What Am I Doing With the Time AI Saves Me?

I was in a meeting recently with one of the vice presidents at the firm where I work, and the conversation had turned to artificial intelligence. We were talking about how we use it, the different tools we have been experimenting with, and how much time we have both spent trying to understand where AI is genuinely useful. At one point she mentioned that she was paying for so many different AI services that she now had more AI subscriptions than streaming services. Then she said something that followed me out of the meeting because it raised a question I had not really asked myself.

“I’m still looking for the return on my investment.”

I understood what she meant. She was spending real money on AI services and real time learning how to use them, so the question was whether all of that investment was actually producing enough value to justify it. What caught my attention was that she was not really questioning whether AI could do useful things. She was asking whether the usefulness was adding up to a meaningful return.

That made me start asking the same question about my own use of AI.

I have spent a significant amount of time working with AI over the last few years. Professionally, that has included helping clients think through AI workflows, understanding how AI is beginning to affect architecture and the broader AECO industry, researching what these tools can and cannot do, and speaking about some of those changes in presentations and other settings. Personally, I have also started using AI to help me clean up my writing, generate images for my website, research, learn new things, build projects, work through ideas, and revisit interests that I have wanted to pursue for years.

By most conventional measures, I could point to quite a bit of value coming from that investment. There are things I can do faster now than I could before. I can get oriented to an unfamiliar subject more quickly, work through documentation more efficiently, explore ideas without spending hours trying to figure out where to begin, and get much farther into a project before I run into the limits of what I already know.

The question I had not really considered was whether AI was actually saving me time or simply helping me fill that saved time with more things.

For most of my career, I have had a fairly simple way of managing what I work on. As much as possible, I have tried to organize things in threes. I would focus on no more than three significant projects at a time. Personally, I would usually identify three major goals for the year, then narrow those into a few things that mattered for a particular month, three priorities for the week, and eventually three things I wanted to move forward during the day.

It was never rigid. Working in architecture for nearly thirty years has meant there were plenty of times when the demands of work did not cooperate with any clean productivity system. I have worked on a lot of projects over that time, including some very significant ones, and there were always deadlines, client needs, changes, interruptions, and periods when more than three things were competing for my attention. Still, three became a way of deciding what deserved my attention first.

That approach helped me stay consistent. I did not have to feel particularly motivated every day. Whether I was doing well emotionally or not, I could usually look at the few things I had committed to and keep moving them forward. The limitation gave me somewhere to return when everything else felt scattered.

Looking back, I think the limitation itself may have been more important than I realized. There have always been things I wanted to do but did not pursue. There were skills I wanted to learn, projects I thought would be interesting, ideas I wanted to explore, and things I would occasionally think I might get to someday. Often, someday stayed someday because I knew what I was already committed to doing. I did not have unlimited time, and the boundary forced me to acknowledge that. AI has changed some of that.

One of its greatest practical benefits for me has been the amount of friction it removes from starting something unfamiliar. There are subjects that once would have required hours of searching, reading, sorting through documentation, watching videos, or trying to find someone who could explain what I did not understand. AI does not remove the need to verify information or actually learn the subject, but it often makes it much easier to get oriented, ask better questions, and move from “I don’t know where to begin” to having a reasonable starting point.

Photography is a recent example. I took a photography class more than thirty years ago and have wanted to get back into photography for a long time, but it never became a high enough priority to push something else off the list. Recently I bought a used Canon EOS Rebel T7i. Instead of starting by reading hundreds of pages of a camera manual and trying to remember what I learned decades ago, I have been using AI to help me relearn the basics, understand the camera, create quick field references, and work through questions as they come up.

I am still the one who has to pick up the camera, make mistakes, understand exposure, learn what the settings actually do, and develop the skill. AI has not made me a photographer. What it has done is make the process of getting back into photography easier than it would have been otherwise, which made it more likely that I would actually do it.

I can see the same thing happening in other areas. An idea that I previously would have dismissed because I did not have the time to research it can now be explored much more quickly. Something I do not know how to build can sometimes become a rough prototype while I am still learning how the pieces work. Questions that might once have sat unanswered because finding the answer was not worth the time can now turn into something I am actively investigating.

