If you use AI regularly, you probably feel like it saves you time.
Maybe meeting prep moves faster because you can summarize background information in minutes. Maybe drafting routine emails no longer takes as much mental energy. Maybe you can turn meeting notes into organized follow-ups without spending another half hour cleaning everything up.
The savings feel real, but many of us haven’t stopped to measure them. When you are moving from one priority to the next, tracking exactly how much time AI saves rarely makes the list.
How much time is AI actually giving you back each week?
For an EA, knowing the answer helps you decide which AI workflows deserve a place in your routine. It also gives you something concrete to share with your executive: how much time you saved and what you accomplished with it!
You also do not need an elaborate productivity system to figure it out.
For the next seven days, let’s measure a few tasks you already do.
AT A GLANCE
Key takeaway: Track a few recurring tasks for one week, compare how long they took before and after AI, then connect the time saved to the work you were able to take on because of it
AI level: All
Reading time: ~7 minutes
TERM OF THE WEEK: TIME SAVINGS
For this exercise, time savings means the difference between the time a task typically required before AI and the time the same task requires with AI included in the workflow.
The important phrase here is with AI included in the workflow.
If AI creates a meeting brief in two minutes, but you spend another 15 minutes checking the information, correcting details, and formatting it, the task did not take two minutes. It took 17. That full number gives you a much more useful picture of whether AI is actually helping.
For example, if a meeting brief previously took 45 minutes and your current AI-assisted process takes 20 minutes from start to finish, you have reclaimed about 25 minutes each time you prepare one.
Do that four times a week, and you’ve reclaimed 1 hour and 40 minutes.
START WITH THREE TASKS
Choose tasks you repeat often enough to compare during the week, and keep the scope simple. A routine meeting brief and board meeting brief may take very different amounts of time even with AI.
Choose three recurring activities where you already use AI. Think about workflows you’ve tried from previous issues of The Curve, such as preparing meeting briefs, triaging your inbox, planning executive travel, or turning meeting notes into follow-ups.
If you haven’t tried one of these workflows yet, the linked guides are a good place to start. If you already use them, this is your chance to see how much time they are actually saving you. Create a simple tracker with five columns:
Task | Before AI | With AI | Time Saved | Frequency |
Meeting brief | 45 min | 20 min | 25 min | 4x/ week |
Travel research | 90 min | 40 min | 50 min | 2x/ month |
Meeting follow-up | 30 min | 15 min | 15 min | 5x/ week |
You can use a spreadsheet, a note on your phone, or even a piece of paper. The tool matters much less than consistently capturing the same information.
Step 1: Give yourself a reasonable baseline
Start by thinking about how you handled each task before AI became part of the process.
For a meeting brief, your old workflow might have included reviewing the calendar invitation, searching previous emails, researching attendees, finding relevant documents, checking previous meeting notes, and organizing everything into something your executive could quickly review.
If that process usually took somewhere around 45 minutes, use 45 minutes as your baseline.
You may not have historical time-tracking data, and that is fine. Use a conservative estimate based on your experience and mark it as an estimate in your tracker: Compare tasks of similar scope so that a shorter or simpler assignment does not get counted as an AI time saving.
Step 2: Time the workflow you use today
During the next week, pay attention to how long those same tasks take when you use AI. Include the entire process, including prompting, reviewing the response, checking facts, editing, formatting, and fixing anything AI gets wrong.
Record each occurrence rather than relying on your impression as the end of the week. If a workflow takes longer with AI, include that result too. The extra review or correction time may show you where the process needs work.
You may also find the opposite. A task that saves only 10 minutes each time might happen eight times a week, which makes it more valuable than a dramatic one-hour saving on something you do once every few months.
After a week, look for patterns. If a task only happens monthly, track it when it next comes up.
Step 3: Calculate the time you reclaimed
The calculation is straightforward: Time before AI − Time with AI = Time saved
Then account for frequency.
If meeting preparation used to take 45 minutes and now takes 20, you have saved approximately 25 minutes per meeting.
If you prepare four meeting briefs each week: 25 minutes × 4 meetings = 100 minutes per week. That gives you approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes each week from one recurring workflow.
