Executive Function Theft
hedgehoglibrarian.com
hedgehoglibrarian.com
I also wonder how much the higher standards plays a part in this kind of thing. If person A believes tasks like vacuuming need to occur weekly, and person B believes they need to occur bi-weekly then person B will either suffer an emotional tax for not having their expectations met or an EFT managing their preferred outcome with some form of nagging.
Lastly, can we just ditch things like get well soon cards, someone getting sick doesn't have to be met with a $5 donation to hallmark with some platitudes. If you really cared you'd improve minimum pay and sick leave entitlements so people didn't have to turn up to work sick.
It's not funny - it's the designed outcome. The studies are generally biased from the start to exclude stereotypical men's work. From the Michigan study:
"Excluded from these “core” housework hours were tasks like gardening, home repairs, or washing the car."
Or from the article:
"Is their decision-making ability wholly captured in those tasks while the other person is getting to relax or to plan a project?"
As if planning a project isn't work and isn't composed of a whole bunch of smaller decisions.
"I also wonder how much the higher standards plays a part in this kind of thing. If person A believes tasks like vacuuming need to occur weekly, and person B believes they need to occur bi-weekly..."
This is huge in my experience. One factor is stuff like OCD or expectations of how that person was raised. The other overlooked one is "ownership" or responsibility. It was a point of pride to maintain the home and recieve compliments on or (or maintain the lawn/car/etc). Now it seems it's all about the biggest paycheck or most prestigious job.
I remember handing my father in law an article detailing "tasks women do that are invisible to men".
His reply: "It says here that I'm a woman."
I've found that it's less about who is more burdened, but how the burden is dealt with.
Case in point: I prefer assigning responsibilities, my SO having everyone watch over everything - we're not the only household where the divide lies here.
It's hard, because our respective approaches drive the other party up the wall.
Oh dear. No two people have identical preferences across all household management tasks. Does that doom us to “emotional taxes” or “executive function theft”?
Of course not!! People who live together come to an agreement about the things that matter to them.
However this is easier said than done: It is not trivial to surface all these issues, and issues un-surfaced do indeed fall into the pathological dichotomy above.
To that end, (and in particular for working parents) I heartily recommend Fair Play by Eve Rodsky and the process it describes. It’s not easy to identify and mitigate all these deltas, and submitting to the books guidance mitigates the formidable cognitive load of the process.
You've addressed one item out of seven indicating that you're not aware of the context or nuance involved in gender inequality in the home.
A card is far more in the realm of possible things I can do. Caring does not confer capability.
To make matters much worse, one week, an elm / functional programming purist in the team started making a lot of noise. they believed in sticking strictly to the core principles of elm and basically avoiding 3p dependencies like the plague. while they were generally respectful and i respected their dedication, it became another thing to juggle. trying to mediate between that guy and those more pragmatic about our deadlines was taxing.
I realized that amidst all this, my primary role of mentoring others and solving higher level engineering challenges was getting overshadowed by these micro-decisions and tasks. it was like being in the middle of a sea, trying to stay afloat, while holding onto a bundle of papers. EFT, as described here, is a term that captures this perfectly. it's so essential to be aware of it, especially in the tech world where the lines often blur between roles and responsibilities, and especially in engineering leadership. Love having a word for this now that I'm in a position to mentor people who are new to engineering leadership
The important thing is to mentor those who show willingness to pay this investment forward. I've never been in a situation with a completely green team but hopefully when I do I can navigate the role of empowering others to navigate some of that mentoring challenge.
This describes my situation - and I suspect that of many others here. It’d be great to have some insight into how you navigated all this.
Top-down isn't necessarily always bad. It's the result that counts. Top-down decision making has different trade-offs from bottom-up, so sometimes it's the better choice.
Bottom-up has more insights in details, top-down has a wider view. Bottom-up gets deeper commitment, top-down gets faster compliance. Bottom-up gets a thousand blooms blooming, top-down gets a unified vision.
It’s pretty weird to me that this is what the author took from Deep Work. Then again, they admitted that they didn’t read it fully.
The message of the book is not to dump your shallow work onto other people. It is to eliminate the “shallow” work entirely when possible, and to be mindful of the pitfalls of context switching when such work can’t be avoided. Nor is the word “shallow” used to describe anything other than the difference between something that requires deep focus to accomplish vs. something that does not. It’s not used in a dismissive or demeaning way.
The author is looking for things in that book that do not exist, and worse, using it as a reference to prove the point of the post.
I agree that dark patterns exist, and the hellish process of dealing with insurance is evidence of that.
