In praise of inefficiency. Or, why I'm letting AI buy me time I'm going to waste.

I'm spending a lot of time getting AI to do my admin. Not the things in my work that require the human touch, but the things that absolutely don't.

I don't, for example, want to scour my emails for receipts and upload them into my accounting software. It needs doing, but I add little value by doing it myself and learn nothing from the experience.

So I'm investing time now to avoid spending a lot more of it in future doing stuff that bores me. Which raises the interesting question of what I'll do with the time I get back.

The answer is: I'm going to waste it.

I want to read things with no obvious relevance to my work: take the long way somewhere, have conversations that aren't trying to achieve anything, stare out of a train window and follow an idea because it seems interesting, not because I've worked out what the output is supposed to be.

Fucking around, essentially.

I'm increasingly finding that's where my real edge lies. Some of the best and most creative ideas in my business have come from curiosity, detours and conversations with no obvious purpose. And ultimately, that's part of what clients are paying me for: ideas and perspectives they wouldn't necessarily arrive at on their own.

Most organisations, when they free up human time, either fill it with more work or remove the human.

I'm trying the opposite.