Here’s an opportunity with AI almost nobody’s talking about.
AI is about to free up your Red Zone and Yellow Zone considerably. The inbox triage. The first draft (not for your sermons, but for so many other things). The research you used to spend an afternoon on. The meeting prep. The follow-up emails. The administrative work that used to eat the back half of your day.
All of it’s going, going, gone because AI can automate it. Done in seconds.
That sounds like a win. And it is.
But here’s the question almost nobody is asking. If AI clears your Red and Yellow work, does your Green Zone (the time when you’re at your best) expand?
Actually, no. It doesn’t. Here’s why.
A Quick Refresher on Green, Yellow, and Red
If you’ve read At Your Best, you can skip this. If you haven’t, here’s the framework in thirty seconds.
Every person has three to five peak cognitive hours a day. Think of those hours as your Green Zone — the time when your energy, focus, and creativity are sharpest, when great ideas come easily, and when you do your best work.
Your Red Zone is the opposite. That one-to-two-hour stretch every day when you’re dragging, need caffeine to stay awake, and can barely focus on anything. In your Red Zone, you don’t just produce poor work. Sometimes you struggle to produce any meaningful work at all. Often for people, that’s after lunch or late afternoon. For me, it’s 4 – 6 p.m. most days.
Everything in between is your Yellow Zone. You’re not at your best, but you’re not at your worst. You can take a meeting. You can knock out an email, or you can plan ahead. Solid, but not your sharpest. I have a widely-listened to podcast, and I do my prep in my Green Zone, but the interviews themselves are in my Yellow Zone. It’s not wasted time at all.
My Green Zone happens between 7 – 11 a.m. most days. Yours might be afternoons. Or late nights if you’re a night owl. Doesn’t matter. The principle is the same: do your most important work in your Green Zone, your moderately important work in your Yellow Zone, and your least important work in your Red Zone. Or call it a day and have a nap or get your workout done in your Red Zone.
Get your peak hours right, and the rest of the hours take care of themselves. Get them wrong, and you can’t work enough hours to make up for it.
So that’s the framework. Now back to AI.
Why Your Green Zone Doesn’t Expand Just Because AI Showed Up
The instinct is going to be: If AI handles all my Red and Yellow work, I’ll arrive at my Green Zone less depleted. Won’t that give me more capacity?
It’s a fair question. And the honest answer is no.
The four-to-five-hour ceiling isn’t a circumstantial limit. It’s a biological one.
Cal Newport’s work on deep focus, and the cognitive science that underpins it, puts the ceiling for genuine deep work at around four to five hours per day. Not eight or ten.
Four to five. Anders Ericsson, whose research on elite performers shaped much of what we know about expertise, found the same ceiling — world-class musicians, chess players, and athletes rarely sustain deliberate practice beyond that threshold.
Beyond four to five hours, you really can’t expand your Green Zone. You’re a human, not a robot.
The Trap Most Leaders Are About to Fall Into
You don’t have to take my word for it. A Harvard Business Review study published earlier this year tracked what people are actually doing with the time AI has handed back to them. The finding was almost predictable: employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so.
Read that again. The technology that was supposed to give us our lives back is, for most people, doing the opposite. AI isn’t shortening the workday. It’s intensifying it.
The productivity industry is going to keep telling you the answer is to lean into it. 10x your output. Run your AI stack overnight. Stack the reclaimed hours with deep work and watch your competitors fall behind.
Bad idea. Again, you’re human. You’re designed with natural, God-given limits. To try to do more deep work is a fool’s errand. You will hit your cognitive limits before you know it.
I want to suggest something different.
If you refill your reclaimed Red and Yellow hours with six, seven, eight hours of “deep work,” you are not more productive. You are more depleted. And eventually, your body declares a finish line becaude you didn’t.
So What Do You Do With Your Reclaimed Yellow Zone?
This is where things get interesting.
Your Green Zone doesn’t get bigger. But your Yellow Zone just got a whole lot freer. AI is going to give you back hours of moderate-energy time that used to disappear into admin and email and meeting prep. Real, usable time. Not your sharpest hours, but solid, capable hours where you can still get meaningful things done.
Here are four ways to actually use them.
1. Actually realize your full Green Zone
Having three to five hours each day to do your most important work (sermon prep, vision casting, strategy) is still a pipe dream for a lot of leaders. They’re still spending their best hours putting out fires, answering emails and responding to things that are not strategic in the least.
Automating your work through AI can help you carve out the full three to five hours a day you need to do your work at the highest level. Start there.
2. Tackle the projects you never get around to.
Every leader I know has a list of projects that have been on the back burner for years. The book you’ve been meaning to outline. The systems overhaul nobody has time for. The mentoring relationship you’ve been putting off. The course you keep saying you’ll build.
As AI gives you more hours back, start working on them.
3. Run better meetings with your team.
Most team meetings are terrible because nobody has time to prepare. The agenda is improvised. The pre-work didn’t get done. Half the meeting is people getting up to speed on what the meeting is even about.
AI just handed you the prep time you never had. Show up to your meetings ready. Brief your team in advance. Ask better questions. Make decisions instead of scheduling another meeting to make the decision later.
A well-prepared thirty minute meeting beats three under-prepared meetings every time.
4. Prep for what’s ahead.
Leaders react. Strategic leaders prepare.
Most leaders spend their entire day responding to what’s in front of them, then wonder why they’re always behind. The Yellow Zone is a great place for the thinking, planning, and preparation that keeps you ahead of the curve instead of perpetually catching up.
What’s coming next quarter? What’s coming next year? What conversations need to happen before they need to happen? What does next week actually require of you?
That work has always needed to get done. You’ve never had the time. Now you do.
5. Call it a day and stop taking work home.
Most leaders I know take work home because they didn’t get to it. So the work follows you home, into dinner, into the evening, and into weekends.
Having used your Green Zone, automated routine things via email and gotten around to projects you’ve been putting off forever, declare victory and go home.
Finish your day at work. Then go be with your family, have some fun, develop a hobby and spend your days off off.
The people who matter most to you should not be getting what’s left after the algorithm runs. They should be getting what’s best.
Winning at work while losing at home means you’re losing. That was true before AI. It is even more true now.
The Real Question
The mantra I’ve lived by since rebuilding my life is this: live in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow.
AI is handing you more today than you’ve ever had. More hours, more margin, more capacity. The HBR data tells us that most leaders, when handed time, will simply absorb it into the work. Faster pace. Broader scope. Longer days. They’ll call it productivity. Their bodies will eventually call it something else.
You have a choice the generation before you didn’t have.
The question isn’t how to fill the hours.
The question is whether you have the wisdom and discipline to not.
Build a life you don’t want to escape from. A meaningful amount of time just got handed back to you. Use it wisely.
AI and the Future Church is Carey’s new book on the ministry, strategy, theological, and ethical issues AI poses for church leaders in the age of AI.
The book releases September 15, 2026.
Pre-order and get free pre-order bonuses at AIFuture.Church.
