You've got more help than anyone has ever had, and you've never been this tired.
You can draft a strategy before breakfast, rebuild a website over lunch and have three agents working on three different things while you sit in a meeting about something else. Nobody planned for the part where every one of those things wants a little piece of your head, and the machines are perfectly happy for you to keep feeding them until two in the morning.
So you start things at night because the day is full. Your colleagues send each other AI-written documents that nobody really reads. You're further ahead than almost anyone you work with, and you've noticed it's lonely out there. At some point you ask one of the assistants whether it actually read the material you gave it, and it tells you, warmly and at once:
It hadn't, of course.
If that sounds familiar, you're in good company. The man who wrote this book has woken at four more than once to restart the agents.
If you've got better tools than ever and longer days than ever, read the story of the year someone worked out why.
Read the novel
A few evenings at most. It's funny in places and frank in others, and you'll recognise more of it than you'd like.
Take one idea to work
Pick one line from the whiteboard below and try it with your team next week. Just one is enough to start.
Pass it on
Give it to the person who's still asleep when you're up at four. Chapter Eight is told from their side of the bed.
Eight lines from the board
In the book a small team meets on Thursday mornings around the new machine and writes on the wall whatever they've worked out the hard way. Most of these started as real notes from real offices. Try one with your team next week.
Pace and people
You going ten times faster doesn't make the rest of us any faster.
One person's speed doesn't spread on its own, so bring the others along or you'll end up far ahead and on your own.
From the author's talks to leadership teams
Use the machine all you like, just don't try to keep up with it.
It will always be faster than you, so set your own pace and keep the conversations only people can have.
From a coaching conversation
If you're on your fourth document to each other, go and talk instead.
Machine-written memos are easy to send and hard to read, and twenty minutes in a room usually settles it.
From the author's notes
Risk
If this went wrong tomorrow, could we live with it?
If the answer is yes, go ahead and keep an eye on it. If it's no, make it smaller first, starting with things you can undo.
From the author's talks to leadership teams
Before you ask if you can trust it, write down everything it can get into.
List the folders, inboxes and accounts it can open, and don't forget the logins of people who've left.
From the author's talks to leadership teams
The work itself
If it takes twenty minutes, do it together now instead of putting it on a list.
When the machine does most of the making, writing a task down can take longer than doing it with the person next to you.
From the author's notes
We tried to automate our report and found out we had three of them.
Handing a job to a machine is how you find out everyone was doing it differently, and agreeing on one way is the real work.
From the author's notes
Now that we can make almost anything, the real question is what's worth making.
When there's too much of everything, it helps to know what you're for and what you won't do.
From a coaching conversation
Tap a line to see where it came from.
Want to see where they come from?
Read the novel freeSet the pace yourself again, and bring your people with you.
Thomas, in November
- Checks the bank account at 4:12, though nothing moves at night.
- Starts four machines at three in the morning because the day is full.
- Is furthest ahead in the office, and on his own out there.
- Rewrites his wife's course pages overnight without asking her.
A year later
- Sits at the side of the table on Mondays and mostly listens.
- Spends Thursday mornings next to the newest person, explaining one thing.
- Lets the client tell his customers in his own words.
- Gets texted "go to bed, dad" at three in the morning, and goes.
At twelve minutes past four in the morning I checked the company bank account for the third time that night.
It was the same as it had been at midnight. It is always the same as it was at midnight. Nothing moves in a business account between midnight and four; the money is asleep even if you aren't. I knew that. I had known it every night since September. I turned the screen brightness all the way down so the light wouldn't wake Anna, looked at the number, and put the phone face down on the bedside table like a man putting a card back in a deck he knows is rigged.
Then I lay there and did sums until the bin truck came at six.
The machines can work through the night. You don't have to.
The hero in the title is the one who has to start every job, catch every mistake and answer every message at one in the morning. He's the part that disappears in this story. The man stays: he still makes the hard calls and pays the bills on the first of the month, and other people get to carry some of it with him.
Thursday Mornings
Now and then, a short letter about how work changes when machines can do it, and what's still ours. Each one is a single real situation a team ran into, how they got past it, and one new line for the board. It takes about as long to read as a coffee. There's no schedule; it only arrives when there's something worth sending.
One click to unsubscribe. Your address is used for these letters and nothing else. Privacy
what does a shadow prove?
that someone is standing here.
and what else?
that somewhere, there is sun.
Is this a business book?
No, it's a novel, about a marriage, a small company and one year. But like The Goal or The Phoenix Project, there are ideas in it you can use at work the following week.
Do I need to know anything about AI?
No. If you've used a chatbot to write an email, you'll follow every page. The machines are in the background. The people are the story.
Who wrote it?
Tom Myrvik is a pen name. The author runs a small company, works with these machines every day and has had his own share of nights like Thomas's.
Is it a true story?
It's fiction. The agency, its people and its clients are invented, though the nights are real.
Is it explicit?
In a couple of places it's frank about desire in a long marriage that changes shape. It's tender rather than graphic, but maybe read it before you hand it to your boss.
Why is it free?
Because the people who need it most are the ones still awake at one in the morning, and it's better that they read it than think about buying it.
Tonight, close the laptop a little earlier and read the first chapter instead.
Read Same as Midnight freeOr download the PDF for a computer or an e-reader. Paperback: coming.