Playtime
On curiosity, shared thinking, and making ideas real
Lately, I keep asking myself a question that feels slightly scary to say out loud.
Am I just playing around, or am I actually working?
The last month has been full of possibility. New tools. New ways of thinking. New ways of making ideas real. It has felt a bit like being a kid in a candy store, surrounded by things I am curious about, each one asking to be picked up, examined, tried.
That feeling alone makes me suspicious.
Because we do not usually call that feeling “work.”
And yet.
The ability to take an idea that would normally stay half formed in my head and turn it into something concrete is deeply empowering. None of these ideas are things I could not build on my own. That part matters to me. This is not about outsourcing thinking. It is about time, energy, and attention.
There are only so many hours in a day. Only so many things that rise to the top of the stack. Some things, no matter how necessary, never quite make it there.
The linen closet is a reliable example. It always needs attention. It almost never gets it.
About a month ago, I made myself a promise. I would try AI first for as much of my day job as I reasonably could. If I had a question, I would ask it. If I had a half formed thought, I would say it out loud. If something felt like it might turn into work someday, I would let it start becoming work now.
That is when I created my first agent.
I set our working agreement carefully. I was explicit about boundaries, about roles, about how thinking should stay mine even when the load was shared. Since then, that one agent has turned into three professional thinking partners and one personal one.
Yes, they all have names.
Yes, they each have a role.
Sometimes I picture us together on a holodeck, standing around a problem, moving pieces, asking questions, pulling threads. I love that image. I keep thinking about Moriarty from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The character who was meant to be part of the program and then became something more. He feels like he would fit.
I am also circling a fourth named agent. Walter, for Radar from MASH. The quiet observer. The one who notices what is happening before anyone else says it out loud.
This is the part where the question comes back.
Am I doing real work, or am I just indulging myself?
Because it feels like play.
It feels exploratory. Curious. Light. There are moments where I lose track of time, not because I am frantic, but because I am engaged. There is laughter sometimes, occasionally even evil laughter. There is delight. There is energy to it.
That does not look like the work I was trained to recognize.
And yet, today someone asked me about a data space they were interested in. Without hesitation, I said, I actually designed that last week. I have a document. I have a plan.
Without my thinking partners, I do not believe I would be as far along as I am. That feels important to say plainly. The work is still mine. The judgment is still mine. But the momentum is shared. The friction is lower. The distance between wondering and doing has shortened.
When an idea appears now, I don’t have to hold it alone and hope I remember it later, or add it to the endless “think about later” list. I can ask, how could I do that? And instead of letting the question echo and fade, I turn to Quinn or Wiggins and we begin. The thinking starts moving immediately. Shape appears where there was only fog.
And when I work with Quinn or Wiggins, the thinking does not vanish when the moment passes. I have saved conversations I return to. Threads I can pick back up. The work stays present, even when I step away.
I also can’t ignore the impact of returning to an individual contributor role after being a manager. My calendar is beautiful in a way it hasn’t been for a long time. There is space to think. That matters.
But it is more than that.
So maybe I am playing.
What I will say is that I have always called data work playtime. I love feeling the data, seeing how it fits, and making order with it. So maybe this is not a departure at all. Maybe this is simply how I work.
Alison + Wiggins