I genuinely enjoy that. Curiosity has always been part of how I work, and AI gives me access to more of that curiosity than I probably allowed myself before. I can learn about something simply because it interests me, experiment with an idea that may or may not go anywhere, or return to something I have put off for years. Some of those explorations have turned into things I value and would not have created otherwise.

What I am also realizing is that I am increasingly surrounded by things I have started.

That is where I keep coming back to the question of return on investment. If something that once required four hours now takes two, then I have saved two hours. That is a real efficiency gain. But if those two hours immediately become the beginning of another project, and the efficiencies on that project allow me to begin another one, then eventually I may be accomplishing significantly more without ever experiencing a sense that I actually have more time.

The numbers could still show that I am more productive. I may complete more work, research more subjects, learn more skills, and produce things faster than I could before. At the same time, I can also have more unfinished projects, more open questions, more things demanding attention, and more decisions about what I should be working on next. Those are not necessarily contradictions. I can become more productive and more scattered at the same time.

AI may be increasing what I am capable of doing faster than I am learning to decide what is worth doing.

That sentence is probably the part of the reflection I keep returning to. My old rule of three created a boundary because my limitations were obvious. There were only so many hours available, learning something new was expensive in time, and taking on another project meant knowingly taking attention away from something I had already decided mattered. The friction involved in beginning something new helped enforce the boundary for me.

AI changes some of those calculations without changing the underlying limitation. I still have the same amount of time. I still have a finite amount of attention. I still have relationships, responsibilities, work, rest, and all of the other things that exist whether I can produce a document in half the time or research an unfamiliar subject in an afternoon. What has changed is how many things can plausibly fit inside the space I once considered too small for them.

That makes me wonder whether my old way of working is more important now than it was before.

The rule of three may not have been as much about productivity as I thought it was. I used it to help me get things done, but it also forced me to leave things undone. I had to accept that some interesting ideas would remain ideas, that some skills would have to wait, and that choosing one project meant choosing not to work on several others. At the time, I probably saw those limitations mostly as practical realities. I am beginning to see that they also protected my attention.

I do not want the answer to this reflection to become that AI is bad for focus or that I need to stop exploring things. That would not accurately reflect my experience. AI has been enormously useful to me, both professionally and personally, and some of what I am doing now has reminded me how much I enjoy learning things simply because I am interested in them. I am also doing work that would have taken far more time or might never have moved beyond an idea without these tools.

The tension is that greater capacity still requires me to decide what to do with it.

In business, return on investment is often measured through things like time saved, cost reduced, productivity increased, or output improved. Those are reasonable measurements, and I think individuals naturally use similar ones when we evaluate our own tools. If AI helps me finish something faster or do something that previously felt out of reach, it is easy to point to that as evidence that the investment was worthwhile.

What I am beginning to question is whether increased output tells me enough.

If AI saves me five hours during a week and I respond by committing those five hours to three additional projects, then I have certainly increased what I am able to do. Whether I have improved the way I am using my time is a different question. I may have created more capacity without creating any more margin.

Maybe some of those hours should become more work. Maybe some should become learning, experimenting, or building something that would otherwise never exist. But perhaps some of the return should simply be getting the time back. It could be time spent with my wife, time outside, time with a camera, time reading something without turning it into a project, or even time in which nothing particularly productive happens.

For most of my career, I had a system that assumed I could not do everything I wanted to do. AI has not made that assumption untrue, but it has made it much easier for me to forget it. The more capable the tools become, the easier it is to look at another idea and decide that I can probably do that too.

I am beginning to think the question of whether I can do something may need to matter less than it used to. The question of whether it deserves my time may need to matter more.

When my VP said she was still looking for the return on her investment, she was talking about her own use of AI. She had been spending more time with it and paying for enough different AI services that she joked she now had more paid AI accounts than streaming services. That was what made her question so interesting to me. She was not questioning whether AI could do useful things. She was asking whether everything she was putting into it was actually returning enough value to justify the investment.

I left the meeting realizing that I need to ask the same thing about mine, although I may have been looking for the return in the wrong place. I have spent plenty of time measuring how much more AI allows me to accomplish. I have spent much less time asking whether I am being intentional about what all of that additional capacity is for.

I know AI is saving me time. I am still figuring out whether I have learned how to keep any of it.

“…just a thought.”