Is AI actually saving you too much time?

Tech company Clay’s AI writing policy went viral recently. And I loved one line in particular:

“More time should be spent authoring a document than consuming it.”

Oof. So true.

Say you spend two minutes prompting AI to produce a three-page document.

Then you send it to five colleagues.

But they end up spending an hour each wracking their brains trying to understand what the heck you’re on about.

That, folks, isn’t a time saving.

Pre-AI, writing something usually took longer than reading it. In my comms days, a simple press release might take days.

My colleagues and I would go back and forth, tinkering with the messaging until we knew we had the exact right headline to pique the interest of hard-to-reach journalists at, say, the Financial Times.

We understood that writing was part of the thinking.

We worked out what mattered. What to lead with. What order things should go in. How to make our point clear. And crucially, what to leave out.

AI has messed with all of that.

It can burp up 800 polished-looking words before you’ve even opened your Word doc.

So I love Clay’s rule.

Not because I think we should necessarily spend hours doing something AI can help us with. C’mon, we’re human. We love a shortcut. Sue me.

But because the time AI saves us shouldn’t automatically become time we pocket.

Some of it needs to be invested back into the work.

For thinking. Editing. Cutting. Checking.

So let’s keep an eye on whether we’re spending less time creating something than someone will spend consuming it.

For a simple transactional email, that may be fine.

For something long, complex or nuanced, it’s a useful warning sign that AI may have saved us a little too much time…