• Since I'm the mother of three boys, I'm the only woman in a crowded house.
• I rarely had space just for myself, so I decided to declutter the attic.
• I turned the attic into my peaceful, feminine sanctuary, reflecting who I am as a woman.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy life as a boy-mom. Having three sons, my days are filled with excited talk of superheroes, villains, and video games. In summertime, epic battles play out in the backyard until dinner. On family movie nights, "Star Wars," "The Hobbit," and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy run on infinite loops. Life is never boring.

Although the "Boom! Crash!" of their younger years has now shifted to more nuanced language like "Bro! That's sus," I still can't help but feel, as our family of five gathers for meals, that I'm often the odd "man" out.

Their shared spoken code reminds me that I'm the only female at the table, and that I'm fundamentally different in highly important ways.

That's when I realized I needed my own space.

I wanted my own space — away from the boys

These past few years, I've stepped deeper into midlife — when women, often having spent decades as caregivers, ask, "Who am I really?" and "Why don't I feel like myself anymore?"

I longed for a quiet space to explore these questions and others — like "What does it mean to be a woman in today's world?"

My challenge was space. In 2019, wanting a home office/creative space, I transformed an unused room on our second floor. Then the pandemic hit. My husband, who'd always commuted, ended up working remotely for several years. My home office became his workspace.

Since every bedroom was occupied, I set up a desk in the living room. But the central location invited constant interruption: my husband, the boys, the dog, and even the cat who regularly photobombed Zoom calls.

I needed space. Quiet space. Feminine space.

Having run out of options, I considered the attic. Part of it was finished, even though we'd never used it as a "living space." We'd moved into the house when I was already seven months pregnant —dumping boxes, storage items, and inherited things in a frenzy before the baby arrived. Then, we shut the door.

I decluttered the attic to make room for me

I climbed the narrow steps to the third floor and peeked inside. In my head, a mantra from Kaizen philosophy: How do you move mountains? One stone at a time.

I took a deep breath and decided this would become my feminine sanctuary.

One stone at a time, I repeated with every box, every folder, every container, every piece of paper I pulled from the attic. I gifted usable things to Goodwill. I used a tip I'd read in a women's magazine to part with sentimental items by snapping photos to serve as memories, while tears streamed down my face. I placed toddler-sized sneakers into a big, black Hefty bag.

It took weeks, but the mountain became a small hill. The small hill shrank to little piles. Until, at last, the attic was empty, ready, waiting.

Designing from the inside out

Most of my life, I realized, I had to share space. Growing up, I shared a room with my sister. After college, I shared houses and apartments with roommates until I moved in with my now-husband. The opportunity to have my own space — to design it in a way that reflected the woman I was becoming — felt exciting and empowering.

As I envisioned the design of my space, I reflected on all that makes me uniquely me. The idea of a cairn came to mind — a structure built one stone at a time with intention and meaning.

One stone — meditator: a space by the window for my meditation pillows, mats, incense, and singing bowls.

One stone — writer/avid reader: a corner nook in which to curl up with books and journals.

One stone — solopreneur: a white, glass, L-shaped desk with plenty of space for my laptop.

One stone — mindfulness practitioner: walls adorned with inspiring art, affirmations, and symbols reflecting my growth.

I now have my own feminine sanctuary

A sign hangs on the door to the attic that reads, "The Zen Den — Meditation in Progress, Please Do Not Disturb."

I place it when I want quiet — while meditating, reading, writing, hosting Zoom calls, creating, practicing origami, or simply being.

For the first time in years, I have a space that reflects who I'm becoming as a woman. And I can hear my inner voice again.

No one intervenes or interrupts, except the cat. And I've given him a feline pass.

• Up to 40% of men admit to losing their rings. My husband was one of them.
• To help travelers like us find lost jewelry, people-for-hire scour beaches with metal detectors.
• We found Antigua's very own treasure hunter through Facebook.

My husband and I were on our blissful honeymoon, beach hopping in Antigua, when a look of horror passed over his face. Amid the splashing and digging for shells, his wedding ring had slipped off.

"It's gone. My ring is gone!" Panic rose in his voice.

I, despite my dramatic nature, was surprisingly calm. We bought his 14-karat gold ring at Costco for $1,000. If we had to lose a ring, I'd rather his than mine, which is a family heirloom. However, his band was the one I'd slipped on his finger after our vows, so it had sentimental value.

"We'll find it!" I squeaked. I ran up to a vendor on the beach and asked if we could borrow snorkels. We spent the next hour circling the same 30-square-foot patch of the ocean floor. Nothing.

The sun was setting, so we dragged our dejected, dripping selves into towels and returned the masks. My husband wavered between dead silence and frustrated groans on the drive back.

That night, we looked through pictures and realized we'd lost it at a different beach: Turner's. We'd been looking in the wrong place.