But I think the post suffers from applying the “EFT” label a bit too broadly, and for circumstances that are far more nuanced than “theft”.
Inventing shallow work, however, is the root of evil.
But in any case, this is not what the book is about.
Where it can be a problem is when there are "attentive" people on a team and "inattentive" people who are ostensibly equals.
Team members with higher conscientiousness tend to get lumped with an outsized share of undesirable, low impact busywork because others won't do it.
This dynamic can cause problems in all sorts of groups and also at home.
I'm one of those people who usually had a little too much work to do, but still felt bad when no one else volunteers for a task.
Often I'll offer to take it.
I'd end up enjoying work less & less and got a bit disgruntled until I was back to my base-line of work.
I definitely see it as a weakness in me, but also in my manager who let it happen.
As I got older, I started to work at around 90% capacity and grab a tea or chat with a colleague or do some admin for the remainder. This enabled me to jump on to urgent requests and even make extra efforts like physically walking over to discuss the matter. This also enabled me to look out for junior colleagues who seemed a bit stressed.
I agree. I get shit on at work and at home.
The author referencing the book in this context is in complete bad faith.
Every one of us relies on those around us to function. Walking into a grocery store and buying food that’s ready to eat just scratches the surface of this reliance.
Humans are fundamentally a cooperative species, which has enabled collective outcomes that would be impossible if we reduced our reliance on others.
This becomes a problem when people are treated poorly in the process. Slavery is the obvious extreme, and various kinds of discrimination and power plays are some of the bad behaviors that emerge from this social reliance.
But reliance is not in itself a problem. It’s at the core of being human.
I would reiterate that the existence of bad behavior that enables focus for one person at the expense of others with no fair exchange of value is not an intrinsic consequence of the ideas in Deep Work.
So I don't think Cal is only interested in optimizing his own life and dumping everything EFT style onto others.
Undoubtedly it was easier for Darwin to work 4 deep work hours a day because he didn't have to handle the kids, prepare the food, clean the house and mow the lawn and work in the garden. Based on having read Cal a lot I haven't seen him advocate this selfishness in the modern world.
I think the argument's slightly more subtle than that - you don't have to advocate for it, it just naturally happens. Maybe it's viewing executive function as a zero sum game, where if I get some you lose some. I think we've all come up with examples that show that's not universally true, although we haven't proved it doesn't just kinda implicitly happen.
I'm currently in the position of being a carer, and large uninterrupted blocks of time are basically impossible for me right now. It's frustrating for everyone involved. Would the author of the linked piece say that I'm being robbed of my executive function because I'm looking after a sick partner? I think her model might be deepity in the Daniel Dennett sense - sounds good on the surface, but has too many exceptions to be useful. As someone else said, we're all interdependent (today's post about us all being temporarily abled fits in here somewhere). I'm not going anywhere with this, I've just been musing a lot about executive function lately.
Either avoid the need for them or automate them.
1. A lot of shallow work doesn’t need to happen at all. It’s not about offloading it, it’s about stopping altogether, or automating it.
2. When this isn’t possible, structure your workday to preserve uninterrupted blocks of deep work. Do the shallow tasks mindfully in batches, instead of letting them constantly steal your attention throughout the day.
3. Use tools like your calendar to schedule shallow and deep periods of work.
A big part of the book is focused on defining the problems that constant interruptions cause so as to deepen the motivation to actually institute habit changes.
He was also ahead of the curve encouraging people to step away from social media in favor of local interactions.
I personally read the book as a person who is probably the poster child for being a “victim” of “EFT”. I was in a role where my attention was constantly demanded/stolen, and I needed to find strategies to make the best of the situation. At no point was this exploration about offloading things to other people.
It’s a good book, and I highly recommend that people read it. Now more than ever.
It’s also worth noting that his next books were “Digital Minimalism” and “A world without email”. He focuses on the theme of technology and information overload. Issues that I think many people are starting to realize are a real problem in their lives.
It sounds like they think projects are fun or something. Just one more thing in a long list of other chores and projects that have to get done. Of course a large project is composed of many smaller decisions. This plus the rampant gender stereotyping and bias (no mention of stereotypical men's work) makes me highly suspect of the statements they are making, or at least the way they are making them. Sure, people get burnt out with all the invisible work, but isn't that everyone?
Also, the author is hardcore cherry picking data.
"Excluded from these “core” housework hours were tasks like gardening, home repairs, or washing the car."
