# Beyond saving five minutes.

2026-02-10 · Joakim Jardenberg. Original in English. Titles and image descriptions added by AI.

Hörni. Everyone talks about AI saving time. 
Me too, ofc. I love to save time as much as anyone. Do the math: 5 minutes a day saves me 2,5 workdays a year. 

But that's not where the real value is.
The real value? Killing the tasks that make folks hate Mondays.
Every boring, repetitive, monkey-work task you remove with AI doesn't just save minutes. It increases well-being. Job satisfaction. Energy for the work that actually matters.

That's why I work with ”The Pain Killer Sprint”: a 3-week format where a team picks ONE hated task and murders it with AI.
Week 1: Name the pain.
Week 2: One person builds the fix.
Week 3: Demo, adopt, share.
No budget needed. No permission to ask for. Just pick the task everyone collectively groans about and fix it.
(And if you don't have a team? Your AI is your team. Invite them to the process, for real.)

An example slide is added below. Steal it, run it, improve it. 

Aside: I have some 50 workshop formats in my toolbox, most with multiple versions. For example, the Pain Killer also comes as a 30-60-90-day sprint, complete with a pitch to your manager and a budget request.

![A slide titled The Pain Killer Sprint, outlining a practical exercise for finding and addressing a recurring problem with AI.](https://jardenberg.com/images/notes/backfill/7426937216016384000-1.jpg)

Image description · AI: A slide titled The Pain Killer Sprint, outlining a practical exercise for finding and addressing a recurring problem with AI. The source image is preserved unchanged.

[Original LinkedIn post](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7426937216016384000/)

Source: https://jardenberg.com/notes/beyond-saving-five-minutes

Joakim Jardenberg. Original in English. Titles and image descriptions added by AI.

Joakim Jardenberg’s own writing: CC BY 4.0. Credit Joakim Jardenberg and preserve AI + JJ / AI translation attribution. Third-party quotations, recommendations, photographs, screenshots, logos and media retain their own rights and are excluded.
Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/