Workshop: How to Buy Back Time with AI
Four activities mapped to the SeedStacking phases. From your first time audit to building a complete automation.

This week's Tuesday topic broke down how AI can give you hours back every week. Here are four hands-on activities so you can actually apply it, no matter where you are in your AI journey.

Activity 1: The 15-Minute Time Audit (Seed level, 15 minutes)

Open your calendar or task list from this past week. Write down every task that took more than 15 minutes and answer two questions for each:
(a) Could AI have helped with any part of this?
(b) If yes, which part: research, drafting, organizing, or deciding?

You are not automating anything yet. You are just learning to see your week through an AI lens. That awareness is the first seed.

Activity 2: The One-Task Test (Sprout level, 20 minutes)

Pick the single most repetitive task from your time audit. Open any AI tool (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) and try to hand that task to it. Write the prompt, review the output, and note:
(a) How long the task normally takes you manually.
(b) How long it took with AI assistance.
(c) What you would change about your prompt next time.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is experiencing the difference once. That is what makes AI real instead of theoretical.

Activity 3: Build Your Time Stack (Grow level, 30 minutes)

Take your full time audit and sort every AI-eligible task into three categories:

Quick Wins (under 5 min saved per use, but you do them daily): email drafts, meeting summaries, simple lookups.
Medium Wins (15-30 min saved per use): report generation, content drafting, data organization.
Big Wins (1+ hour saved per use): research projects, curriculum design, proposal writing.

Now pick one task from each category and write the exact prompt you would use for each. Save these three prompts somewhere you can access them daily. That is your Time Stack. It is a living document you build over time.

Activity 4: Automate One Workflow and Teach It (Harvest level, 45 minutes)

Take your best Quick Win from Activity 3 and build an actual repeatable workflow around it. This means: write the prompt template with placeholders, test it on three different real examples, refine based on what worked and what did not, and document it as a step-by-step guide someone else could follow.

Then post your workflow in the community with a before/after: how long the task took manually vs. with your AI workflow. The best submissions get featured in the community spotlight.

Share your progress at any level in the comments below. Even completing just the Seed activity (the time audit) will change how you see your week.