That's from the Michigan study. So no shit if you exclude maintenence duties that were stereotypical men's work they do less "work around the house". The whole point of the book they mention (if you cut through its BS and bias) is that there's a total bucket of work, that would should be equally divided, and that it shouldn't just default based on gender but be decided on an individual basis. Seems like a straightforward argument. Perhaps if we stop promoting the emotional and biased presentation of these arguments it would be better recieved. Nobody wants the hear that they've been victimizing their wife based on a generalized stereotype (I'm talking about how the studies are being applied/argued).
The main assumption in this article is that "ego depletion" is real. It may not be, see Wikipedia [1]. Psychology is in a big replication crisis, and the ego depletion stuff is all tangled up in it. There's a real possibility that this "theft" only exists by virtue of you believing in it. I'm aware there's a lot of hedging to be done here (experiences of people with ADHD, etc.).
I don't like calling this kind of experience "theft". I much prefer the framing around community service work: boring tasks that are essential for the community's well-being. If someone is not doing their part, they are being an asshole and should be made to (or get kicked out of the community). Emphasizing the communal aspect means you stand up for everybody, not just yourself. It promotes fairness for everybody, not just for yourself. It empowers everybody in the group because you are collectively taking care of this work. And it'll be more effective in practice because the "offender" is getting shamed by everybody, instead of you just whining about your own injustice.
"If you believe that ego depletion is real, you experience it." -- wow, sounds spooky, fascinating if true
"If you experience ego depletion, you believe that it is real." -- yes thank you, Captain Obvious
To me it seems like different people have different capacity for making decisions (that's kinda what ADHD is about). If you can make 10 different decisions a day, but you are required to make 20, you experience "ego depletion". If you can make 30 different decisions a day, but you are required to make 20, you laugh at the idea of "ego depletion", and you can even help to debunk it experimentally by increasing the required decisions to 25 which you can still do easily.
An analogy would be if you talked to people who have broken legs and found out that they are unable to run. So you come with a hypothesis "all people are unable to run". Then someone else tests the hypothesis using both people who have broken legs and people who are okay, and then conclude "actually, the only people unable to run are those who believe that they are unable to run", which is technically true, but misses the part where the people believing that they cannot run are the ones with broken legs.
The picture ego depletion paints is that a) this is caused by making decisions and b) there is nothing to be done about it. I don't think either of those is true. Some decisions might be stressful and they could certainly contribute, but choosing what's for dinner is not in that category. And even if I'm tired and just chilling with some video games, I might be making decisions around builds, where to go next, etc.
> Some decisions might be stressful and they could certainly contribute, but choosing what's for dinner is not in that category.
Ah, depends on whether one has an autistic child that has a tantrum whenever the dinner does not fit their unclearly communicated criteria. Then it can easily be the most stressful task of the day. :D
Generally, I'd like to push back against that "most people sometimes have the sensation" part, because that's basically true for everything. (Depression? Most people sometimes feel sad. Dyslexia? Most people sometimes make a mistake when reading.) That's the point of some mental problems that yes, most people experience it sometimes in an extreme situation, but unfortunately you experience it every day. And the people who experience it only once in a while are happy to provide you advice about what works for them, assuming that it must automatically work the same for you, or you are just lazy and not trying hard enough.
Go for a short walk through the woods and you've made hundreds of decisions including where to step, what scenery to look at, how to respond to a noise you heard, etc. but that experience is generally considered refreshing.
Meanwhile, your whole day might be dampered if you have just one really important decision looming over you, or which you just made and are unsure about.
If I'm writing a fun personal code project then none of the decisions faze me, but if I'm fixing a bug in some awful code I might need a break.
Diagnosed with ADHD myself. The prescribed stimulants definitely make it easier to deal with annoying decisions.
I noticed mental fatigue around a task is just an illusion I might have picked up from observing others? If I just don't think about it, I can start on a big daunting thing and just keep going, like I always tended to do in the past. If I let others' descriptions of task paralysis or whatever seep into my head then it gets harder.
Similarly, spoon theory can still be a helpful frame of reference even though "spoons per day" is not in reality a fixed or discrete quantity.
I often run into code where it seems the author left a lot of tech debt for the sake of fixing the one task they were given. We have processes in place that are meant to prevent bad code from getting into master, and they do work - you can't just sneak absolute garbage past code review, but still everyone involved is incentivised to only let through the minimum acceptable version of the code that will hold together until bonuses are calculated next quarter. The part where this becomes theft is when next quarter your mess impedes my progress, my velocity goes down, which means my bonus goes down, which means you have literally stolen money from me.
I often think about this when interacting with commercial software that has bugs and rough edges. Am I in pain right now because somebody maximised their performance bonus three years ago? Are these issues the results not of incompetence, but of simple min-maxing? At the end, we all reap what we sow, and I can but hope that my mortgage gets paid before the reaper comes to harvest.
