Key Takeaways
- →Doing your busywork faster with AI is not progress, it's faster waste.
- →Delete the 72% of work slop so you can win in the 28%.
- →If AI can do a task 80% as well, hand it over today.
Listen to the audio version of the podcast on Apple or Spotify.
72% of your time is being eaten by coordination, communication, and admin. That leaves 28% for actual strategy. That is not a productivity problem. That is a math problem.
...and the math is telling you that you are not doing your job.
So this is not a post about better executive time management through a new app or a cleaner calendar.
It is about deleting the work that should never have been yours in the first place.
Most leaders hear that 72% stat and reach for a faster tool. Wrong move. The win is not doing the busywork faster. The win is making it disappear.
Why This Matters Right Now
AI handed every executive a turbo engine overnight. The problem is most of us bolted it onto a car pointed in the wrong direction.
We are using AI to write emails quicker, summarize meetings faster, and generate reports in seconds. We call that transformation. It is not. It is the same low-value output at machine speed. The waste does not shrink. It compounds.
The leaders who win the next decade will not be the ones who do admin fastest. They will be the ones who refuse to do it at all.
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What "Work Slop" Really Means
Work slop is the meeting that could have been an email. It is the email that should have been a decision. It is the status update, the approval chain, the scheduling back and forth, and the Slack thread that ran 47 messages deep to answer a question that belonged in an FAQ.
Work slop is any transactional, low-value activity that keeps you away from the work only you can do.
Here is the trap. It does not feel like waste. It feels like work. It feels like being needed. It gives you the dopamine hit of checking boxes and filling a calendar.
"Busy is the enemy of great."
You end the day exhausted and certain you accomplished something. You were busy. You were not productive. Those are not the same thing.
The 500% Number That Should Wake You Up
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent more than 40 years studying peak performance. He found that people in a flow state are 500% more productive than their baseline. McKinsey ran a 10-year study and landed on the same finding. [needs source: McKinsey flow state study]
Now the gut punch. Most knowledge workers spend only 5% of their hours in flow.
Read those two numbers together. Your highest-output state is sitting right there, worth five times your normal work, and you touch it 5% of the time. The 72% is the reason. It crowds out the 28% where your real value lives. It costs you your business, your health, and your relationships.
The Three Questions That Protect Your Easy Mode
I use Claude as my AI chief of staff. I named him Maximum Effort. He runs guest research, content distribution, meeting prep, follow-up tracking, and first-pass correspondence. His entire job is to protect the work only I can do.
Here is how you decide what to hand him and what to keep.
First, does this require my specific talent, expertise, or insight? If yes, keep it.
Second, does this require human relationship, trust, judgment, presence, or taste? If yes, keep it.
Third, could a well-briefed system do a 70% to 80% adequate job? If yes, give it to AI today and never look back.
The machine does not have to match you. If it hits 80% of your output on something that was work slop anyway, hand it over. You will earn 10x by spending those reclaimed hours in your easy mode, the zone where your natural talent creates results that look like cheating to everyone else.
How I Proved This at Rogue Risk
In 2020 I launched Rogue Risk seven days before COVID froze New York. I had emptied my retirement account. I owed vendors. My whole plan went bye bye in a week.
So I ran time audits. Paper logs. Every person tracked their day in 15-minute blocks for three days.
One of my best salespeople was burning most of his day on admin, mostly figuring out which carrier to place business with. We built a simple routing system that cut that task by 75%. Close rates jumped 10%.
He did not get better at selling. We removed the work slop and let him work where his expertise lived. I built that by hand with spreadsheets and macros because AI did not exist yet. You do not have that excuse today.
Your Three-Step Plan
Run a three-day time audit. Log every activity in 15-minute blocks. No editing.
Categorize each one as easy mode or work slop. Easy mode produces disproportionate results. Work slop is draining, transactional, and has no business being done by a human.
Find the single most obvious piece of work slop and hand it to AI. Ask your tool of choice to build the plan with you, then automate it.
Get rid of one activity. Sit with it for a week. Feel what it is like to never do that thing again. It will blow your mind, and it is addictive in the best way.
Make the decision that you are no longer available for work slop. The 28% is where companies get built. That is where the strategist and the visionary show up. Stop letting busywork steal that, because you are better than that.
Listen to the full episode on your favorite app: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanley
Watch it on YouTube: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanley
Want help finding your own easy mode? I write to founders and executives every week. Join us: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe
This is the way.
Hanley.