Repeat the calculation for your other two tasks, using the same time period before adding the results together. Keep occasional tasks separate, or label weekly estimates clearly. You now have a reasonable estimate of the capacity AI is creating each week.
Step 4: Track where those hours go
This is where the numbers become useful to your executive. Add one more column to your tracker: What did the time make possible? Record what you actually did with the extra time, rather than what you hoped to do.:
Task | Time Saved | What the Time Made Possible |
Meeting briefs | 1 hr 40 min/ week | Prepared earlier and flagged issues before meetings |
Email drafting | 45 min/ week | Cleared outstanding follow-ups before EOD |
Travel research | 50 min/ trip | Reviewed the following week's calendar |
Meeting follow-up | 1 hr/ week | Checked outstanding action items and followed up sooner |
These are examples. Your final column should reflect your own week, and it is fine if the time simply helped you keep up with the existing priorities.
Your executive may never notice that a first draft took eight minutes instead of twenty. They are more likely to notice that materials arrive earlier, or that a calendar conflict caught before it disrupts their day. Make that connection explicit: “Saving 25 minutes on each meeting brief gave me time to flag two unresolved questions before your meeting.” or you have more time to anticipate what they will need next.
Over time, this record can also help you identify work you would like to take on that requires more judgment, context, and ownership.
Step 5: Ask AI to analyze the results
At the end of the week, you can use AI to help you look for patterns in your tracker.
Try this:
I tracked several recurring tasks for one week to understand how AI is affecting the time I spend on my work.
For each workflow, calculate the average time saved per occurrence, estimated weekly time saved, and estimated monthly time saved based on the frequency I provide.
Then identify which workflows are creating the greatest time savings and which ones show little improvement or take longer with AI. Suggest one practical adjustment to test next week. Separate measured times from estimated baselines, state any assumptions used to convert weekly and monthly frequencies, and keep one-off tasks separate from recurring savings.
Finally, summarize the results in 3 to 5 concise bullets that I could share with my executive. Focus on the additional capacity created and what that capacity allowed me to accomplish. Use only the information in my data, do not exaggerate the results, and flag anything that cannot be calculated reliably.
Here is my data:
[PASTE YOUR TRACKER]
Giving AI your actual numbers also reduces the temptation to ask it to estimate how much time you “probably” saved. Your own workflow data should be the source of the calculation.
You probably do not need to send your executive a spreadsheet every Friday. A short update can be enough, particularly if your organization is actively experimenting with AI or trying to understand whether its tools are worthwhile.
For example:
Over the past week, I tracked a few workflows where I have been using AI. Across meeting briefs and follow-ups. I reclaimed approximately two hours and 55 minutes. That gave me time to flag meeting issues earlier and check outstanding action items. Travel research also saved about 50 minutes per trip. I’m going to keep refining the workflows that are showing the strongest results.
This gives your executive a concrete number while also explaining what happened because that time became available.
You can also keep the information for yourself. Repeat the exercise after you refine a workflow, or revisit it after a month. That gives you a basis for deciding what to keep, what to adjust, and where further learning would be worth your time.
AI UPDATES OF THE WEEK
Google Workspace can now turn your spreadsheet into an interactive dashboard. Google introduced Sheets canvas, which uses Gemini to turn spreadsheet data into interactive mini-apps such as Kanban boards, scenario planners, and executive dashboards. You can describe what you want in plain language, and the resulting canvas stays synced with the underlying spreadsheet.
Slack’s AI assistants can now manage Lists and records. Slack expanded its MCP Server so AI assistants such as Claude can now create, read, update, and delete Slack Lists and records, in addition to working with Slack search, messages, and canvases.
We’d still love to hear from you!
If you haven’t taken our 2-minute survey yet, there’s still time. Tell us how you’re using AI, where it’s falling short, and what you want to learn next. Your responses help us understand what EAs actually need from AI.
SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!
And please keep sharing what you’re learning with us. The more we hear from EAs doing this work every day, the more useful these conversations become for everyone.
The Base Team
