It's eleven at night and I'm still at the keyboard. Not because anything is due. Because something is about to finish.
Things come together now in hours that used to take me days. For most of my career, a good day ended with me proud of the work and ready to call it a night. The rush of seeing something finished and released came every few days. Now it comes every few hours, sometimes every few minutes, and I don't want to step away for fear of missing the next one.
I'm not the only one. Researchers at UC Berkeley spent eight months watching a tech company adopt AI, and the people there didn't work less. They worked faster, took on more, and let work spill into more hours. Some noticed that once they started prompting on their breaks, the breaks stopped feeling like rest.
My interfaces were the first place it showed. Screens I'd built clean and uncluttered picked up a button here and a panel there until they felt kludgy. Each change worked. Each one was a solution, but rarely the right one, and they piled up fast. In thirty years I've watched plenty of products get worse one reasonable change at a time. Somehow the baby gets ugly, and I'd stopped noticing it happening in mine.
You may know a version of this. Always on the phone, always marketing, always pushing, because the tools make it easy to post one more thing, answer one more message, tweak one more page. The speed is real. So are the corners it cuts, and they're usually the places that needed attention.
A few weeks ago I wrote that AI should slow your strategy down while it speeds up the rest. Last week I wrote about finishing small tasks the moment you notice them. Both still hold. Chores can be instant. Ideas can't. Let AI press the buttons. When it comes to how something should look, what it should do or what you should say, you need inspiration, and inspiration asks for the one thing we've stopped giving ourselves: time.
So I've started protecting some.
For three years now, I've left my phone at home most mornings and taken our dog on a long walk along the Gulfport waterfront. No notifications, just the water and a dog who wants to sniff everything. Ideas for our work have shown up on that walk many times.
The newer change is at my Dungeons & Dragons table. I run a weekly game, and I used to plan sessions in a notes app with help from AI. Now I plan them with a pencil and paper. It's slower, and it's become tactile, almost meditative. It feels like a real creative outlet again, which it hadn't for a while.
Your version doesn't have to look like mine. It might be coffee on the porch before you open, or sketching next season's menu on paper before anyone touches a screen. What matters is that it's quiet and away from the tools, and that it happens often enough for ideas to find you.
The dog doesn't care how fast anything ships. Most mornings, that's the company I need.