AI made me more productive, not less busy

I had a question rattling around on a Saturday morning, so I figured I would ask it out loud. It is aimed at other business owners, especially the ones using AI to speed up their work and save time.

Here is what I am noticing. These tools let me set an agent off to deliver a project, finish a task, or do something boring that used to eat my time. The kind of work that took ages and burned brain calories for no real payoff. Now I no longer need to do it myself. So I can get bigger jobs done in the small gaps between meetings and everything else on my plate. A little slice of time can now execute something fairly complicated for me.

The benefit is not spread evenly across the business. I do not see as much gain in every other part of what I do. Where I really feel it is in completing big tasks in small windows, then freeing up the mental space to focus on the work I actually want to do.

Take this video. The annoying part was never the thinking. It was uploading it, waiting for it to process, sorting out the screens, all that stuff. The kind of thing where you ask yourself, can I be bothered? It is going to take too long. I am also not the type to record live or straight into one of those apps. So that friction usually wins, and the idea never makes it out of my head.

That got me wondering. For a business owner, are the real gains coming from the fact that we now use more of that in-between time? And then a less comfortable thought arrived.

Is this just more of what we have always done to ourselves with technology?

Think about it. Technology was always going to free up our time. Instead we ended up with email in our pocket, plus our messages, Slack and LinkedIn. I have less downtime than I used to, but I am far more efficient. Like most people, my productivity has gone straight up. I am not actually creating much more free time.

The strange part is I feel better about myself, because I am producing more. Whether that is a good trade is the bit I keep turning over.

So here is the honest question, and it might be a bit of a ramble. Are other business owners finding they get these really productive micro periods of time? You create the rules, the processes and the agents. They deliver all the grind. You get to do the fun thinking stuff. Or is this just a me thing?

That was my Saturday morning thought bomb. I could be completely wrong.

And if you are watching this, you are probably proving the point. Like everyone else, you are using a Saturday, when you should not be working, to learn something on LinkedIn.

See how it goes. Cheers.