It's amazing how hard I seem to crash when health problems interrupt my normal flow.
There are so many things I have streamlined, automated, and systematized, but getting knocked off my groove makes me feel like all of it is precariously balanced and my health is shaking the base of it all.
The cyborg imagery this newsletter draws upon is a way for me to imagine the ideal: some kind of balanced, integrated body that is human, but with technological enhancements. It's very difficult to find that balance, let alone maintain it.
Looking at this as a puzzle to be solved—because I do think it's possible and even necessary to work on this integration of humanity and technology—there are some principles I've discovered in the last few months that I think will help.
Slowing Down
Three weeks ago, I started having a strange black orb appear in my vision. After the optometrist found nothing wrong with the structure of my eye, another symptom arose: massive pain in/on my nose. It became hard to concentrate. Some days I just couldn't work continuously like I normally could with the fatigue and slight mental fog that settled in as final symptoms.
I still don't have a clear answer to what is going on, but this was a major setback to me. When I don't feel well, I don't work well. When I don't work well, I feel even worse (mentally and physically).
The value of rest is so high, but it feels like an exorbitant cost.
We've explored in past CYBORG_ issues the need for rest so that your brain can perform at its best. Taking breaks can help you find breakthroughs in difficult problems. Rest is the most crucial component in the formula for performance.
Why, then, is it just so hard to take those breaks and rest?
Cultural pressures, childhood experiences, beliefs, values, addiction. All of these can play a role in our need to work and be productive incessantly. But productivity is not a human thing—not really.
I picked up Cal Newport's newest book, "Slow Productivity," and was surprised to find a few ideas that elaborate on this issue.
Newport's thesis is that knowledge workers don't even know what "productivity" actually is since there's no consistent definition, rather, lots of different ideas that are almost like job descriptions. The reason that matters is that productivity is now some arbitrary thing we're all chasing, but aren't making much progress on.
Slowing down, as it turns out, might just be the way to break through our current barriers to "success" or "accomplishment" or whatever the outcome is for your version of productivity.
Two of his ideas are worth highlighting:
- Work at a human pace
- Focus on quality
Work at a Human Pace
The trap I fall into the most is trying to outpace myself. If I can just automate this or learn all of these other things or put in one more hour, I'll finally get where I want to be.
It already doesn't work and when I have a health concern pop up, it really grinds down my momentum and motivation.
My mistake has been trying to work like a machine. I'm not a machine, I'm a human. We have myths and stories and even current news reports that express how feeble human work is when compared to machine work (assuming equal jobs).
The legend of John Henry racing a steam-powered drill to compare man-power against machine-power in digging through a mountain is a tragedy in my view. Yet, it's the path I've been on for far too long.
Newport's reminder to work at a human pace is painful. It flies in the face of advertisements, culture, and news that make it seem like the world will leave you behind at any second if you don't know how to code in the latest framework or you don't have the 25.1.1.1.3 version of the iPhone.
What I've seen work for me is to focus on today, and trust in the compound effect—the idea that effort consistently applied builds over time until eventually it turns into a mass greater than could be anticipated.
Compounding means I do what I can today—even if it is insignificant in comparison to other days. This is how I learned to code. I started with HTML (content-formatting code for websites), then I looked for ways to automate something extremely simple, which lead me to python (a scripting language). Over time and many scripts (automations) later, I now have a decent grasp on how to build professional products and websites.
Bootcamps won't do it. "Tutorial hell" on YouTube won't do it.
It's about time and effort, consistently applied, at your pace—a human pace.
Focus on Quality
In application, a focus on quality assists us with the human pace we just discussed.
This may be the only space left for humans to land in the AI-saturated world that is coming upon us.
Generated articles, summaries, and imagery from AI are quickly losing their novelty. The influx of these products is cheapening the content we have access to in our digital spaces.
This is humanity's time to shine!
An intense focus on the quality of our work is now, more than ever, the way to stand out of the masses of average work.
The only way to accomplish this is by slowing down to a human pace and making the hard decisions for what to devote your quality-focused effort to.
We all have a lot to do both at work and at home. Not everything can have our top-tier efforts, so we have to be strategic.
At work, I have two objectives that I want to stand out as true quality:
- Building the best CMS that allows marketers to have enough flexibility of content within brand and design guidelines.
- Learning and implementing practices or techniques that make our websites accessible to anyone, regardless of ability.
By focusing on my first objective, I've alleviated a lot of the grunt work that tends to be shoved onto marketing developers (aka changing text all day). This allowed me to take on my second objective, but only after the quality of the first reached a certain threshold.
It's been a long, hard journey, but I've built something massive in just a few years' time, all on my own.
Cyborg
Slowing down is not rewarding in the short-term. It may even feel like a waste—which is how I described last weekend.
Monday, however, I got to work, facing a complicated, leftover problem from Friday. I assumed this problem would take another full day to solve, but, as it tends to happen after a significant break, the solution was quickly uncovered within the first ten minutes of work.
Breaks and rest help us to process things, to restart with a fresh outlook, to rebuild our stamina.
Scaling back down to a human pace and focusing on real quality is how I have recaptured my satisfaction with work and how I have taken the sting off of my anxiety about the fast-paced treadmill we call technology.