Facebook to the rescue

My husband's not alone in his misfortune. Statistics vary, but several reports over the years estimate that between 10% to 40% of men lose their wedding rings at some point. Through many Reddit posts, I realized there's a solution: a metal detector.

Turns out, people make careers from finding jewelry on the ocean floor. And it's getting more popular due to surging gold prices.

I came across an article in The Wall Street Journal about a famous man from the island of Mauritius who'd found a Frenchman's ring in the ocean not once but twice. I wondered if Antigua had its own treasure hunter.

So I posted in a tourists' Facebook group: "We're on our honeymoon. My husband lost his ring. Does anyone have a metal detector?"

The first comment completely deflated my confidence: "That's a bad omen lol." Another said, "I never wear my good jewelry in the ocean." Most people suggested we pray to St. Anthony or wished us luck. Finally, the next morning, someone mentioned Winston.

Winston Merchant's a local guy from St. John. Over a WhatsApp call, he offered: "$50 if I don't find it. $200 if I do. Cash." We agreed.

"Do you think it'll still be there after two days in the ocean?" I asked over the phone, anxiously chewing my lip.

"Ya, man. It'll be there." Winston's quiet confidence raised our hopes.

The day of the hunt

We met Winston the next morning, 44 hours after my husband lost his ring. He radiated calm. I live in New York City, so I can't grasp the concept of calm, let alone embody it. But this man did. He sported flip flops and a Bob Marley shirt.

As we got to talking, he estimated he's unearthed about 1,000 pieces of jewelry.

"But I've been doing this a long time, man. Since 1998," he later said.

He said he's found rings, chains, and bracelets, mostly for tourists. One time, he said he tracked down a valuable pendant the size of a grain of rice on a resort lawn. Another time, he found a woman's diamond ring on the Sandals beach and delivered it to the airport moments before she boarded her flight.

Full-time, Winston farms marijuana and black pineapple — a rare, exceptionally sweet variety only found in Antigua. This helps him fund his side gig of metal detecting, which isn't cheap.

He said his latest detector, a Garrett Sea Hunter Mark II, cost him $800, and a pair of new headphones set him back $140.

He used my own ring to make sure he was on the right frequency for gold, adjusting the knobs as he floated the sensor over my hand. Then, he set off, scanning the beach.

Soon, he was knee deep in the bluest water I'd ever seen. Whenever his sensor beeped in his ears, he'd scoop a pile of sand from the ocean floor and sift it with a second contraption that resembled a pasta colander, but was cylinder-shaped.

He unearthed a quarter. "I'll keep that," he cracked. Then a matchbox car. Then one aluminum can lid after another. All of it went deep in his pocket so he wouldn't come across it again.

At one point, he was neck deep in water, and I was beginning to lose hope.

Striking gold

An hour and a half later, I sat 15 feet from the water's edge contemplating how we'd afford a new ring when Winston calmly sauntered up.

He held out the pasta-collander tool and said, "You better go surprise him." I peered inside, and there lay a golden ring. Eyes wide, I screamed an expletive.

"Go put it in a shell or something," Winston smiled knowingly. Clearly, he'd done this before.

I ran up the beach, grabbed a shell, and tucked it and the ring inside my palm. I bolted up to my husband and said, "Look at this pretty shell I found." Unfolding my hand, I revealed the ring. Another expletive. My husband's eyes were gleaming.

The pair of us bounced around, cackling to anyone who'd listen, "Winston found it! In the ocean of all places!"

Collectively, that ring spent more hours in the ocean than I did on my honeymoon.

Winston didn't seem surprised at his success. He estimates his find rate is 95%. Sometimes he ditches the metal detector and searches with his hand by feel. He puts so much effort into his hunts because he knows the feeling of losing something special, he told me.

"It's not just a ring. A lot of memories flash through your head when you lose it," he said. "That joy from your vacation gets pushed back, and you leave bitter. I make somebody happy again."

It seemed fitting that my husband was wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates hat. We'd been searching for lost treasure with Winston, who'd struck gold.

• Hiring has slowed, but firms are getting better at matching workers to jobs, according to Goldman Sachs.
• The economists found that fewer early job exits suggest both sides finding better matches.
• Tools like LinkedIn and AI may help firms avoid bad hires, reducing churn in the labor market.

Hiring has slowed sharply across many advanced economies, but companies may simply be getting better at picking the right people, according to Goldman Sachs.

That's due in part to a decline in short-term job separations: workers leaving or losing jobs soon after being hired. That decrease suggests firms and workers are increasingly finding better matches from the start, even as labor markets cool after the post-pandemic hiring surge.

"Most of the pullback in churn reflects a decline in job separations within one or two quarters after hiring, a pattern that suggests that workers and firms have gotten better at identifying 'good' matches over time," Goldman's economists wrote in a Tuesday note.

Historically, short-term separations have been common because some hires turn out to be poor matches between employers and workers. However, they have steadily fallen across developed economies over the past two decades, and the decline accelerated after the pandemic.

The trend is borne out by US Census Bureau data and Canadian labor force data.

