If you were a Microsoft Application, which one would you be?
I think this is probably more telling than any of the personality tests I’ve taken lately.

PowerPoint
You’re the storyteller. You can turn three bullet points and a vague idea into a twenty-slide narrative arc with transitions, diagrams, and a final slide that says “Any Questions?” in a very confident font.

Word
Reliable, steady, and quietly doing the work. No drama, no flashy dashboards, just clean documents and thoughtful writing.

OneNote
You have incredible ideas and a very organized brain… but no one else understands your system. Including you, sometimes.

Access
You were built very well (a while ago) and nobody else fully understands how you work, but if you break the entire organization will collapse.

Clippy
You appear unexpectedly, offer advice nobody asked for, and yet somehow you’re still a little charming.

I would be Excel. I love structure, always want to see the data, get caught up in relational databases… give me a report, a messy spreadsheet, a dashboard with a few questionable numbers in it, and I’m very happy to disappear for a couple of hours and start pulling threads.

There’s something incredibly satisfying about it. You start with a question, you follow the numbers, something looks strange, you dig deeper, and eventually a pattern starts to emerge. A formula was wrong. A process broke somewhere upstream. A number is being interpreted differently by two teams.

My brain feels like it’s operating on a different, calmer level when I’m working inside a spreadsheet. Time flies when you’re reporting! (Just me?)

Now, many AI tools are significantly reducing the amount of time I need to spend in the data before being able to draw conclusions.

Which is good… right? Well, sort of.

The thing I’ve been noticing is that AI is helping me solve complicated problems much more quickly, but the work that remains tends to be complex problems, and those are a very different animal.

A complicated problem usually has a logical answer, even if it takes some work to get there. You analyze the data, you find the error, you identify the bottleneck, you fix the input or change the assumption. Complicated problems require thinking, but they are mostly solved through analysis, and once you find the issue the path forward becomes fairly clear.

Complex problems are different.

They involve people, and multiple processes, and often several teams who all have slightly different incentives and priorities. They require buy-in from stakeholders, leadership, and the people actually doing the work day to day. There isn’t always one clear “correct” answer, just a series of decisions that hopefully move things in a better direction.

And those problems require a much higher level of concentration and problem solving. Which means the workday can start to feel like a series of high-concept decisions one after another, with very little breathing room in between.

Now, when AI saves me data-digging time, I try to actually acknowledge it.

“That just saved me twenty minutes.”

And then, instead of immediately filling that time with another complex problem, I try to intentionally do something that resets my brain.

Go for a walk.
Do something creative - like write this newsletter!
Do a quick operational cleanup task.
Read all my ‘fun’ emails I have automatically filtered and sorted into a separate file so they don’t distract me every 10 minutes.

The goal is to acknowledge that complex thinking requires recovery time in between to be at it’s most effective.

I suspect many of us are experiencing some version of this.

AI is removing a lot of the analytical grind work, which is incredible from a productivity standpoint. But it also means we’re spending more time in the messy, collaborative, people-heavy problems that organizations actually run on.

Those are the problems that move companies forward.

They’re also the ones that take the most energy.

So I’m curious.

As AI saves you time in your work, are you noticing the same shift?

And more importantly, what are you doing with the time you’re getting back?