AI and Increasing Our “Impact per Hour” as a Guiding Metric.

Why “Impact per Hour” Matters

We have measured productivity in hours and outputs for too long.

For leaders and organizations, this is a flawed metric. Optimizing for “outputs” risks losing sight of what those outputs are meant to achieve.

In March 2023, I therefore argued for a shift toward “​meaningful productivity​,” focusing on work that drives real and meaningful outcomes.

AI accelerates the urgency of this shift.

When AI teammates can draft reports in seconds or summarize meetings in real time, what defines us is not the busywork but the impact we create.

That’s why I propose a new metric: Impact per Hour.

How much of your time actually moves the mission forward?

For leaders, this is the right lens for AI. Not to replace people, but to free them from the 30 to 40 percent of their time lost to low-value tasks, so they can concentrate on what creates real value.

And we do this by increasing both capacity (how much AI frees human time from low-value work through automation) and capability (amplifying people’s ability to create higher-value outcomes by tapping AI as your writer, designer, analyst, and thinking partner).

In OpenAI’s survey of 9,000 workers across almost 100 enterprises, 75 percent reported being able to complete tasks they previously could not perform at all. Not tasks they did faster. Tasks that were simply outside their reach before.

The examples OpenAI lists are telling: programming support and code review, spreadsheet analysis and automation, technical tool development, and designing custom GPTs and agents. Work that used to require a specialist is moving into the hands of people who never trained for it. Outside of engineering, IT, and research, coding-related messages grew by an average of 36 percent in six months.

Freeing up time changes how much you can do. Expanding capability changes what you are able to do at all. (Source: OpenAI, The State of Enterprise AI, 2025 Report)

Our first lesson in our AI Leader Advanced​ isn’t about LLMs or Agents; it’s about defining your ‘why’ to formulate a North Star.

Because if AI can one day do nearly everything, Impact per Hour becomes not just a management tool but a life question: how do we spend our hours on what brings meaning and fulfillment?

As I tell leaders in our boot camp: it doesn’t matter what percentage of work AI can replace. We’re hardwired to fill freed-up time with more busywork, a concept known as Parkinson's Law.

The real benefit comes from deciding (and acting on!) what you will do with the time saved.

Whether AI stalls at the LLMs of 2025 or eventually takes over, optimizing for impact is the move every leader and organization can make today.

1. Define Impact Clearly

Purpose is one of the strongest drivers of ​happiness at work​, which in turn boosts engagement and reduces attrition.

Start by naming the outcomes that truly matter: customer satisfaction, product innovation, or cultural resilience.

Or beyond work: contributing to a cause, growing a side project, spending more time with family. Write down one to three outcomes that define your impact.

2. Audit Low-Meaning Work

Use our ​GED-RT model​ to mark the tasks in a typical week that drain energy but add little value, like status reporting, shallow meetings, routine analysis. These are prime candidates for AI.

3. Deploy AI Agents Where It Hurts Most

• Pick your top three low-meaning tasks and set up AI agents to handle them, with human-in-the-loop review where needed.
• Too many leaders say they “use AI” but treat it as a better Google rather than redesigning workflows.
• Don’t get distracted by shiny AI experiments. Start where the pain is—and transform your work methodically. (Join us​, and we’ll do this together.)

It sounds simple, but in practice, I see that most still spend more time chasing shiny AI objects than methodically reshaping their work.

The discipline is in focus, not novelty

Studies often find that companies with an integrated purpose strategy outperform their peers across several key business drivers, what ​Deloitte calls​ the ‘purpose premium.’

So when one leader applies the ‘impact per hour’ principle, it’s powerful. When a thousand people do it together, it’s transformative.

A mission-driven organization where every person optimizes for impact per hour and embraces AI as their co-pilot becomes a 10x organization. Not only in productivity, revenue, and the bottom line, but in the actual mission of the company.

Each person knows their outcomes, automates low-meaning work, and reinvests freed-up time into mission-driven impact.

The result is not only higher productivity, but a culture where people feel proud of their contribution. This is how AI helps us build companies that are both high-performing and deeply human

The Bottom Line: Impact Per Hour

It’s easy to think we already “know AI.”

But most leaders still dabble in prompts or use it to search faster.

But what matters is purposeful discipline. The real work is dissecting your role, applying AI where it frees time, and then spending that time meaningfully.

In the short term, leaders who optimize for impact per hour unlock capacity, engagement, and results, especially in the context of a 10x organization.

In the long term, they prepare themselves and their organizations for a future where busywork vanishes, and only meaningful contribution remains.

We need to stop thinking about AI as a productivity tool. The leaders and organizations that shift to impact will define what comes next.

Until next week,

– Daan