EverydayWork.AI

A colleague who knows I use AI daily as a thinking partner asked if I had a prompt I would like to contribute to the library. “Of course,” I said. The one that immediately came to mind was: “What circle of hell are you in where the punishment is writing

And not for the reason most people assume Most high-stakes decisions don’t start with confidence. They start with urgency. Increasingly, we turn to AI in these moments to help us move faster. We tend to treat urgency as a neutral constraint—something to manage, something to respond to.

There's a special kind of meeting that's worse than the ones you expect to be a waste of time. It's the meeting you were actually looking forward to. Maybe it's for a project that's been stuck for weeks. Maybe decisions

A little context I don't usually share: I taught public speaking at Purdue, and for a short time I was a professional motivational speaker. I don't lead with that when I'm invited to present — it sets expectations I might not always want to meet.

One slide in a deck I was working on this week was unusually difficult. A research team had completed a strong analysis and asked me to help translate the findings into an executive presentation. But one finding contradicted both intuition and everything we’d seen in previous analyses. The first

Feedback can expose a gap in knowledge you didn't realize you had. It's specific and credible — something like, "This data would be better represented as a box-and-whisker plot." You understand your data. You're confident in the analysis. But you don&

At some point recently, you read something at work and thought — this was written by AI. And then consciously or not, you disengaged. You may not have been able to name what gave it away, but you stopped reading closely. If AI is going to be useful in moments that

Like most professionals, I started by using AI to polish my writing—something it does remarkably well. But sometimes it framed things in an unexpected way. Or it chose a word that was technically correct, but felt off. So I started interrogating it. Why that framing? Why that word instead

Sometimes a meeting ends cleanly on paper. The agenda is covered. The decision is recorded. The next step is clear. And yet, you leave with a sense that something didn’t quite land. It’s not tied to any single comment. It’s the accumulation of small signals you noticed

Have you ever received feedback from two people you respect that doesn't line up? One wants more detail. Another wants it simpler. One pushes for caution. Another wants a stronger point of view. None of it is unreasonable. That’s what makes it hard. In moments like this,

The request comes in as an exception. A large client wants something the standard process doesn’t support. The renewal is at stake and the account team needs approval quickly. The request is possible, but manual. It pulls experienced people into work that was intentionally engineered out of the process.

Sometimes you're pulled into something so far outside your experience that you don't even know what a competent person should ask. The stakes are real, the timeline is short, and you're aware that there's a risk in missing something that would be

Sometimes you’re asked to make your deck appropriate for a senior leader audience. It’s easy to assume the task is simplification—fewer slides, cleaner visuals, less detail. That helps, but it’s not the main shift. The most important shift is the altitude of the takeaways. Senior leaders

Subject matter experts often need to explain something they know deeply to someone who has to make a decision. The details matter. The nuance matters. And accuracy often feels like the safest choice—especially when you care about being taken seriously. But accuracy and simplicity are often in tension. As

Most conversations about AI at work are focused on productivity. How to streamline processes. How to scale decisions. How to reduce manual effort. That work matters. In large organizations especially, automation creates real business value and enables broader transformation. But it’s not the whole story. There’s another set