The Air Force's Secret Weapon Isn't a Missile—It's Time
We’ve all felt it: the sense that we’re busier than ever but getting less done. Our days are a flurry of emails, meetings, and administrative tasks—a death by a thousand paper cuts that drains our energy and sense of purpose. But what if the solution to this modern crisis of productivity comes from one of the most structured organizations in the world?
In a recent episode of the BEING BUILT Podcast, host Aaron Davis sat down with Alexis Bonnell, former CIO & Digital Capabilities Directorate at the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) and now a Partnership Manager at OpenAI. Drawing on her experience at Google, the United Nations, and now the DOD, Bonnell shared a powerful philosophy for reclaiming our most valuable, non-renewable resource: time.
Bonnell, a self-described "data-driven gal," felt she was losing her edge and couldn't keep up with her workload. So, she did the research. After contacting past and current employers, she made a startling discovery: the volume of her emails and meetings was about four times what it was just 12 years ago.
She wasn't losing her edge; she was kicking ass just to stay afloat.
This administrative burden, the work that isn't our "special sauce," is what Bonnell calls "toil". It's more than just work; it has an emotive friction that drains us. And as she learned from interviewing personnel leaving the defense forces, this toil kills purpose faster than a powerful mission can replace it.
To fight back against toil, Bonnell champions a radical mindset shift at the AFRL: treating time as a weapons platform.
"Can we treat a minute as critically as a missile?" Bonnell asks.
This simple question reframes everything. It forces us to analyze how we spend our minutes and whether they are contributing directly to the mission. The goal is to get more "minutes on mission" —the time spent on deep, valuable, and uniquely human work—and spend less time on tasks that could be automated or eliminated.
To put this philosophy into practice, Bonnell uses a simple, yet profound, clarifying question: "Would I do this in war?".
This isn't about being overly dramatic; it’s about urgency and priority. If the world were on the line, would you be forced to take a four-day training course or haggle over the specific wording in a memo?. The question instantly cuts through the noise and exposes low-value activities that have become institutional habits.
Ironically, many of these bureaucratic habits were once defined as literal acts of sabotage. Bonnell shared a fascinating find: the declassified OSS Simple Sabotage Field Guide, a WWII-era manual on how civilians could disrupt the enemy war machine.
The guide's instructions for organizational sabotage are shockingly familiar:
Refer everything to a committee, and ensure the committee is never smaller than five people.
Haggle over the specific wording of communications.
Advocate for caution and urge fellow collaborators to "be reasonable".
As Bonnell notes, organizations today, including the government, have accidentally adopted these sabotage tactics as standard practice. The first step to fixing the problem is recognizing that what we often call "due process" is, in fact, self-sabotage.
So, how do we fight back? This is where technology, particularly AI, becomes a powerful ally. Bonnell argues that "digital transformation is human transformation". New tools are not just about data and platforms; they are about enabling people to "act differently, feel differently, and think differently".
For the average person, AI is a tool to fight the daily battle against toil. It can summarize long documents, handle administrative tasks, and clear the path for the creative and strategic work that humans do best. It gives us a way to finally fit our monumental tasks into the finite hours we have.
Ultimately, Bonnell's message is one of empowerment. By being ruthlessly intentional with our time, questioning our processes, and leveraging technology as an ally, we can move from being passive critics of a broken system to active champions who are building a more productive and purposeful future.
The question is, are you ready to go to war for your time?
