop Optimizing Minutes, Start Buying Back Hours
Most of us try to save time by moving faster, but the real win comes from removing whole chunks of work that never needed to exist. AI is not just a speed boost, it is a lever for reclaiming hours by shrinking cycle time, reducing rework, and protecting attention. ------------- Context: Where Our Time Actually Goes ------------- When we look closely at a typical week, the biggest time drain is rarely the task itself. The drain is everything around the task, figuring out what âgoodâ looks like, switching contexts, chasing missing info, rewriting the same idea in three formats, and waiting on decisions that could have been made with clearer inputs. A common scenario is the âfirst draft trap.â Someone opens a blank doc, spends an hour getting momentum, sends a rough draft, gets vague feedback, then spends another two hours revising, not because the work is hard, but because the target was unclear. The time-to-first-draft was long, and the rework rate was high, so the whole cycle time balloons. Another time leak is meeting gravity. We hop into calls because we are uncertain, or because we want alignment, but we end up paying in context switching and follow-up. A 30 minute meeting often creates 90 minutes of hidden cost when we account for prep, recovery, and the fragmented attention that follows. The point is not that we are doing anything wrong. It is that the system is designed to convert uncertainty into time spent. AI becomes powerful when we use it to reduce uncertainty early, so the rest of the work becomes smaller, cleaner, and faster. ------------- Insight 1: Time Savings Come From Clarity, Not Speed ------------- We often think of AI as a faster doer, but its first job should be a clearer. Clarity reduces time-to-decision, time-to-first-draft, and the amount of back and forth that creates rework. When we start with fuzzy intent, we pay for it later. We pay in revisions, misalignment, and the slow drip of corrections that never quite end. If we start with a clear outcome, audience, constraints, and examples, the work tightens immediately.