Lesson 3: Freeing Up Time for High-Impact Creative Work
Objective
Students will be able to define what "high-impact work" means for their role and create a plan to reinvest the time saved through automation into those activities.
Key Ideas
The Automation Dividend: What Do You Do With the Time You Save?
Saving time is pointless if you just fill it with more low-value work.
The "automation dividend" is the time freed up by AI that can be reinvested in activities that require uniquely human skills.
Defining Your High-Impact Work
What are the activities that only you can do?
What work drives the most value for your clients or your business?
What is the work that you find most fulfilling and energizing?
Examples:
Building client relationships.
Developing long-term creative strategy.
Mentoring junior team members.
Experimenting with new creative mediums.
Deep, focused, uninterrupted creative thinking.
The Eisenhower Matrix for Creatives
Urgent & Important (Do): Crises, deadlines. (Automation can help reduce these).
Important & Not Urgent (Plan): This is where high-impact work lives. Strategy, learning, relationship-building. This is the quadrant you want to expand.
Urgent & Not Important (Delegate/Automate): Many repetitive tasks live here. This is the prime target for AI automation.
Not Urgent & Not Important (Eliminate): Time-wasting activities.
Creating a Reinvestment Plan
Calculate the time you expect to save from one new automation.
Explicitly block out that saved time on your calendar for a specific high-impact activity.
Treat your strategic thinking time with the same respect you treat a client meeting.
In-Lesson Activities
High-Impact/Low-Impact Sort: Have students create two columns on a piece of paper: "High-Impact" and "Low-Impact." Give them 10 minutes to list all of their regular work activities in the appropriate column. Discuss the results as a group.
Reinvestment Plan Draft: Based on the previous activity, have students choose one "Low-Impact" task they plan to automate and one "High-Impact" activity they will reinvest the saved time into. They should write a one-paragraph commitment to this plan.
Talking Points
"The question is not just 'What can AI do?', but 'What can AI do for me so that I can do what matters most?'"
"Busyness is not a badge of honor. Impact is."
"Automate the predictable so you can be brilliant at the unpredictable."