Leaders want their week back, not a week off
For years the promise of software, and now AI, has been time back. It is a good promise aimed at the wrong target.
TL;DR
- Most leaders don’t want less to do. They want the hours they spend at work to count.
- Saving time only matters if you decide in advance where it goes. Otherwise it quietly fills up with more meetings and more email.
- When businesses adopt AI, the tool and the data are around 20% of the outcome. The other 80% is the way the work actually gets done, and that’s where your week goes.
- Start with your own diary: track a normal week and see how much of it grows the business and how much just keeps it running.
A week off
I took a week off recently. The first two days were exactly what I needed: time with my kids and my wife, no laptop, no calls, and a proper go at being a dad and a husband. By day three I was restless, and by the end of the week I was counting the hours until I could get back to work.
I share that because it says something about how founders and business leaders are wired, and about how the technology industry, my own corner of it included, sells to them. For years the promise of software, and now AI, has been time back. Automate this, streamline that, and hours of your week will be returned to you. It is a good promise aimed at the wrong target. The leaders I know want the hours they spend at work to count, on the things that move their business and their life forward. Less to do rarely features on the wish list.
What would you do with the time?
I was at the Kevin Bridges gig in Glasgow this week, and he told a story about how he finally persuaded his mum to get a smartphone. The next day she mentioned she was heading into town to buy a book. He showed her she could order it on her phone and have it on the doorstep by tomorrow. She looked at him as if he had missed the point entirely. She liked the bus journey, looking out of the window and gathering her thoughts. She liked browsing the bookshop, then sitting in a coffee shop with a cup of tea and maybe chatting to a stranger. Then she asked him what she was supposed to do with the time she had saved by ordering the book online.
She was right. Saving time is only valuable if the time goes somewhere better. For a lot of people, the hours technology frees up quietly disappear into more screen time. Businesses do the same thing: an efficiency project lands, the team saves a few hours a week, and those hours fill up with more meetings, more email and more of the same. Nobody planned where the time would go, so it went nowhere in particular.
Saving time is only valuable if the time goes somewhere better.
That is why I have stopped talking about giving people time back and started talking about giving them their week back. The difference is intent. Time back is a by-product. Getting your week back means deciding in advance what the reclaimed hours are for.
It may not be, and let’s face it is highly unlikely to be, a beach trip or a multi-million-pound exit. Even at that level, very few entrepreneurs get an exit and ride off into the sunset. They go again, or get even busier with new ventures.
Where the week actually goes
I spoke with a founder recently who runs a £10m business. He has a clear and ambitious plan to double it to £20m by 2030. When he mapped out his own week, he found he was spending around 12% of it on business development. The rest went on running the operation: materials, approvals, chasing information, and fixing the problems that land on the desk of anyone who has built a business from the ground up.
I suspect most founders would find something similar. The plan says growth, and the calendar says admin. When you look at where the admin comes from, it usually turns out to be a dozen small problems rather than one big one:
- information sitting in five different systems
- timesheets rekeyed every Monday
- reports pulled together by hand
- decisions waiting on the one person who knows how the old system works
And don’t even get me started on printing bits of paper.
The plan says growth, and the calendar says admin.
At Zudu we describe this with a rule of thumb we call 10/10/80. When a business adopts AI, the tool itself accounts for around 10% of the outcome, and good data for around another 10%. The remaining 80% is the way the work actually gets done. That 80% is where your week goes, and it is where most AI adoption never reaches. A Copilot licence on top of a fragmented process gives you a slightly faster version of the same week.
Redirecting the week
When we work with a business on this, the goal is to rebuild the 80% so the week changes shape. That means:
- systems that talk to each other, so nobody rekeys the same information twice
- routine reporting and decisions handled automatically
- knowledge captured in the platform instead of in one person’s head
- AI working inside the process on the repetitive work, so people can focus on the work only people can do
Then comes the part that usually gets missed, which is deciding where the reclaimed time goes. For my board colleague, moving from 12% of his week on business development to even 30% would mean running a different business. We cannot promise what he will sell with that time, but we can make sure he has it, and today he does not.
For other leaders it might mean more time with the team or with customers, more time thinking about the next five years instead of the next five days, or simply getting home in time for tea. The point of becoming an AI-enabled business is to give the people in it, starting with the person at the top, more room to be human.
The cost of keeping the week you have
It would be easy to read all this as a nice-to-have. Most businesses could carry on as they are for years, running on the same tools and the same habits, and many of them will. Very few businesses break because they kept an old way of working, but plenty fall behind because of it.
Very few businesses break because they kept an old way of working, but plenty fall behind because of it.
Blockbuster kept trading for a decade after it turned down the chance to buy Netflix for $50m. Kodak built the first digital camera in 1975 and still filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Neither failed overnight. Both kept their week exactly as it was while someone else used theirs to build what came next.
The same thing is happening now, at every size of business. Somewhere in your sector, a competitor is working out how to spend a third of their leadership time on growth, and how to run with half the admin you carry. They will be quicker to respond, leaner to run and easier to buy from. They may even exit before you, at a higher multiple than you’ll ever be able to reach. The question for every leader is whether they want to be that business, or compete against it.
Start with your own week
The best place to start is your own diary:
- Take one ordinary week and track where your hours go.
- Sort them into two piles: time spent on the things that grow the business, and time spent keeping it running.
- Look hard at the second pile and ask how much of it exists only because your systems, data and processes do not work together.
I suspect the first number will be lower than you would like. It was an eye-opener for the founder I mentioned, and the reasons behind it are usually fixable.
If you try it and want to talk through what you find, I am always up for a coffee. That is how every conversation at Zudu starts, and it is often the most useful hour either of us spends that week.
