The Cost of Stuck
The home to-do list that never gets done, the deck nobody reads, and the things AI is finally lowering the barrier on.
Last week we talked about the mental load at home. This week I want to talk about its twin, the small, repeated, exhausting parts of our jobs that we don't enjoy and aren't even what we're good at.
Sharp at the Strategy. Bad at the Slides.
For most of my career, in consulting and then in a senior tech role, a real chunk of my week was building, presenting, and shipping decks. Board prep. Leadership team reviews. Client deliverables. Big strategy reads where the work was the strategy, and the deck was the wrapper.
The work itself (the strategy, the recommendation, the way the pieces fit together) was where I felt sharp. Where I struggled was the layer on top of it. The deck itself. How it had to look.
I’d sit there with my mouse, getting antsy over the positioning, and still get comments back from my boss that the font was off, when the content was what mattered, the strategy we were going to implement, the sales team I was going to run.
If you know, you know.
I’m not even mad about it now, looking back. So much comes in presentation. We see that first. The spacing matters. The alignment matters. The fact that the title font on slide seven doesn’t match the title font on slide eight actually matters, because somebody is going to notice, and quietly start to wonder whether the rest of the work was rigorous either. That’s a real thing.
There’s a lot of writing right now about AI taking jobs. This isn’t going to be one of those.
Here is what I keep finding: when I make a long list of the parts of my work that drained me, that drained the smartest, most senior people I know, almost none of them are the parts where we’re actually adding value. They're the things that have to happen around the real work, to make it presentable, to make it digestible, to get it through the door. The status update. The internal coordination doc. The reformat-this-table-by-Friday email. The repetitive-task tax that doesn’t get cheaper the more senior we get. If anything it gets more expensive, because the hourly cost of the people doing it keeps going up while the work itself stays exactly the same shape.
That’s the part nobody talks about with the 5-to-9 reality. The 5-to-9 is parenting hours for most of us. We can’t add hours on the back end the way some of our peers can. So the only way the math works is if the hours we do have count more. And the way to make them count more is by handing off the layer of work that doesn’t really need our brain to something that can do it in the background, while we stay focused on the strategy.
Whatever your version is, it probably looks something like this:
The Friday recap email to your boss. (It keeps your manager looped in and puts your wins on the record where they actually count. The drag is that you're the one writing the same "here's what I worked on / here's what's next" template every Friday afternoon.)
The weekly scorecard update. (The numbers matter, and your boss needs the read at a glance. The drag is that you're the one pulling the same three reports every Monday and copying the same five numbers into the same five cells.)
The meeting prep one-pager. (A good one helps the meeting run sharper, and it lets your stakeholders ride along with your thinking. The drag is that you're the one writing out what's already in your head, every single time.)
That is the part AI is really good at.
We Already Have the Half That’s Hard to Teach
There are two reports out this month worth holding next to each other.
LinkedIn just published its 2026 Skills on the Rise report. AI literacy is now at the top of the technical skills list. Nobody is surprised by that. The rest of the list is the part that surprised me. Seven of the top ten fastest-rising skills aren’t technical at all. They’re conflict mitigation. Public speaking. Stakeholder management. Communication. The stuff that takes ten years to get good at and one bad meeting to undo.
A friend sent me a screenshot this week. LinkedIn was prompting her to add AI fluency to her own profile. The platform itself was telling her to put it in the qualifications section as a skill she should be claiming. She was surprised. I wasn't, because I'm seeing it everywhere now. Her work is strategic in nature, so “AI fluency” makes sense, but it wouldn’t have been a phrase anyone used a year ago. The bar moved while we were busy.
Cognizant put out its New Work New World 2026 read a few weeks ago. The headline number: AI now touches 93% of jobs. Not might. Does.
Sinead Bovell put it cleaner than I could: “Technology literacy is the new financial literacy.” I studied finance and accounting in undergrad. Financial literacy was my whole world for three years (college in Canada is 3 years - I didn’t skip ahead). Hearing AI literacy framed the same way did something to my brain. It moved the category from “specialty” to “baseline.”
