You Said it Saves Time.

But You're Working on Sunday.

It’s Sunday morning. I’m about to leave to go to my favorite coffee place in Winterthur. My wife walks me to the door, looks at me, and says:

“You said Copilot saves time. So why are you working on Sunday?”

I laughed. But she had a point.

For more than two years I’ve been writing about Copilot, talking about Copilot, building with Copilot, using Copilot every single day. And every slide about genAI promises the same thing: “Save 7+ hours per week.” It’s the headline number. It’s what so many executives want to see: the ROI on Copilot.

So why am I still working Sundays? Am I doing something wrong?

The Uncomfortable Truth

The truth? My working hours haven’t dropped. I work roughly the same amount as before Copilot.

What changed is what I do during those hours.

Sunday is my routine day for content creation. But what comes out throughout the whole week is completely different: deeper analysis, better client work, this newsletter, LinkedIn Learning courses, hundreds of posts, a CxO panel at Microsoft AI Tour. Things that wouldn’t have been possible two years ago.

💡 Are you trying to find out “when to use what” in Copilot?

So when someone asks

“how much time does Copilot save you every week?“,

My answer is:

“I actually don’t know. But the output I’m able to deliver is significantly higher.”

Let’s not focus on how many hours you’ve saved, but rather how much business impact you created.

That’s a different value proposition. And I think it’s the more important one.

What Actually Changed

After almost three years of daily use, three practices stand out. These are things I actually do.

More depth instead of more breadth

Before Copilot, my instinct was always to take on more (projects, topics, meetings, all kind of thigns. The classic consulting trap: maximize the number of things you touch. (I still tend to say “yes” more often than “no”. That’s one of the main things I work on with myself.)

Copilot inverted that, because Copilot handles the surface work like drafts, research, summaries, and formatting, I can go deeper on fewer things. That means I focus on what really matters to my customers.

The outcome: I haven’t saved a single minute, but within the hours I work for my customers, I produce higher quality.

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🫵🏼 What was you’re biggest impact with Copilot? Let me know in the comments

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Strategic thinking instead of doing

There’s a benefit of AI that I can’t stress enough: it pulls you up the value chain.

I think we all know these days where you sit only in meetings, trying to catch up on things while the next workshop is already coming. The hard part of the workshop isn’t drafting the slides, but how to structure the workshop and how to ensure the outcome you need.

When Copilot handles the doing, there’s room for the question that actually matters. Not “how do I get this done faster?“ but “should we even be doing this?“

I have more time for client conversations about strategy, outcome and especially building relationsships. More time to think about how a workshop should land before I build the slides. More time to question my own assumptions before I commit to a direction.

And again: I do not work less, but my cognitive ratio shifted.

Mental deload via Copilot guidance

This one is harder to explain but I think it’s actually the most important one.

Before Copilot, complex tasks meant carrying everything in my head. The structure of the document, the open questions, what I researched yesterday, what I still need to verify, what was discussed in the last workshop and so on. All of it at once, while trying to actually create something.

Now I can hand the structure to Copilot and let it guide me through. “Here’s where we are, here’s what’s next, here’s what’s missing.” My head doesn’t have to hold the whole map. It just has to walk the next step.

That cognitive deload is what makes days at the desk feel different. And in parallel, I can start tasks in Cowork, let them run in the background, and work on something else. Come back to it, when the other task is finished. To be honest: I am still figuring out, how much multi-tasking is efficient.

I do know that at a certain time it’s counterproductive and it’s switching from mental deload, to mental overload.

The Real Question for Decision Makers

Why does this matter beyond my Sunday morning?

Most leaders measure Copilot the wrong way. They ask their people: “How much time does Copilot save you?” Then they’re surprised when the answers are vague. I have so many experiences where a CFO comes back and said “Well, at the end costs are still the same”. Hours-saved is invisible to the person living it. The minutes get absorbed into other work and nobody can point to them on a calendar.

There’s a better question:

“What do you do differently with your time now?”

That answer is concrete. The sales rep who used to walk into meetings cold now arrives prepared with full client context, winning rate went up. The marketing team that used to spend Friday afternoon writing recap emails now uses that time to plan next week’s campaign. The analyst who used to format slides until midnight now ships a deeper analysis by 6pm.

Hours-saved is invisible. Behavior change is visible, but harder to measure. I get that.

If you want to measure Copilot ROI, look at the work itself & trust your employees.

• Are the deliverables better?

• Are client conversations sharper?

• Do people spend their time on strategic work or on urgent firefighting?

Those are the productivity metrics that actually matter.

And one more thing I want to outline: this journey starts with personal productivity, but it’s a strategic investment at the same time. There’s no doubt that AI has already changed how we work.

If your competitors are using AI and you’re not, you’re at a disadvantage. If you’re using AI and your competitors aren’t, you have an unfair advantage.

But at some point, others will follow. By then you’re already a step ahead. That’s when you can invest in the next layer: process AI, where you infuse your business processes themselves with AI. That’s where personal productivity becomes organizational productivity.

My Wife was right and Wrong at the Same Time.

She was right about Sundays. Copilot didn’t save me Sundays. I’m still here, still writing, still putting in the hours.

But she was wrong about what success looks like. Time isn’t the only metric that matters.

What Copilot gave me is a different kind of value and it’s not hours I got back (or well, indirectly I got them back). The capacity to do work I couldn’t do before, to think more clearly and to carry less in my head while producing more on the page throughout the week.

By the way: since this is community work I doing as a MVP, it has to be done in private times anyway.

There’s a part of her observation I want to acknowledge though: just because AI lets you do more doesn’t mean you should fill every gap with more work. Personal productivity is also a personal choice and Copilot is an amplifier. It amplifies whatever you point it at, including a tendency to overwork.

So the question is what you decide to do with what it enables.

For me, right now, that means writing this newsletter on Sunday morning because I want to. And this morning I headed into the gym at 6am, because that’s the routine that gets me through the week and not because I have to.