🧪 Creativity at Speed, Using AI to Get to Better First Drafts Faster
Most of us think creativity takes time, and it does. But a lot of the time we associate with creativity is not the creative work itself. It is the slow start, the blank page, the wandering brainstorm, and the endless polishing that happens because we did not land the concept early. AI cannot replace taste, but it can dramatically reduce the time cost of getting to something we can shape. The real time win is not “AI makes us more creative.” The win is that AI reduces time-to-first-draft, compresses iteration cycles, and protects attention so we can spend our best hours on judgment, storytelling, and originality. ------------- Context: Why Creative Work Often Feels Like a Time Sink ------------- Creative work has a unique kind of friction. Even when we know what we need to produce, a post, a campaign concept, a training module, a deck, a new offer, we still have to find the angle. That search can take hours, and the search often happens in a messy way. We open a doc and write a few lines, delete them, write again, then check messages, then scroll examples, then start over. The work is not moving. We are paying the start-up cost again and again. That is context switching inside a single task, and it inflates the timeline. We also lose time because creative work is often reviewed subjectively. When the criteria are unclear, feedback becomes “I just don’t like it” or “it doesn’t feel right.” Then we revise without knowing what target we are aiming at. Rework skyrockets, and cycle time balloons. Another time leak is the “single-track draft.” We create one idea, invest heavily in it, and then defend it. When feedback arrives, we either collapse or scramble. This is slow because we treated the first attempt as precious. AI changes the economics of creative exploration. It makes drafts cheap. When drafts are cheap, we can explore more, choose faster, and refine with less emotional weight. That is how creativity becomes faster without becoming shallow. ------------- Insight 1: The Fastest Creative Teams Separate Generating From Choosing -------------