Your back starts talking to you around 12PM, just as you go for lunch…
Not loudly. Just a tightness low in the spine, the kind you stretch out and forget about, until hour six, when it’s not asking anymore.
If that’s familiar, you’re not imagining it and you’re not out of shape. Office workers in the U.S. report low back pain at a rate of roughly 25.7%. And it’s not evenly distributed by effort: one workplace study found sitting for most of the day drives roughly a 3.5-fold increase in chronic low back pain compared to workers who sit less. That chair keeps a running total, whether you feel it accumulating or not.
I know this one personally. Years of desk time left me with the kind of back pain that doesn’t announce itself, it just quietly rules things out. Long dinners. Long flights. Standing through an entire meeting because sitting through it wasn’t an option that day.
When I quit my job, I didn’t only quit a job. I quit a lifestyle.
I hate sitting. I mean that plainly, not as a personality quirk. Eight hours in a chair feels like paying rent on my own body.
And the back is only half of it.
What the chair is actually doing to you
The back is the part you feel. The part you don’t feel is worse.
Sitting under constant work stress keeps cortisol elevated. Cortisol tracks your heart, not your mood. A pooled analysis of more than 43,000 people found that those with higher stress hormone levels carried a 63% higher risk of cardiovascular disease than those with lower levels. A separate study published in the journal Hypertension tracked adults for over a decade and found that every time cortisol levels doubled, the risk of a cardiovascular event rose by 90%.
You won’t see that cost on a productivity report. You’ll see it years later, arriving like a bill with interest.
Now for the good part.
Walking does the opposite of all of it. Stanford researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz put this to an actual test in 2014: people walking on a treadmill scored roughly 60% higher on creative-thinking tasks than people sitting still, and 81% of participants improved specifically on the test built to measure divergent thinking, the kind where you’re generating ideas instead of picking from a list. The effect held whether they walked outside or on a treadmill facing a blank wall. What mattered was the movement, not the scenery.
So the body wants you standing and the mind gets sharper while you do it. Somewhere along the way we built entire careers that require neither.
I spent years trying to square that circle. Here’s what it looked like.
The one job that fit on a walk
For a long time I solved this halfway. I walked constantly, twenty thousand steps some days, and I filled that time the only way the phone in my pocket would let me: talking to people.
Sales calls, mostly, plus check-ins with employees and conversations with business owners and partners who could actually move something forward for a client. It worked, and I built real relationships that way, and I don’t regret a single one of those hours.
Here’s the part I didn’t say out loud back then: I felt guilty about it. It worked, and it looked productive from the outside, but I knew I was only walking-and-working because sales happened to be the one category of work that fit through my mouth. Everything else, the code, the websites, the newsletters, still needed someone sitting at a desk, and that someone was usually me, later, indoors, back in the chair I’d just escaped.
And even the work I did manage to hand off didn’t survive the handoff clean. I’d describe what I wanted to an employee mid-walk. The employee would absorb some percentage of it, then pass their version of my version to whichever AI tool we were using. What came back wasn’t my vision, it was a guess about a guess.
Until now.
Then voice mode became agentic
ChatGPT’s voice mode used to be dictation with a personality. You’d talk, it would type, and you still had to go do the thing yourself when you got home.
Agentic voice mode is a different category, and it’s the category that finally closes that gap. There’s no employee in the middle absorbing seventy percent of what I meant and handing off their own guess. An agent takes intent. Every tool before it took input.
Say “the fulfillment queue backed up again, find out why and fix it” into a text box and it’s a note to self. Say it into an agent and it’s already running before you finish the sentence, and what comes back is what you actually meant, not a guess about a guess.
That single difference is what let the walk absorb the rest of the business, not just the parts that ran on conversation.
The mechanics are unglamorous. ChatGPT voice on my phone as the interface, remote access into my desktop where the real work lives, one agent supervising another so I’m several layers up from the keyboard and the output still lands. None of it is exotic. All of it had to exist before the walk could become a full workday instead of half of one.
(Moving your agents onto something that keeps running while you’re outside is the whole second workshop of the Agentic Business Sprint, and it’s the same setup that let me run the company from an iPhone for five months.)
So what does a day like that actually look like?
Twenty thousand steps, four departments
Here’s an actual session. I’m ten thousand steps in, running four jobs at once. Sales conversations move forward through voice. Fulfillment gets checked and corrected mid-stride. Somewhere else, actual building happens on a machine I’m not touching. And marketing gets drafted, reviewed, and queued before I’m back at my front door.
By the time the counter crosses twenty thousand, all four departments have moved, on the same walk that used to carry one.
Multitasking used to mean doing four things badly at the same time. This is closer to conducting: each agent holds its own thread, and I move between them just by saying so.
And it gets better. It doesn’t stop at my own agents. I drop into servers where specialized agents live and pull them into whatever I’m working on, and when I need something my own systems don’t know yet, I bring in frontier AI directly and get it in real time, mid-walk, instead of waiting until I’m back at a desk to look it up.
The walk stopped being time away from the business. It became the highest-bandwidth hour of my day.
Want to run the same test without any of my stack? It’s simpler than you think.
Go back through last week and find one task that only lives at your desk because that’s where you happened to be the first time you did it. An approval. A status check. A draft review. Hand that one task to an agent this week and take it outside. If it comes back done, the desk was never the requirement.
The back pain is still real. The stats are still true. But the choice that used to sit between my spine and my company doesn’t have to get made anymore.
Reply and tell me the one task at your desk right now that has no real reason to be at a desk. I read every response.
P.S. Every task that requires you, at that desk, at that hour, is one more piece of your business that can’t run unless your body is in a specific chair. Stack enough of them and what you own starts looking less like a business and more like a job with better branding.
The Agentic Business Sprint is eight weeks of taking those dependencies apart one at a time, across four workshops: getting clients with AI, moving your business into the cloud, building your founder-led marketing engine, and building AOS, your Agent Operating System. Eight weeks to build it, twelve weeks of me on call while it runs.
$997, founding round. The door is open for early access through Friday, August 28, and enrolling now comes with a 1-on-1 call with me. We start implementing right away, so you’re already moving by the time the cohort kicks off.
I think you need a minimum of 10,000 steps every day