A story about towels and the future of work.
One of the most important career lessons I ever learned happened in my bathroom with an armful of towels.
It was one of those early spring evenings that feels like a gift after a brutal winter. Warm for the first time in months. Light lingering. My family was outside — I could hear them through the window, laughing, messing with the grill, enjoying this perfect evening.
And where was I?
Standing in the bathroom. Glaring at the linen closet. Because someone had folded the towels into quarters.
Quarters.
So I pulled them all out and started refolding them. Every single one. Into thirds. The correct way.
While I stood there folding and quietly seething, the laughter outside got louder. The evening was slipping away. And I was in the bathroom, refolding towels that were already folded, in a closet nobody was going to open until tomorrow.
And then it hit me. What was I doing?
The towels were clean. They were folded. They were put away. My refolding project was accomplishing exactly one thing: keeping me from the first beautiful evening of spring and the people I love most.
I put down the towels. Went outside. Grabbed a beer.
I never forgot that moment.
I think about those towels constantly right now.
Because I look around at organizations trying to figure out AI, and I see a lot of towel-folding.
We’re pouring enormous energy into optimizing work that AI is going to handle for us anyway. Building training programs for tasks that won’t exist in two years. Perfecting processes for workflows that are about to be automated.
We’re refolding towels that are already folded — while the most extraordinary evening of our professional lives is happening right outside the window.
Here’s how I see it. Roughly 85% of what knowledge workers do today — the gathering, synthesizing, drafting, formatting, routine analysis — AI can already do or will very soon. That’s not a threat. That’s a liberation.
Because the other 15%? That’s where it gets interesting.
That 15% is the work that is irreducibly human. The judgment calls. The creative leaps. The ability to look at a problem everyone has accepted as given and say, “Wait — why are we solving THIS problem?” The capacity to sit with ambiguity long enough for something genuinely new to emerge.
That 15% isn’t the scraps left after AI takes the good stuff.
It’s the whole point. It always was. We just couldn’t see it because we were buried in the 85%.
AI is handing us that time back. The evening is here.
Are we going to go outside? Or are we going to keep folding towels?