I think your focus is slightly off the mark here. The problem is that people are being given mentally intensive tasks that are treated as mentally trivial, so their cognitive capacity gets drained invisibly. Your brain can absolutely get tired, and when it does, it's very hard to perform cognitive tasks.
It's not ego depletion, it's exhaustion from mental work.
A person, a group of people, or an explicit social system, has decided to override my goals without replacing my behavior. Without fighting them directly, I am left to execute behaviors that meet their goals. The very context of my executive functioning has been replaced with arbitrary constraints.
Who determines the goals of "everybody"? No one can!
Whoa really? I mean it certainly doesn’t work that way for me, but then again I am a stubborn sonovabitch.
Tangentially, this is a common problem in relationships. "You never do the dishes", "you never do the laundry"...
My headcanon for these mismatches is that people have different thresholds of activation. In a relationship, it's useful to state these explicitly ("Oh I only do laundry when I'm close to running out of underwear") before resentment sets in.
> "You never do the dishes"
means:
You ignore how much more difficult it is to get rid of those little pantry flies, roaches, and/or ants once they find a food/crumb source vs. consistently blocking the impetus for that class of problem to manifest itself. (Or, depending on your locale, perhaps just minimizing that problem as much as possible.)
Moreover, your philosophy of free agency doesn't take into account the resulting increase in your stress level from clutter and lack of clean utensils, and how that increased stress-- probably paired with a reluctance to acknowledge and deal with common stressors generally-- ends up confining your choices in ways that become frustratingly predictable over time. That's not to mention your attempts to hide your disgust when you pick up a dirty plate to reveal mold or wiggling pantry fly eggs, as if denial of an emotion negates the existence of that emotion. And finally, there's the effect that disgust has on your general mood, and even subtle though detectable changes to your opinions given we feeble humans process both physical and conceptual disgust in the same part of our brains.
> "you never do the laundry"...
means:
Pleasant odors and shared work tend to have positive affects on a woman's libido.
My wife sometimes does most of the dishes before she even starts eating. If I followed the customs of the home I grew up in, my wife would end up doing the dishes every single meal before I even get to the sink. Obviously I have learned to adapt to the situation, but my point is that it’s a bit unfair to characterize every mismatch in expectations as evidence of abject filth and slobbery on the part of the husband.
I have no idea about pleasant odours but can see how not having ones standards respect could be a libido killer; just part of the complexities of a relationship/cohabitation.
You're describing a hypothetical man who thinks dishes should be left in the sink until they grow mold and attract pests. Obviously mold and pests are bad, so this hypothetical man would be in the wrong.
But, most real relationship conflicts don't fit that hypothetical description! For example, last year there was a discussion on HN about leaving a dirty dish by the sink: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31000658 There was no mold or pantry fly eggs in that situation; the wife was upset about any dirty dishes being left by the sink at all, even a once-used glass of water.
And that's a much more complicated situation. It's common for different people to have different expectations for cleanliness: a husband might think it's OK for an empty glass of water to be left on the counter if he might drink from it later, but the wife might think that's "dirty". These are different points of view, and neither one is necessarily wrong.
Sometimes people try to frame this as "the husband is sexist and trying to make his wife do the chores" (or "he's inflicting executing function theft on her") but I don't think that's a correct or helpful framing. Like writeslowly and AceJohnny2 wrote above, this is a case of different people having different standards. That doesn't necessarily mean the one with lower standards is committing "executive function theft" on the one with higher standards.
Eggs don't wiggle. Those are larvae. Maggots, baby.
If yours is usable and if you want to get the benefits and struggle with the mental overhead (like me), the way I solved it might help. I projected the expenses we were almost certain to have (took about a minute.) Then I put a range on the expenses we'd probably have. That's where I set the FSA withdrawals. There was realistically a 0% chance I was going to lose money with the FSA. If gambling stresses you out, just do a conservative amount and be content with the savings from that.
That was 2022. For 2023, FSA planning was easy because I knew I'd be paying for orthodontics, so I just set it at maximum and spent the whole thing up front in January. I'll probably be back to a lower amount next year. It takes a minute to update the withdrawal in our benefits portal during open enrollment.
The ADHD tax is real, and this article calls out its mechanism exactly, though not by this name.
Similarly, my work has two options for commuter benefits. Monthly transit passes or like a $20/mo bike credit. The transit passes process automatically and do not accumulate. The bike credits can in theory accumulate but you need to manually manage these more that, bring receipts, the whole thing. Even though I’m an avid cyclist and spend well more than $20 on my bike related activities every month, the shenanigans around it just make it unusable to me.
