Dolly Parton wrote “9 to 5” in 1980, tapping her acrylic nails to get the typewriter rhythm right. It’s a great song. It has never once described my job, and I’d bet it hasn’t described yours either. Publishers don’t work 9 to 5. Stories break at 11 p.m., the site goes down on Saturday, the newsletter has to go out whether or not anyone slept.
What’s changed in the last year isn’t that work stopped fitting inside the workday. It’s that I finally have a coworker who doesn’t sleep.
The night shift
Here’s what my day looks like now.
During daylight I work with Claude. Tickets come in from our publishers, and I run through them in one long-running thread with the AI — checking DNS, tracing a website error, building a custom landing page, doing a migration. It’s a collaboration. I’m steering, it’s doing, and I’m often steering two or three unrelated projects at once.
But there’s always a pile of work that doesn’t fit in the day. Crawling 20+ publisher sites for SEO issues. Pulling the monthly analytics for every site we support and benchmarking each one against its own history. Reviewing a freshly imported staging site for migration bugs.
That work goes on the night shift. I assign it before I log off. It runs while I’m asleep. In the morning there’s a report waiting, and my job is to read it, catch what went wrong, and decide what to do about it.
The Commodores wrote “Nightshift” in 1985 as a tribute to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, who’d both died the year before. The idea was that somewhere the music kept playing after everyone else had gone home. Mine is less poetic. It’s a task queue. But the principle holds: the work no longer stops when I do, and the part that runs without me is the part I never had time for anyway.
AI killed the SOP
The first video MTV ever aired, in August 1981, was the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” — a song about one technology quietly making another one obsolete, played on the technology that was about to do exactly that. Pour one out for the standard operating procedure. It had a good run.
Every team I’ve ever been on had a folder of standard operating procedures. Read by exactly one person: the one who wrote them.
The SOP was always a proxy for what we wanted: someone who could do the task right without asking. The document was never the point. So I’ve stopped writing SOPs for people and started writing them for the AI — and letting the AI do the teaching.
Here’s how it works. When we figure out how to do something for a publisher — set up social auto-posting, build a newsletter template that fills itself from the site’s feed, send a push notification that follows their playbook — we capture the steps, the gotchas, and the judgment calls as a skill the AI can load.
Then when a staffer at that publication needs to do it, they don’t read a PDF and they don’t book time with me. They ask the AI, and it walks them through it step by step. It asks them to paste in what they did so it can check it. It tells them when they skipped something. It knows their site’s quirks because we wrote those down too.
The document gets written once, while the AI watches me do the task. It gets read every time it’s needed, and it never goes stale in a shared drive because updating it is part of the AI’s job. My job shifts from teacher to author of the lesson — and the lesson gets taught, and checked, a hundred times without me in the room.
Signed, sealed, delivered
The third change is everything that leaves my desk and reaches another human.
As a neurodivergent person, I am a direct communicator. Logical, blunt, occasionally more blunt than the moment calls for. The AI has become my translation layer — I say what I mean, and it helps me say it in a way the recipient can receive. Most of the email that comes from me now started as an audio note to the AI about what I needed the message to accomplish. The thinking is mine. The phrasing is a collaboration. I’m not shy about it. My emails say so, and so do my reports.
Then there’s the Lab Assistant. It lives in our shared Slack, and any publisher on the network can tag it with a question — how do I do X on the site, where does this setting live, why is this thing blocked — and get an answer in the channel, in the moment, without waiting for me to surface. It runs on two years of me teaching the AI how I do my job, plus the skills from section two, pointed outward. The questions it can’t answer come to me, and I notice they’re better questions than they used to be, because the easy ones already got handled.
Stevie Wonder released “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)” in 1970, and it’s the most joyful song ever written about showing up. That’s the bar. Not that every message is perfect, but that it goes out, on time, sounding like a version of me that’s had enough coffee.
What actually changed
None of this is about replacing people. What changed is which hours the work happens in and which tasks a human has to be present for. The crawl runs overnight. The training runs on demand. The email goes out today instead of Thursday.
Dolly’s narrator was pouring coffee and bracing for the boss. I’m reading a report with my cappuccino that was finished before I woke up. That’s not the future of work. It’s Tuesday.
*Editor’s note: AI assisted with spelling, grammar, punctuation and music research.*