At some point after becoming a mother, I realized I had only about two productive hours a day. Not two hours for answering messages, organizing things, checking what everyone else was doing, or moving small tasks around. Two hours in which I could actually think.
The realization was painful because the person I had been before becoming a mother still lived inside my plans. She planned full working days. She could spend hours refining a design, exploring alternatives, going back to an idea the next morning, and giving it another try.
My environment had changed. My expectations had not. For a while, I treated this as a productivity problem. Maybe I needed a better schedule. A more precise system. More discipline. Better tools.
Perhaps AI could help me I thought. But I quickly realized that even with AI, I could not simply continue doing the same work faster. Two hours were still two hours. I could not optimize my way back into my previous life.
I had to adapt.
The old strategy belonged to the old environment. This was not the first time my environment had changed. I had moved countries twice and, each time, rebuilt a significant part of my life. I think adaptation became one of my skills before I even had a name for it.
But this time, I was not adapting to a new country. I was adapting to a new amount of time. And time changed the value of everything. Tasks that once felt normal became too expensive. Work that required long, uninterrupted concentration became difficult to sustain.
The question was no longer:
How can I do everything I used to do?
It became:
What is still worth doing in this environment?
That is a very different question.
And I think it is the question many of us should be asking about AI. AI is not only changing how quickly we work. Most conversations about adapting to AI begin with tools.
Which tool should I learn?
How do I write better prompts?
How can I automate more of my workflow?
These questions are useful. But they assume that the old result is still the right result. When an environment changes, this assumption becomes dangerous.
My problem was not that I had become too slow at living my old life. My old life was no longer available. Similarly, AI is not only helping us complete familiar tasks more quickly. It is changing the environment in which those tasks used to have value.
Using AI to accelerate an old workflow may help for a while. But at some point, we have to ask whether we are optimizing for an environment that no longer exists.
Once I accepted that I could not fit my previous working life into two hours, I started asking myself what I could build around instead. What was my strongest skills, professional superpower?
What could still create value without requiring an endless amount of time? Several answers came from my earlier work in sales and product design.
I had learned to ask good questions.
I had learned to listen carefully.
And I had learned to observe.
I chose observation.
This skill was the one I could still practice in the life I had. I could observe while working with a client. While testing an AI tool. While watching a team make a decision. While realizing that AI was not simply changing products. It was changing roles, relationships, and the structure of teams.
I did not need a full day to notice something. I needed enough attention to recognize that it mattered. So I started writing these observations down.
Eventually, some of those observations became posts. Some became articles. Some started turning into frameworks. And some are slowly becoming chapters of a book.
I started writing because my environment changed, and observation was the ability I could build a new way of working around.
Adaptation begins with recognition.
We often imagine adaptation as invention. A dramatic transformation. A completely new career, identity, product, or strategy.
But adaptation often begins much earlier and much more quietly. It begins when you recognize that something has changed.
Before creating a new strategy, we have to see the new environment clearly. This is difficult because old environments remain alive inside us. We keep trying to become better at a game whose rules have already changed.
My two productive hours made this impossible. The constraint was too visible to ignore. AI creates a less obvious constraint.
What to do when the environment changes
I do not think adaptation begins with immediately learning every new tool. This looks more like optimisation to me.
1. Name what actually changed
“AI is changing everything”
Is too broad to be useful. What changed in your work specifically.
Can people now produce a first draft without you?
Can stakeholders generate their own prototypes?
Can a developer make interface decisions that previously required a designer?
Can customers compare more options, move faster, or expect instant support?
Can work that once took a week now be completed in a day?
The more precisely you describe the change, the easier it becomes to see its consequences.
2. Notice which old strategy is becoming too expensive
When my time changed, certain ways of working became unsustainable. The same is true when technology changes.
Which activities still consume most of your time but create less value than before?
Where are you polishing output that can now be generated cheaply?
Where are you protecting a process simply because it once justified your role?
Where are you trying to preserve the previous shape of your work instead of responding to what the work now requires?
Adaptation often involves stopping something before starting something new.
3. Find the ability that still compounds
When execution becomes cheaper, other abilities become more visible.
Judgment.
Taste.
Context.
Responsibility.
The ability to frame the right problem.
The ability to recognize which generated option should not exist.
The ability to notice patterns across products, teams, and systems.
The ability to ask a question that changes the direction of the work.
These abilities are not always easy to demonstrate in a portfolio or measure in a productivity dashboard. But they compound with experience.
The important question may not be:
What can I do that AI cannot do?
That line will keep moving.
A better question is:
What ability becomes more valuable because AI can do more?
4. Build around the new constraint
For me, the constraint was time. For someone else, it may be a role that is becoming less defined, a market that is becoming more crowded, or clients who no longer want to pay for execution alone.
The instinct is often to resist the constraint. To prove that the old model can still work. But constraints are information. My two hours forced me to stop building my work around the assumption that I had eight.
AI may force us to stop building our roles around the assumption that execution is scarce. Once you accept the new constraint, you can design around it.
5. Observe before you optimize
AI makes action incredibly easy. We can generate the deck, the interface, the strategy, the article, the research summary, and ten variations of each.
The temptation is to accelerate immediately. But speed only helps when the direction still makes sense. Before optimizing a workflow, observe what is happening around it.
Which decisions are changing?
Where are new problems appearing?
What are people now responsible for?
What is no longer being discussed because everyone is too busy generating?
Adaptation does not begin with producing more. It begins with seeing better.
Your environment may have already changed
I sometimes wonder whether I would have started writing if I had still had a full uninterrupted working day. Perhaps I would have continued designing more. Doing the things I already knew how to do.
The constraint removed that option. It forced me to look for another way to create value. AI is beginning to do something similar to many professions.
The old strategies may still work for a while. Sometimes they may even work better with AI. But adaptation is about noticing what the new environment rewards.
My two productive hours taught me that the answer is not always to become faster at what you used to do. Sometimes the answer is to discover what you can do now that still matters.
For me, it was observation.
Then writing.
I am still finding out what comes next.
