I work as a project coordination at a totally average midsize firm. Organizing tasks, chasing people for updates, and trying to keep up with all the info. Google Sheets, Google Docs, emails. Nothing revolutionary.

Anyway, this is about her (let’s call her Karen). She’s a lot. Somehow, I just don’t vibe with her.

She once booked a meeting with me just to remind me to book a meeting with someone else.

She prints most of her emails. Prints. Why?

She regularly ends team calls with, “Okay, let’s circle back offline,” which means nothing but sounds like it should.

A couple months ago, I hit a wall. Work was piling up, and no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t keep up. One night, I was scrolling TikTok and saw a video about using AI. I thought, “lol ok sure,” but looked into it anyway cause I was desperate.

Fast forward to today, I use AI a lot. Nothing fancy, but it helped. I use Perplexity to research, Otter to record meeting notes, Saner to search through all docs and emails, and I automated follow-ups in CRM.

Then, last week, Karen corners me by the microwave while my sad burrito is spinning, and goes:

“Sooo, what’s changed lately? You seem way more relaxed, like you found some new system?”

I froze.

I wanted to say, “Yeah, I found a few tools...”

But then I remembered when she accidentally deleted our shared task tracker. And when she told our boss I was being too experimental with my workflow. And the 13 back-and-forth edits on a Word doc titled Final_Final_UseThis_v8

So instead, I said

“Oh, I just started organizing my notes better and keeping a closer eye on my to-dos.”

She nodded. Silence.

Now I feel kind of bad. Maybe I should’ve told her? Like... it might’ve helped the whole team?