Productivity

There’s a feeling you get when everything clicks into place. Not the eureka moment of solving a problem, but something more fundamental: the deep satisfaction of being exactly where you need to be, with exactly what you need, arranged exactly how it should be. It’s the feeling of home, but applied to the spaces where we create. This isn’t about aesthetics or luxury. It’s about something more primal: the human need to nest, to claim territory, to shape our environment until it shapes us back. And nowhere is this more crucial than in the spaces where we do our most demanding creative work. ...

As a hobby, I’ve been perfecting various burger recipes. It both feeds us and gives me something to incrementally improve. Add fake internet points to the mix, and now I’m motivated to post photographs of my creations. The feedback and reinforcement these fake points provide are enough to keep me consistently taking those photos, and making those burgers. A little push can be good. But here’s the thing about fake internet points: they work. Absurdly well. Here I am, a grown adult who builds software for a living, getting genuinely excited because 47 strangers clicked an arrow next to a photo of my latest smash burger creation. The dopamine hit is real, even when I know exactly what’s happening to my brain. ...

After three months of AI-assisted development, I’m more productive than ever. I’m also mentally exhausted in ways I didn’t expect. The productivity gains are real—I can go from sketch to working prototype in hours instead of days. But there’s a hidden cost that we’re not talking about: the tools fundamentally change the cognitive load of programming. Instead of being tired from wrestling with implementation details, I’m exhausted from operating constantly at the architecture and design level. ...

We’ve all seen the ergonomic warnings. Adjust your monitor height. Take breaks every twenty minutes. Use a proper keyboard. The IT department sends out reminders about repetitive strain injuries, and we dutifully nod while hunching over our laptops for another six-hour coding session. But here’s what nobody talks about: your brain is a muscle too, and we’re giving it the cognitive equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome. The thinking muscle I’ve been writing software for over twenty years, and I’ve watched my industry evolve from “ship it when it’s done” to “ship it yesterday, fix it tomorrow.” Somewhere along the way, we forgot that thinking—real, deep problem-solving—is physical work. Your brain burns glucose. It gets fatigued. It needs recovery time. ...

I have a reminder on my TODO list that haunts me weekly: Problem: I’m not writing. Sometimes I snooze it, sometimes I check it off. Sometimes I start to draft something and then lose interest. I leave the task on the list as I really should be writing more. There are a bunch of things getting in my way, but honestly I haven’t felt like myself for a few years. Working from home during lockdown was draining, and work itself is challenging enough that I don’t have much left at the end of the day. Even my non-work life has thrown a few curveballs. The most frustrating thing, however, is that I have been struggling with imposter syndrome. I feel like I don’t deserve to write. ...