Here’s the data point that bothered me the most. In the same set of reports, the data on who’s actually been using AI in their own work shows a real divide forming. Roughly one in three women have experimented with it. More than half of men have. The gap may be about who has had a quiet weekend free of someone else’s calendar to go open a chat window and play. Some of the sharpest, most capable people I know are on the wrong side of it because their Saturday was somebody else’s birthday party and their Sunday was groceries and laundry.
If that’s where you are, you’re in the largest cohort of senior professionals right now. The reason most of them haven’t experimented is calendar pressure. Birthdays, groceries, the three loads of laundry that eat a Saturday before anyone gets to open a tab.
Some of us are the senior, ambitious, time-starved half of the workforce that has been competently running our jobs and our households at the same time. We already have the seven skills out of ten that are harder to teach. The judgment. The stakeholder feel. The communication. The pattern recognition that comes from a decade of high-stakes rooms (kids bedtime routine counts here).
We already have the half that’s hard to teach. The half that’s left is one tool, used consistently.
Outside of Work Hours
So if half the win is doing less of the drain, what’s the other half?
A friend said something to me recently I haven’t been able to put down.
“I can hear the excitement in your voice when you talk about what you’re doing now. You’re working on things you really love. Things you’re thinking about even outside of work hours.”
It was the last part of what she said that resonated with me. Outside of work hours. What our brain wanders to when no one is making it think about anything is usually the thing worth pursuing.
I Built an App on a Saturday Night
I’m figuring this out alongside you, so let me show you what figuring it out looks like in practice.
This weekend, the weather turned cold in Chicago. Three kids melting down by 11 a.m. My husband and I looked at each other in the kitchen and one of us said it out loud: why does this feel so draining?
That night, before I jumped in the shower, I opened Claude on my phone. I told it: build me an interactive summer bucket list. Here’s my zip code. Here are my kids’ ages. Indoor and outdoor. Options for one kid alone, all kids together, any combination. Things within forty-five minutes of us. And don’t just give me the farmers market, give me the categories I haven’t thought of yet.
It built me an actual app. Not a list. An interactive thing, toggleable by indoor or outdoor, by which kid was going. Sixty-five activities, some we’d done before and many we hadn’t. The biggest unlock was the toggle. I could filter by weather, by which kid was going to be home, by combinations of kids. The system was doing the mental accounting I’d usually be doing in my head. My husband laughed at me, leaned over my shoulder, and said, “So what will Claudia tell us to do today?” Claudia is his name for Claude now. I didn’t start it. I’m not going to argue with it. Sixty-five things we could do is winning in my book.
Sunday morning, I pulled up the app, saw “Kids Empire,” texted a friend who knew the place, and drove the whole family there. Old-school go-carts. Money-loaded cards. No flashing lights. No phones. Claude (sorry, Claudia) had also recommended a gelato spot a few minutes away, but the kids were having too much fun, so we just got the ice cream sandwiches at the place. No one knew the difference. No one cared. Came home happy. I wasn’t on my phone scrolling for ideas because the system already had the answer.
Same kids. Same house. Saturday vs. Sunday. The difference wasn’t that we tried harder. The difference was that the “what do we do today” overhead, the part that was eating the day before it started, got handed off to something that does that work in twenty seconds.
Here's a stat from this month: parents using AI for the family stuff are getting back about four hours a week. Family Mind's tracker has the data, and No Guilt Mom landed in the same range.
What's been fun to watch is what some friends are doing with those hours. One friend is running three projects in parallel with AI's help: child education consulting, a cooking thing, editor for a children's newspaper. A year ago none of that would have fit alongside her real life, and now she's doing all three. I'm doing my own version (you're reading one of mine), and everywhere I look, people are quietly picking up passion projects that have been on the shelf for years and just trying them. The cost of testing something has fallen off a cliff.
