Cultivate your productivity.

I stand at my desk and I prompt. Then I walk away.

I clean the office, water something, flip through a magazine for inspiration. From the outside it looks like I'm goofing off — and ten years ago I would've agreed. But the agent is working. The prompt is the seed. The walking around is the tending. I come back, read what it made, course-correct, prompt again. That's the job now.

My friend Ryan calls it cultivation — a word he got from Natalie Dixon's Move Think Relax.

The idea: you need movement and rest in the right proportion to make anything good. Ryan's real work isn't typing anymore. It's making sure the 3D printer has a job queued before bed. Tending the systems that make the things, instead of making the things by hand.

Designers and artists figured this out a long time ago. The flow state, the long walk, the shower idea — the best work has always happened in the margins around the work. Now everyone else gets to find out.

Productivity used to look like a factory. Stand at the line, repeat the motion. Even knowledge work copied the shape: heads-down, butt-in-chair, hours billed against deliverables. The XKCD bit where the office guys sword fight on chairs and shout "code's compiling" was funny because slack time inside focused work was a stolen anomaly.

It's not stolen anymore. It's the work.

Now productivity looks like farming. You plant a prompt. You tend something else while it grows. You come back and harvest, or you prune and replant. Multiple plots at once. Some need water, some need pruning, some need to be left alone.

That changes what a good workday feels like. The grind…hours at the keyboard…measures the wrong thing. The right metric is how many living systems you tended well today.