IBM saved 3.9 million hours doing this

Hi Everyone,

IBM saved 3.9 million employee hours in 2024. A key driver for the massive savings was CEO Arvind Krishna, who told his teams to decide what to stop doing before applying any new technology. Otherwise, you risk what he calls "automating bad processes."

When you skip this step, you end up with a faster version of something that was already broken. New tools speed up work that should never have existed, handoffs move tasks that should have been killed, and three months later, your week looks the same - or potentially worse.

Today, we're walking you through a four-step process that fixes this.

Step 1: Eliminate

Open your calendar and your task list. For each item, ask whether it needs to happen at all. Not who else could do it, and not how to make it faster. Just whether it needs to exist.

The easiest hours to find usually hide in places like:

• Recurring status meetings where everyone reads the same dashboard
• Weekly reports nobody references
• Approval steps that have rubber-stamped every request for a year
• Standing 1:1s with people you already talk to daily

These are also the hardest hours to give up, because killing these meetings or processes feels riskier than just doing them. Aim to cut three items this week. If the work keeps moving without them, you don't need to bring them back.

Step 2: Simplify

For whatever survived Step 1, ask if it can be smaller or lower-effort.

This could look like this:

• A 60-minute meeting becomes 25 minutes with a written pre-read
• A weekly report becomes a five-line summary
• A four-person review becomes a two-person review
• A monthly all-hands becomes a Loom video

Compress the work before you put any tools near it. A lot of automation effort gets wasted speeding up work that was bloated to begin with.

Step 3: Automate

Now, with what's left, you can look at tools. The short menu below covers what works well at the executive level. Pick one per category.

• Meeting notes and follow-ups: Fathom, Granola, or Fireflies.ai auto-join calls, transcribe, and pull out action items.
• Email triage and first-draft replies: Superhuman or Fyxer AI effectively reduces the volume so you can focus on the few messages that need real thought.
• Calendar defense: Reclaim AI or Motion protect focus blocks and reshuffle them when meetings move.
• Connecting your tools: Zapier and Make.com pass information between your other tools so nobody has to copy and paste.
• Desktop file and task management: Claude Cowork automates file organization and recurring task work, built for non-developers who don't want to write scripts or set up complex workflows.
• Drafting, research, and first-pass thinking: Claude, ChatGPT, or NotebookLM give you a starting draft to react to instead of a blank page, whether that's a summary, an outline, or a first version of a memo.

One thing to watch out for. A 2024 Foxit study of 1,400 workers found executives think AI saves them roughly 4.5 hours a week on documents. Once you account for the time spent checking and correcting the output, the real net savings amounted to 16 minutes. So, choose tools that need very little verification, and drop the ones that need a lot.

Step 4: Delegate

What's left after the first three steps is your delegation list. Work that has to happen, can't be made smaller, can't be done well by a tool, but doesn't actually require you.

Hand it over with the context the person needs and a clear definition of done. If you've worked through the first three steps honestly, this list will be shorter than you expected.

Try this today

Pick one recurring item on your calendar this week and run it through the four steps in order. If it survives all four, keep it. If it doesn't, kill it, shrink it, automate it, or hand it over, in that order.

Go deeper

👉 IBM Think: Enterprise transformation through extreme productivity with AI – Arvind Krishna's "eliminate, simplify, automate" framework and the 3.9 million hours saved at IBM in 2024

👉 Fortune: How MasterClass CEO David Rogier built his AI executive stack – a working example of the automate step at the CEO level, with the specific tools he uses

👉 Dan Martell: Buy Back Your Time – the Buyback Principle and 10/80/10 rule for deciding what to keep, automate, and hand off

👉 DDI: Delegation Is Top Factor in Preventing Burnout – The 2025 Global Leadership Forecast data on delegation proficiency, stress, and retention

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow we'll examine why resistance to change is often something else entirely - and how to spot it in your team in about 10 minutes.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. Tim Ferriss once paid overseas assistants to handle his dating app messages and book the dates for him! What's something on your list you wish someone else could just do for you?