This Blog Post Is Late.

As I write this, it’s a Friday afternoon in the middle of July. I’ve just realized I fumbled my blog deadline, so I’m shoehorning it into a crazy afternoon about which I’ve been complaining all week.

I’ve been annoyed about my day not on my own behalf, but on behalf of the entire U.S. workforce. I remember how things used to be and, by all rights, most of Michigan (me included) should be off somewhere on a lake right now. In years past, that’s how Friday afternoons in July worked. But not anymore. My afternoon today is wall-to-wall Zoom calls, punctuated by “can we chat before the weekend” texts. It’s 2:45, I won’t finish it at fivve, and I’ll probably work tomorrow too. I’m lucky; I love what I do.

I also take comfort in knowing I’m not the only one. If you work in communications, leadership, or, well, pretty much anywhere, you don’t need me to explain further. Since the pandemic, the pace of work has accelerated beyond anything we could have imagined before. And somewhere along the way, AI quietly reset everyone’s expectations about how fast good work should happen. Need a press release? Ten seconds. A strategic plan? Two minutes. Let’s GOOOO (nearly all my texts are punctuated with this phrase these days, so I’ll include it here too).

Anyway, this is exactly why I’ve been thinking so much about slowing down. Not because the work isn’t important, but because it is.

I came into this profession in the 1990s, when the internet was brand-new (!) and speed was a virtue. The people who taught me measured commitment in responsiveness. “Close of business” sounded suspiciously like procrastination. If you could finish the thing while the boss was still standing in your office tapping a foot, all the better.

I absorbed that completely. For most of my career, I have believed being valuable meant being fast.

But here’s what I know now: the professional mistakes I regret most didn’t come from not knowing what to do. They came from moving too quickly— 1 from believing there wasn’t time for one more phone call, one more question, one more good night’s sleep before hitting send. I’ve watched organizations race to be first when what they needed was to be thoughtful. I’ve done it myself and lived to repent at great, extended, painful leisure.

AI didn’t create that temptation. It just poured gasoline on it. To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. Far from it. But I think a lot of us are using it backward.

We hand AI the parts of our jobs that make us valuable — the thinking, the writing, the deciding — and then spend our own hours formatting documents, chasing calendars, and moving meetings around.

I’ve been working to flip it in my own days. I can let AI summarize the meeting, clean up the grammar, draft the horrible version nobody should ever see. Then I can spend the hour it gave me making one more phone call and deepening the relationship. Reading the room. Asking the question I almost didn’t ask.

Because AI can’t sit across from a skeptical reporter and know when to stop talking. It can’t feel the ten years of history between two community partners who don’t trust each other. It can’t tell you a sentence is technically correct but emotionally wrong.

That’s still my job.

Honestly, it’s why I’ve made peace with the Friday afternoon Zoom calls I’ve got lined up here today. Every one of them is proof that somebody, somewhere, still wants an actual human in the conversation and, even better, they thought of me. That’s not an interruption. That’s a gift—and it’s the whole business.

1. I love em dashes. That’s not AI, that’s ME. I will not delete them no matter what anybody thinks.