Last month I wrote about intentionality. About the difference between being busy and being deliberate, about how easy it is to get pulled into a rabbit hole of AI-generated dog videos instead of doing the things that actually move the needle.
(Entertaining? Yes. Strategic use of time? Decidedly not.)
Recently, something came up that took that idea further.
I was running a session recently, and a small group used AI to knock out their task in minutes. Genuinely impressive work. While everyone else was still grinding through it the old way, this group was already done.
Then they just... drifted. Someone grabbed their phone. Someone wandered off. An hour of rare, unstructured time with people they rarely get face-to-face with just evaporated.
When the exercise was scored, I ranked them last.
They were confused. The output was good, they finished first. What was the problem?
The problem wasn't the AI. It was what they did with the hour it gave back.
This is the thing that keeps coming up for me: AI is getting very good at returning us time. It can compress an hour of effort into ten minutes. That's genuinely exciting, but a tool that saves you an hour doesn't automatically make that hour valuable.
You still have to decide what to do with it.
And that's where intentionality comes in.
In that session, the "right" answer was obvious in hindsight. They were in a room with colleagues they rarely see. The task was the vehicle, not the destination, and the connection was the point. But, like most of us do, they equated finishing with succeeding.
AI breaks that equation. When the output is handled, there's still work left. Human work, the kind that can't be automated.
The question is whether you're intentional enough to see it.
So this week, when AI hands you back an hour, what are you actually doing with it?
(And walking barefoot on the beach is a perfectly acceptable answer!)
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