For Dimitar Manolov, AI isn’t only about writing code faster or automating individual tasks. One of its more interesting possibilities is much simpler: giving us back some of our time.
Based in Nion’s Sofia office, Dimitar works as a Consultant Manager and has spent much of his time at Nion working with the SilverRail platform. Alongside his client work, he has been experimenting with AI assistants and agentic workflows and how they can help organise priorities, reduce context switching and protect time for focused work.
At our latest Soft Skills Forum, Dimitar brought some of those experiments to the wider Nion team. He shared his perspective on how modern technologies are changing the way we manage our time, both at work and in our personal lives, using examples from his own experience.
The conversation was built around how to manage our attention when there are always meetings, messages, tasks and unexpected priorities competing for it.
The Real Challenge: Context Switching
One of the challenges Dimitar highlighted was context switching. Moving between meetings, messages, reports and different pieces of project work means constantly having to regain focus on whatever comes next.
Time-blocking methods can help, but maintaining them also requires planning. This is one area where Dimitar has been exploring how AI can take on some of the coordination.
He shared examples of using AI-powered scheduling to organise different types of work into dedicated time slots, while leaving room for meetings and other activities. As priorities change, the schedule can be reorganised too, reducing some of the manual work involved in moving tasks around.
This allows AI to support not only the work itself, but also the everyday planning around it.
Building AI Into the Flow
Dimitar also looked at how AI is moving beyond individual prompts towards connected workflows.
During the session, he spoke about tools including Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Claude, Make and CrewAI, and the different ways assistants and agents can be combined with existing processes.
For Dimitar, experimenting with these technologies means looking at the whole flow of an activity: where time is being spent, what can be automated or supported, and where human attention is most useful.
It’s an approach that is relevant to consulting work, where a day can involve moving between client work, meetings, research, problem-solving and communication.
Using the Same Thinking Outside Work
One of Dimitar’s examples showed how the same approach can be useful outside the working day.
While planning a family holiday, he experimented with AI agents to help research and compare different parts of the trip, including hotels, charging stations, weather and maps.
Planning something like a holiday involves gathering information from multiple places and making a series of smaller decisions. Bringing some of that research together through AI gave Dimitar a practical way to test how agentic workflows could save time in an everyday situation.
And this is where his perspective on time management becomes especially interesting. There are plenty of tasks in our days that aren’t particularly difficult, but still take time because they involve searching, comparing, organising or rescheduling.
Using AI to handle some of that coordination can leave more time and attention for the things that genuinely need us.
For Dimitar, it’s an ongoing experiment in finding where AI actually helps and where it makes sense to keep the human in control.