And before we go any further, I’m not about to suggest anyone start a side hustle on top of everything they’re already running. Permission, not pressure. The thing on the shelf doesn’t have to become a business. It doesn’t have to become anything. It just gets permission to use a single afternoon to see if it still has a heartbeat. And to see if it fills your cup the way you imagined it might.
If AI can build me a custom app on a Saturday night in 3 minutes, what could it do for that thing in the back of your mind?
A Bathroom Vanity Reno That Sat for 4.5 Years
I want to give you the smaller version too, because not every unlock looks like building an app.
This week, when my husband finished his shower, he gestured at the cabinets in the master bathroom and said, “I think we should redo these. They’re ugly.”
We have lived in this house for four and a half years. The cabinets have been ugly for four and a half years. We have talked about repainting them roughly twice a year for four and a half years. Every time I have heard it, my internal answer has been the same: forget it. Because redoing the cabinets means picking the color, which means getting samples, which means finding a painter or doing it ourselves, which means a Saturday I do not have, and I am the one who has to drive all of that, because I am the one who knows what we like.
This time I did something different. I opened ChatGPT. I cleared the toothpaste off the sink. I took a picture. I typed: I like beach coastal vibes. Give me six options of what this color could look like.
A year ago I tried this same thing in ChatGPT for a different project. It was finicky. It took me thirty minutes to get one image that looked right. This time it took thirty seconds. Six clean options. Big time difference. Big mental load difference. I had assumed white. The dark navy option was not on my list. I showed it to my husband. He said, “I like the dark one.”
Four and a half years of stuck. Thirty seconds of unstuck.
This is the smallest version of the unlock. The version that says even the dumbest stuck thing in our house can move now. Not because of will. Not because we finally found the time. Because the barrier to take the first real step dropped to almost nothing.
The bathroom is happening.
I think about how many of those tiny stuck things sit in every house. The dresser redo we keep meaning to start. The pediatric dentist switch. The closet shelving. The summer camp registration we’ve been avoiding because there are nine browser tabs involved. None of them are going to define our year. But the cumulative weight of them in the back of our heads is real, and a lot of it can move now in fifteen-minute pockets we already have.
Two Things to Try This Week
One for the work half. One for the rest. Both small.
Move 1 — Name your drain. Hand one piece of it to AI.
This week, pick one piece of the drain at your job. Hand it to AI. See what comes back.
Step 1. Open one of these in a new tab:
Step 2. Paste this prompt in. (Or hit the microphone icon and brain-dump it like you'd brain-dump it to a friend on a walk. You don't have to type it.)
I’m going to brain dump the recurring tasks at my job that drain me — work I don’t actually enjoy and isn’t even what I’m best at. (Examples for me: the weekly recap email, the scorecard report, the meeting prep doc.)
When I’m done, I want you to do three things:
1. Rank what I described from EASIEST to HARDEST to take a meaningful piece off my plate using AI today.
2. For each task, name the AI tool or capability that fits best (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Notion AI, ChatGPT Projects, etc.) and one sentence on what it does well for that task.
3. Pick the EASIEST one and give me the exact next step I could take in the next 15 minutes — including a starter prompt I can run today.
Don’t give me twenty ideas. Pick the smallest, most useful next move.
Here’s my brain dump:
Step 3. Type or speak your brain dump after that prompt. Send. See what comes back.
Move 2 — Notice where your brain wanders.
This week, just notice and write down. What does your brain wander to when no one is pushing it to think about anything? Walking the dog (I don’t have one, but maybe you do). Folding laundry. The five minutes between meetings. Whatever you keep coming back to, write it down. Don’t do anything with it yet.
Next week, I want to start digging into what AI is actually doing to school, and what we want our kids walking out of it knowing. Open question I keep sitting with: what do we want them to be able to do, when school can’t move fast enough?
I’ll see you after carpool.
Danielle