“Can you summarize that for me?”

I’ve been hearing some version of that my whole career. You write up a problem — the background, the angles you’ve considered, what you think ought to be done about it — and back it comes. Too long. Don’t have time for all that. Give me the high points.

So you summarize. And then, sooner or later, somebody asks you to summarize the summary.

I’m going to be honest about what that used to do to me, because the post is worthless otherwise. It annoyed me. Not because compressing things is hard — it isn’t, and helping people get more done is most of why I like this work. It annoyed me because of the story I’d attached to it, which was that people were choosing not to put in the effort.

That story was wrong, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to trade it in.

There are two versions of that request and they look identical on the screen.

Twenty years ago I was a brand-new analyst who did not know data management from a hole in the ground. I couldn’t write a query. I could open Word and Excel and that was the entire inventory. I needed people to put things on a lower shelf for me and some of them did, and I’m still grateful.

That’s the first version. It’s a novice asking, and anybody who sneers at it has forgotten what it felt like.

The second version comes from people who are nothing like novices. They’re sharp, often better at their own domain than you’ll ever be, and when they ask for the short version it isn’t because they can’t reach the high shelf. It’s because they’re carrying eleven other things and yours is the twelfth. There’s a real fire in front of them, and your carefully constructed context is one more thing asking for attention that’s already spent.

Once I started reading it as load instead of laziness, most of the annoyance went away.

But there’s a trap on the other side of that, and I almost walked into it.

If I compress everything for everybody forever, nobody ever builds the muscle. And that muscle has gotten more valuable, not less, because these tools reward the opposite of brevity. You have to be detailed with them. You have to give enough context that they don’t wander off somewhere you didn’t intend. The people getting real work out of AI are the ones who’ve learned to think out loud and in full — and nobody learns that by being handed conclusions.

So: hand people the high shelf and watch it fall, or hand them the low shelf and watch them never climb.

What I do now is neither.

I stopped summarizing and started sending the whole thing. Full context, all the reasoning, every angle I considered. Then they run it through their own tools and say give me this in a way that makes sense for me — and they get the short version at exactly the height they need it.

The difference is what survives.

When I compress something to three bullets, the detail doesn’t just leave the page. It leaves their world. If a question comes up next week that touches the part I cut, somebody has to go research the whole thing again.

You can’t ask a follow-up question of a summary. There’s nothing behind it.

Hand over the warehouse and let people set their own shelf height. They get the short version, and everything underneath it is still sitting there when they need it.

Which is the part I’d been getting wrong for years. I kept trying to find the right height.

Home tonight, twenty-two hundred miles from where we were just a couple of days ago.

There’s no feeling like it. The house smells like our house. Everything is where we left it. Tomorrow is for laundry and pictures and getting my head pointed at the week, and tonight is for sitting down.

Going somewhere is easy. Coming back is the hard half, and I think I finally understand why.

On the way out, the whole day runs on anticipation. You’re tired and it doesn’t matter, because there’s a thing at the end you’ve been waiting months for and every airport line is one line closer to it.

On the way back there’s nothing pulling except being done. You’ve already spent all of that. What’s left is the same lines, the same waiting, the same hauling of bags — minus the fuel.

So this time I planned the day in chunks, with slack between them, and the whole thing was built so that we never had to hurry.

Off the ship at 8:30. Shuttle. At the airport by 9:20, which was earlier than we needed and exactly the point.

Bag check. Then TSA, which is where the day does its best to get to you — herded through in a line, following instructions precisely, everybody a little bit annoyed with everybody.

I lost a multi-tool I’d forgotten was in my bag. We lost a water bottle we forgot to empty. Neither was expensive and both were entirely our fault, and I’ve noticed that being at fault does not make a confiscation feel any better.

Then we found our gate, sat down, and got a notification that we’d been moved to a different one about three blocks away. So we got back up and walked across the airport.

Then they charged ten dollars for a bottle of water, having just made us pour out one of our own (we forgot the other one). I’m not going to build a whole argument around that. It just deserves to be written down.

Here’s the thing, though. None of it landed.

We had time to sit after security. We had lunch. We got on the plane, got our bags fast on the other end, got in the car, stopped for dinner, and drove the last stretch home.

Every one of those annoyances hit a day with enough room in it to absorb them. That was the only real planning I did and it was worth more than anything else I organized on this trip.

I’ve come home from vacations before with the week already spoiled by the trip back — arrived tired and irritable with the good part somehow spent.

Not tonight. The week’s still intact.

Bed, and then Sunday.