This blog series was developed from a Fireside Chat at the 365 Leadership Summit with Geoff Ables, CEO of C5 Insight, and John Siefert, CEO of Cloud Wars and Dynamic Communities. The conversation explored what leaders are experiencing as AI reshapes how work gets done and what that means for leadership itself.
Most people don’t think about how they spend their time at work in a structured way. They just experience it.
A full calendar. A steady stream of emails. Conversations that turn into more conversations. Decisions that need to be made quickly, often without all the information you’d like to have.
It feels productive, and it often is. But it’s also reactive.
For years, that’s been the reality of how work gets done. Not because anyone designed it that way, but because the systems, expectations, and pace of business naturally pushed people in that direction.
AI has the potential to change that, not just by making work faster, but by shifting how time is actually spent.
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The 70-20-10 Activity Spectrum: How Workdays Are Really Spent
If you step back and look at how work tends to unfold over the course of a typical day, a pattern starts to emerge.
One practical way to look at it is what John Siefert calls an “activity spectrum.” He’s used it for years as a gut check, asking people to plot how much of their day is spent in three modes: reactive, active, and proactive.
- Reactive Work is the default setting for most roles. It’s responding to emails, messages, requests, issues, and updates. It’s the steady flow of small decisions and quick turns that keep work moving.
- Active Work can be thought of as collaboration. It’s working with colleagues, partners, or customers to solve problems, align on decisions, and move initiatives forward. It’s the work of coordination and progress, not just response.
- Proactive Work is the hardest one to protect, and usually the first one to disappear. It’s the time you spend thinking, imagining, and considering what could be possible, instead of staying locked into what’s immediately in front of you.
When people are honest in that self-assessment, the pattern tends to look like a rough 70-20-10 split: 70% reactive, 20% active, and 10% proactive. Not as a precise formula, but as a reflection of how work tends to be distributed in the real world.
What’s starting to change now is how sustainable that pattern will be as more of the reactive load becomes easier to offload, and more time opens up on the proactive side.
AI Reduces Reactive Work First
AI is already starting to take on reactive parts of work that have historically consumed most of the day:
- Responding to routine requests
- Drafting communications
- Gathering and organizing information
- Surfacing answers quickly
These are the kinds of activities that used to require focused time and attention, even if they felt relatively small on their own.
As those capabilities improve, much of that work begins to happen more automatically or with far less effort. Tasks that once required deliberate action start to move into the background.
The effect isn’t dramatic all at once, but it’s noticeable. The volume of purely reactive work begins to decrease, or at least requires less time to manage.
As that happens, the balance that’s held relatively steady for years doesn’t just improve. It starts to shift.
When the majority of time is no longer consumed by responding and coordinating, the structure of the day changes. Work doesn’t flow the same way it did before.
That introduces a different kind of question. Not how to get through the work faster, but what fills the space that opens up as a result—and how people use that time to stay relevant.
Why Proactive Thinking Becomes the Most Valuable Use of Time
As reactive work becomes easier to manage, the value of proactive thinking increases.
Time to step back and think about how things could improve. Time to explore new ideas. Time to understand where the business is heading instead of only focusing on what’s happening right now. It’s what John Siefert describes as “staring out the window time,” and it’s been the smallest slice of the workday for most people.
That time doesn’t always feel immediately productive. It doesn’t show up as completed tasks or resolved issues. But it’s where better decisions start to form, where new ideas take shape, and where direction becomes clearer over time.
The challenge is that most organizations haven’t been built to support that kind of thinking consistently. When it does happen, it’s often informal or dependent on a few individuals rather than something the organization actively creates space for.
As more time opens up, that gap becomes more visible. The opportunity isn’t just to work faster. It’s to rebalance how work happens, shifting more attention toward the kind of thinking that has historically been the hardest to prioritize.
The Risk of Losing Connection to the Work
As more reactive work is handled by systems and tools, there’s a different kind of risk that starts to emerge.
It becomes easier to lose touch with how work happens.
Think about something as simple as catching and preparing food. There’s a difference between knowing how to cook something and understanding where it comes from, how it’s prepared, and what’s required at each step along the way.
The further removed you get from that process, the less context you have. It becomes harder to make informed decisions. Harder to understand where things might break down. Harder to relate to the people doing the work.
The same dynamic shows up inside organizations.
If leaders and teams become too far removed from how work is done, even as tools make that work easier, they risk losing the context that allows them to lead effectively.
Speed and efficiency don’t replace understanding. They just change where attention needs to go.
Why Leaders Need to Redefine How Time Is Used
The shift happening here isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about how time itself is used inside the organization.
For a long time, productivity has been measured by activity. How quickly teams respond. How much gets done in a day. How effectively work moves from one step to the next. In a world where most of the day was spent reacting and coordinating, those were reasonable measures.
As AI begins to absorb more of that reactive work, those signals start to lose meaning.
If less time is required to respond, to gather information, and to keep things moving, then the value of time shifts. It becomes less about how much activity can be completed and more about how effectively that time is used to make decisions, solve problems, and shape what comes next.
That’s not a small adjustment. It changes what gets rewarded. It changes how performance is evaluated. It changes what people feel responsible for when they sit down to start their day.
Leaders play a central role in that transition, whether it’s explicit or not. Without a clear shift in how time is expected to be used, most teams will default back to familiar patterns. More meetings, more coordination, more activity that feels productive because it always has.
Redefining that doesn’t require a formal mandate, but it does require intention. Creating space for proactive thinking. Recognizing when time is being used to move work forward versus simply keeping work moving. Making it clear that not all productivity looks the same as it did before.
That’s where this shift becomes real. Not in the tools being used, but in how time is understood across the organization.
How C5 Insight Helps Organizations Redesign Work in the Age of AI
At C5 Insight, we help organizations move beyond traditional automation and take a closer look at how work actually gets done. That starts with understanding where time is being spent today and identifying where reactive effort can be reduced with technology.
From there, we work with leaders to rethink how work should operate moving forward. That includes redesigning processes to integrate agentic AI, building custom AI agents, and creating space for more proactive thinking where it matters most.
Because the goal isn’t just to do the same work faster. It’s to make better use of the time that becomes available as work begins to change.