AI is saving workers more than two hours a day. That sounds like an unqualified win, and in many ways, it is. But beneath the productivity headlines, something more complicated is happening. Employees are getting faster, but some are also getting less…
It used to be that my friend Kristin had a vague sense of how her husband’s day went. He’d come home with a story to share or sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he seemed annoyed, and when he was in one of those moods, she didn’t press. They’d kick their feet up, pour some wine, and talk about the upcoming weekend.
Now they both work remote and all of a sudden, she knows a lot more about her husband’s day. “I know how many times he’s opened the fridge,” she told me recently. “Seven times. Seven times before lunch.” She wasn’t angry when she said it. “I love him,” she said. “But I don’t know that I was meant to know this much.”
You’re seeing too much
I’ve been thinking about Kristin and her fridge for weeks. Working from home hasn’t just changed the way we work. It has also changed some marriages in ways no one expected. Couples used to have built-in distance. Before you got home, there was space to think about your partner, miss them, and feel grateful. These days, couples are with each other all day. They see each other’s stress spirals, doom scrolling breaks, things they said in meetings that bothered them, emails that didn’t make sense, phone calls they wish they could re-do. It’s a level of intimacy we never asked for. For some, it’s endearing. For others, it’s a lot.
You used to get the best version of your partner when you walked through the door. But now you get the full, unedited version all the time. Little annoyances you never knew about build up because you’re around to hear them. Your partner is everywhere you are and it’s absorbed into your day. It can change how you see them.
The who does what debate
And when you are both home all day, you will need to renegotiate who does what. When one of you used to leave for work, a lot of things were just decided by that dynamic. One person handled what was happening at home. It wasn’t always fair, but it was clear. Now, it’s not clear at all. You both are there, both have jobs, and both look busy. So, all day long, there’s this unspoken conversation. Do they look more slammed than me? Who’s dealing with the laundry? Should I figure out dinner, or will they?
You lose the space between you
There’s another issue that is harder to name. You lose a little bit of mystery. When you worked in different places, you didn’t know the details of each other’s day. You asked about it and shared stories. That back and forth was a kind of connection. Now, you already know that important meeting went badly because you heard it through the wall. You know they are overwhelmed because you are watching it in real time. There’s less to share at the end of the day, less curiosity, and fewer moments to discover things about each other. And that matters more than we think.
Research on relationships shows that small moments of curiosity and having genuine interest in someone’s day help keep a couple feeling close. Feeling consistently cared for isn’t about big gestures. What matters more is the daily habit of turning to your partner and saying, “Tell me what happened,” and waiting to hear the answer. When you already know everything, those moments may start to disappear.
Create the break
So, the question is, how do we still show up for each other when nothing feels new? The answer is: you have to create a little distance on purpose. Work in different rooms if you can; Take solo breaks to go outside; try not to eavesdrop; occasionally make plans to have lunch or take a coffee break away from home. And when the workday comes to a close, take a walk together, shut the laptop when chatting, ask about each other’s day even if you think you know the answer. It’s not really about knowing what happened. It’s the act of sharing and creating moments of connection.
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It’s graduation season and my email inbox is flooded with inquiries from students entering the workforce, looking for career advice. How do I land my dream job? What should I do at the company where I’ve been recently hired to get where I really want to be? How do I go from what I have to do to what I want to do?
What I’ve gathered from these students is not much different from what we more seasoned professionals struggle with day in and day out. How do we square the incongruence between our duty—the thing we have to do to survive, pay our bills, and keep the lights on—and our conviction—the thing we feel called to do? The job, of course, is our duty. The gift is our conviction. For most of us, the two seem as far apart as east and west, and never the twain shall meet. For only a few lucky ones, their job and their gifts coexist, at least, that’s what we’ve told ourselves.
But what if that’s not the case at all? What if we could have our cake and eat it, too? We invited Najoh Tita-Reid onto the latest episode of the From the Culture podcast to help us explore this tension. She is the former global chief growth officer at Mars Petcare, former global CMO at Logitech, and former VP of marketing at Bayer Consumer Care—a three-decade-plus veteran. Yet despite her incredible resume of leading big brands, she recently walked away from all of it, not because the work was bad but because her conviction was bigger.
Tita-Reid had been working on her gift right alongside her duty for quite some time before she left the C-suite. She didn’t see the two as a mutually exclusive proposition, but more as a game of catch-up. Her corporate duty had been hard at work long before her gift began to manifest. It took years before she realized her conviction—her ability to peek around the corner and see change.
Like a canary in a coal mine, as Tita-Reid puts it, she’s been able to sense shifts long before they happen. This ability started as a whisper and increasingly got louder, but by the time it registered that she was a “canary,” she was deep into her marketing career and her conviction seemed underdeveloped relative to her duty skills. So, she’d wake up at 5 o’clock to do the conviction work before the duty work began. For her, that meant teaching herself AI from independent instructors, on her own time, on her own dime, while her C-suite job was still going.
The duty kept her solvent. The conviction kept her alert. Before long, she was bringing her newly developed canary skills to her marketing work, and it helped her rise through the ranks and up the corporate ladder, until her conviction and her duty were equally yoked. That’s when Tita-Reid realized that her conviction could lead her duty, so that the curiosity of her gift could actually become her duty. That is when she decided to disembark the traditional corporate train and ride her convictions into the sunset.
As a career marketer myself, I relate to this deeply. I was a few years into my career before I realized my conviction. I became insatiably curious about the social sciences and their application to behavioral adoption. I wanted to study it, teach it, and practice it. By the time I became aware of it, I was already running a full department at an advertising agency, and, like Tita-Reid, my duty skill set far surpassed my curiosity.
So, I did exactly what she did: I began to work on my conviction before and after work. I read nonstop—Kahneman, Ariely, Thayler, Lowenstein. One scholar led me to another and helped me build a theoretical repertoire. I taught classes about my learnings on the weekends, at night, and even in the early mornings. And the more I did it, the closer these two disparate worlds became. I even got a doctorate in the conviction while working my duty. This went on for over a decade before my conviction and my duty were parity, and it was at this point that, like Tita-Reid, I, too, allowed my conviction to lead me.
So, I say to you what Tita-Reid told us and what I tell my students: Do your duty while developing your conviction skill set. Work your 9-to-5 and your 5-to-9 so that before long, your 5-to-9 becomes your 9-to-5. This is not a side hustle, but an investment. You’re investing in yourself today to realize the interest tomorrow.
Because of those many years of investing in myself while also investing in my place of work (my duty), I can truly say that I’m now living in my gift—and it is a gift. I get to teach at one of the best schools in the world (the University of Michigan), work with some of the biggest brands in the world (Google, TikTok, and McDonald’s), and put ideas in the world through platforms like this article you’re reading, books, and stages. It’s not a dream; it’s compound interest, and it’s available to you, too.
Check out our full conversation with Najoh Tita-Reid on the latest episode of From the Culture here.
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