The flurry of requests from educators seeking recommendations for time-saving Gen AI tools made me realise just how swarmed teachers from all over the world are with their professional responsibilities.

As a teacher who’s in the same leaking boat, I can empathise. I may want to spend an hour or two planning high-voltage, high-impact lessons for my students, but I just don’t have the luxury of time. My free periods are responsibly expended writing student remarks or writing emails to the whole school or setting examination papers. I’m sure that if I zoom out, I will find that people from other professions are facing similar challenges. Too many KPIs to fulfill, not enough time to do deep work in any of them.

Now, I’m as guilty of leveraging these productivity hacks as these time-starved teachers. Nonetheless, I remain mindful of the fact that if I keep trying to take short cuts and not hone my craft, I might save time in the short term but pay the price in the long run. Observing how AI churns out sensible feedback in seconds may help me tick off items on my to-do list, but I don’t get to experience the intellectual struggle associated with examining a student’s work and searching for the best words that will convey my feedback in a way that will resonate with him or her. If I don’t go through the grunt work and agonise my way through these unpolished pieces of work, I wouldn’t be able to gather the insights that strike me like lighting bolts in the sky.

So, there are certain things we must be willing to expend our life energy on, even if they consume a lot of time and consume bits and pieces of our souls. What things are you willing to ‘squander’ your time on? Parenting children is an obvious answer since it is a low time-preference commitment. But in the context of your professional work, what things do you invest a lot of time in, even if the work is menial, even if you are partially unwilling to do it? That’s what I want to know.