Are You More of What You Value?

I almost exchanged a family trip for two business opportunities.

My kids haven’t been to their great-grandparents’ house in nearly a decade. This trip matters to us. It’s memory-making stuff (the kind you can’t outsource, can’t automate, can’t “circle back” on in Q4). We had the dates set. Flights booked. Plans made.

Then two very real opportunities popped up.

And I caught myself negotiating.

This is a special opportunity…
You can’t miss this one…
What if you say no?…

And for a moment, I almost moved the trip.

That moment bothered me more than I expected (and that’s why I’m writing this). Not because work is bad. I love work. I love building. I love momentum. But I came face-to-face with a harder question:

Whatever you value most... are you now more of it?

The Stanford Question (Applied to Real Life)

Stanford Business School has a famous application question: What matters most to you, and why?

It’s a brutal question (in the best way).
Not because there’s a right answer.
Because it forces alignment.

Now layer AI on top of that.

If AI gives us massive productivity gains, then we have to ask: What are those gains for?

If family matters most, are you now more present at home?
If health matters most, are you sleeping better and training more?
If faith matters most, are you becoming more faithful?

I’m a Christian. I want to be a wholehearted disciple of Jesus Christ. Not performative. Not theoretical. Real. In daily life. In relationships. In how I spend my attention.

And I have to ask myself: is AI helping me become more of that man, or just a more efficient worker?

The Inversion I Didn’t See Coming

I recently asked, Do You Feel the Pain of Idle Agents?. Core argument: “keep the GPUs full.” Keep intelligence running. Don’t leave cognitive capacity idle.

I still believe that.

But here’s the inversion I didn’t see coming:

I can keep the GPUs full while emptying parts of my humanity.

That’s the uncomfortable part. Both can be true at the same time. Most of us haven’t reckoned with that yet.

I’m in one of the most advanced AI groups I know (and honestly, a lot of it is over my head). People there are regularly doing weeks of work in minutes.

I asked a simple question: what are you doing with your reclaimed time?

• More work?

• More time with family?

• More time in community?

• More health and fitness?

The overwhelming answer: more work.

No judgment. If your goal is more output, AI is extraordinary.

But many of us say our top values are family, faith, health, friendship, service.

Even wilder? We can now do in 90 minutes what teams used to quote as 8 weeks (I’ve seen it firsthand), and still end up telling ourselves we “don’t have time” for what matters most.

That’s not a tooling problem.

That’s a values-allocation problem.

Parkinson’s Law, Meet Real Life

We’ve all heard Parkinson’s law: work expands to fill the time available.

In the AI era, this creates a new trap:

You free up time... and work expands to consume the gain.

At the enterprise level, I’ve argued leaders should pre-decide where reclaimed capacity goes (innovation, new markets, strategic bets), or the gain gets swallowed.

I think the exact same thing is true personally.

If I don’t pre-decide where my regained hours go, they won’t drift toward what I value. They’ll drift toward what pings.

This is a moment for a thorough, human accounting.

What’s Irreducibly Mine

No one else can be a father to my kids.
No one else can be a husband to my wife.
No one else can be a best friend to my best friends.
No one else can follow Jesus Christ on my behalf.

AI can do a shocking number of things for me.

It cannot do those things as me.

Those are irreducibly mine.

Big Rocks Before Bots

The old big-rocks metaphor still works: if sand goes in first, rocks don’t fit. If rocks go in first, sand can fill around them.

The AI version is simple: place your human priorities first, then allocate your newfound capacity gains accordingly.

1. Name your non-delegables.
Write the roles no one can perform for you (parent, spouse, friend, disciple, son/daughter, neighbor).

2. Pre-allocate your next 8 reclaimed hours.
Don’t wait until “extra time” appears. Decide now where those hours go.

3. Put those blocks on your actual calendar.
Sleep. Workout. Prayer/scripture. Family time. Friendship. Service. Protect them like key meetings.

4. Run a weekly integrity check.
Ask: “Did AI help me become more of what I say I value?”

If helpful, here’s a prompt you can use right now:

“I’m using AI to reclaim time. My top values are [list]. My non-delegable roles are [list]. Help me design my next 7 days so reclaimed time goes to these priorities first. Give me specific calendar blocks, guardrails, and one weekly review question.”

The Real Choice

It used to be school.
Then early career.
Then kids.
Then advancement.
Now AI.

At every stage, there’s been a perfectly reasonable excuse for why I’m not yet the person I hope to be.

I don’t want AI to become the next excuse.

I want AI to help me finally align my life with what I say matters most.

So here’s the question I’m sitting with (and maybe you should too):

Whatever you value most... are you now more of it?

Related: Do You Feel the Pain of Idle Agents?
Related: Your Team Just Quoted 8 Weeks
Related: Hit Reset

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