Fewer bad hires

The decline appears broad across industries. It's explained by changes in the workforce composition, suggesting a structural shift in how workers and firms form job matches.

"In our opinion, the best explanation of the decline in short-term separations is that increased information and improved screening processes have increased both firms' and workers' ability to identify 'good' matches," wrote the Goldman economists.

Platforms such as LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed give workers insight into company culture and working conditions before they accept a role. At the same time, employers are increasingly using digital screening tools — including AI — to evaluate candidates and screen applicants.

Those tools may help reduce hiring mistakes, the economists wrote.

Better matches mean fewer early job exits — and less need for companies to hire replacements.

The shift could also make the labor market more efficient overall. With fewer failed job matches, there is less frictional unemployment — the type of joblessness that occurs when workers move between jobs.

Goldman's analysis comes amid debate about the current labor market, which some economists describe as a "low hiring, low firing" environment.

In such an environment, a further drop in hiring could push unemployment higher more quickly because displaced and younger workers have fewer opportunities.

• Business Insider gathered chief people officers and senior leaders for an on-the-record dinner in New York City.
• The event, Futureproofing Your Workforce in the Age of AI, highlighted the relentless change HR executives are navigating.
• Below are excerpts from the discussion, edited for clarity.

"Are we working for AI at this point or is AI working for us?" Maxine Carrington, the Chief People Officer of Northwell Health asked a group of HR and people executives who were gathered for dinner on a rainy night in New York City recently.

"How we can use those tools as enablers to help us achieve our goals, that's the mindset I need us to have, not chasing the tools."

Heads around the table nodded in agreement. The group, convened by Business Insider, spent ninety minutes in a conversation titled "Futureproofing Your Workforce in the Age of AI," presented by Indeed.

"I do think it's an organizational, transformational challenge and not a technological one," Gareth Lewis of Lewis People & Culture Advisory said at one point. "But right now the conversation's all around tools, efficiencies, headcount reductions, and not so much about how we actually are going to redesign our roles."

Redesigning roles is exactly what Agnes Garaba, Chief People Officer at UiPath, is striving to do, but it's not easy.

"So we basically asked every single one of the functional leaders to think about what the future would look like," she said. "If I could go out today and blow up my entire HR team and reimagine it from scratch, what would that look like? And it's a hard exercise. Often I find our imagination is the biggest barrier, so to say, to get there."

The tension between AI driving total transformation versus a focus on integrating AI tools was top-of-mind for the executives gathered together. But in the wide-ranging conversation, plenty of other topics were discussed too. Below are some highlights.

How to help employees become AI "power users"

Katie Burke, COO, Harvey: Part of what you have to start asking yourself is, is your organization experimenting and dipping your toe in the water or are you driving actual impact and transformation? And not surprisingly, there are patterns across every industry on what makes the difference between those.

Number one is senior leaders actually being in on the work. So not saying, "Here's the example that I can share." It's actually building the agents themselves, for example, or attending those hackathons.

And you cannot drive transformation, in my opinion, just with a stick. There has to be some level of carrot and reward and excitement, and I think people operate at their best when they are not operating out of fear.

Make partners prove the value of AI tools they're providing

Roz Harris, VP, Talent, Zillow: Put the pressure on your product partners, the vendors that you're using, to justify their roadmaps and why they're getting your dollar. Because your shareholders, your leaders are (asking), 'What's the big revolutionary bang that's going to unlock our teams? That's going to unlock the business, going to move things forward?'

I can promise you many of us aren't companies that are going to build that thing ourselves. But we do have product partners who should be enabling us to do those things. But are we articulating our needs to them? Are we articulating those well?

Company-wide hackathons allow employees to shine

Maggie Hulce, Chief Revenue Officer, Indeed: So we have a monthly contest that any employee can be a part of and they submit their ideas of agents or use cases. The sales teams are absolutely running away with it. And people don't think of the sales teams as the ones who are going to build the agents first. So this particular person who we thought of as a salesperson, maybe thought of as one-dimensional, now I see them as having five functional hats.

HR leaders play a key role in pushing companies to adopt AI

Dickie Steele, Partner, McKinsey & Company: How do we build a culture where we go after dramatic productivity improvement on the numerator? Somebody doing a thousand clinical trials, not one clinical trial? I feel as an HR community, we should be a lighthouse in terms of the deployment of (AI) agents. We should be pushing the business to start with a much more compelling value creation thesis than "Can we cook something up that makes our employees marginally more productive?"

Beware the hype around AI dramatically improving your bottom line

Liz Dente, Chief People Officer, Priceline: Dickie, just to push back a little bit is, you know, you're looking for this amazing thousand-times return. The notion of incremental, relentless forward progress every day is just fine with us. You know, it'd be great to be selling a thousand times more plane tickets, but I just don't think that's realistic. And I think there's a lot of hype in the marketplace that you're going to get these massive returns. I just don't think it's true.