Evan Cho was one of those engineers people imagined when they thought about the future: hoodie, headphones, three screens lit up with code that pulsed like a heartbeat. He worked at Nimbus Labs, an AI company so advanced the interns joked that even the janitorial closet had a neural network doing inventory.

Which is why his desk confused everyone.

Right there, in the shadow of a 90-teraflop workstation, sat a curling yellow sticky note.
Handwritten.
Ballpoint pen.
A tiny square of 20th-century stubbornness.

CALL MOM.

Most people assumed it was ironic.

It wasn’t.

On a rainy Wednesday morning, a coworker named Lila stopped by to ask Evan about a data pipeline. She had been at Nimbus for two weeks and still moved through the building with the reverence of someone in a museum.

She was mid-sentence — “Do you think the model drift is coming from—” — when she noticed it.

She blinked once. Twice. Then slowly pointed.

“Is that… a sticky note?”

Evan didn’t look up from his code. “Mm-hm.”

“You wrote it? With a pen?”

“Last I checked, yes.”

Lila frowned the way someone frowns when they’ve walked into a room and forgotten why they came. “You know we have an assistant that can remind you of literally everything — calls, meetings, hydration. It even adjusts your reminders based on your stress levels.”

“I helped build that part,” Evan said.

“Right, so… why the sticky note?”

This time he paused. Took off his headphones. Turned the chair toward her.

And for a moment, Lila saw how tired he looked. Not physically — more like someone who’d been running fast but wasn’t entirely sure what direction he was headed.

“Because if I let the AI handle the small things,” he said, tapping the edge of the note, “I stop noticing the things that matter.”

Lila waited. She could tell there was more.

Evan exhaled through his nose, the way a person does when telling a truth they don’t usually say out loud.

“Last year, I missed my mom’s birthday. The AI reminded me. It did its job perfectly. But I just… swiped it away. Twice. I was coding. Fixing a bug in the conversational model. And I told myself I’d call her later.” He looked at the yellow square like it was a photograph.

“She passed away three months after that. Heart thing. Fast. Unexpected.”

Lila’s breath caught.

“I still think about it.” He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “The reminders make everything feel optional. Dismissible. One more notification. But writing it down?” He held up the note. “This makes me stop. Makes me choose. Makes me remember I’m a person, not a process.”

The office hummed around them — soft, electric, relentless.

After a long moment, Lila reached into her backpack and pulled out a small, sun-faded notebook. She set it on her desk like something fragile.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Don’t tell anyone. But I still write my ideas down by hand.”

Evan smiled — the first real smile she’d seen on him.

“Your secret’s safe,” he said. “Humans should have a few.”

A two-minute exercise to strengthen intentional thinking in an AI-powered world.

1. Look around your desk or your morning space.
Find one small task you normally outsource to technology:

2. Choose just one of those tasks to do by hand today.
Write it down on paper.
A sticky note, index card, scrap, notebook — anything.

Keep it small:

3. Before you write it, pause for three seconds.
That pause is the whole exercise. It turns the act from automatic to intentional.

4. Place the note where you’ll see it.
Not to guilt you. To remind you that you’re still steering the ship.

5. When you complete the task, don’t toss the note right away.
Hold on to it for a moment. Notice how it feels to complete something you chose rather than something an algorithm nudged you toward.

📝Until next Sunday. Keep those sticky notes handy.

— Mike