If you spend everything in your FSA in January and quit your job, the company has to eat the loss.
(IANAL, blah blah blah)
To guardrail the process, i've integrated my FSA with a small app I wrote as a hobby project that automatically flags eligible transactions. This largely automates the reimbursement procedure, significantly reducing the overhead of manual management and making sure I don't miss much heh.
And in terms of the risk of forfeiture, this conservative approach coupled with the aforementioned automation has safeguarded me against major losses and kept my exposure low. I think the benefits of FSAs are hard to ignore, but they do necessitate a bit more touch than other expenditure vehicles to be sure.
HSAs are a very good tax dodge retirement account, so you should figure them out. Except in California they're supposed to be taxed. Except… HSA providers don't give you the forms you'd need to report HSA investment gains, so it is literally impossible to report them.
Negotiating what you spend your executive function on is part of navigating reality. People can exercise agency here.
You can say "no" to most of these tasks and there will be zero effect. Most of the time people don't actually care that much about these tasks getting done, they're just nice-to-haves.
I also disagree with the framing of it in the workplace and relationships.
"EFT" is literally the purpose of a job. You take on the burden of your role so someone else doesn't have to.
If a couple is happy with the division of labour, why does it matter who does more "EFT" tasks?
Gendered or other differences in "EFT" tasks seem like a completely different problem. That is related to your personal negotiation of the tasks rather than an inherent problem with them.
Personally I try to ruthlessly eliminate these tasks because I have poor executive function and don't want more things to deal with, but most people don't seem to be interested in doing that.
This culture then dresses up this mindset in loaded terms like “emotional labor” and “executive function theft” to make it more reasonable (and to make those that disagree look more unreasonable) but it’s all bullshit.
If you don’t want to send emails, find another job, or change your own job. If you don’t want to do the dishes, find another partner, or demand they change (and be prepared for them to leave instead).
But rather than this, the proponents of this culture demonize all those who disagree with them. Their arguments and approaches are intentionally not rational, and are instead emotional, precisely because they require everyone else to not engage with life and their own happiness rationally.
Thief is the perfect word. Instead of using their own brains they stole mine. I don't know how someone does this and isn't ashamed of themselves. I'm so glad I don't have to live the life of a helper monkey for the terminally lazy anymore. Magically they managed to survive on their own once I moved out. Go figure.
I say fuck that.
In disability advocacy this is sometimes called spoon theory. This is somewhat offtopic but one of my favorite sci-fi short stories is about this concept.
https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/carnival-nin...
"Carnival Nine," Caroline Yoachim. (It seems like if you press the button with arrows pointing in cardinal directions, it gets a lot easier to read.)
Anyway... It's also the least one can do when you're with them but that's not necessarily practical.
> the authors found that when they turned something down, another woman — usually one with less power — was asked
So perhaps partly it comes from a desire to help those weaker than oneself. But there must be more to it than that!
I do tell the team just to ignore those requests and report them to me, yet the people making the bad requests just get more aggressive with their requests, either exaggerating the importance, exaggerating the requestor's "right" to assign the task to my team, etc.
The end result is that we end up closing the means to talk to my team or I am brought in more often to deny the requests, which means I'm spending more time explaining why we aren't doing stupid and wasteful things like giving some sales teams' client free work for a year (can easily cost 6 or 7 figures USD) without getting proper approvals from all the teams required to provide that work. Examples _like_ this happen way too often and it can be weeks worth of emotional meetings explaining why the original requestor needs to deal with the mess they made themselves.
My team is a bunch of IT professionals, and they should be doing IT work, not spending weeks convincing other teams to clean up the messes they made or preventing months of commitments for projects that should never have been approved, and it does _NOT_ feel good or right at all to make them constantly do something that is objectively not their job, and the end result is I end up burning out badly intercepting all of these requests.
The article was very relatable for me and EFT is a term I am going to be using moving forward.
But my personal frustration with scenarios that I've dealt with isn't about specific groups, it's that I imagine myself in like a kids TV show and we're all having to participate while some person in the company learns the value of being honest and taking responsibility for their mistakes.
except unlike a TV show, the stuff isn't resolved in 22 minutes, it takes months, if we ever resolve it, and it creates a lot of stress, frustration, anger, and costs a lot money.
and the person(s) who caused all of this don't learn anything except how to make someone else deal with the fallout of their bad decisions :))))
I definitely get bank EFT (pun not intended), I deal with this by having recurring todos with all the links and stuff I need to smash it out quickly. The idea is to offload from CPU (executive/conscious) to GPU (habits/unconscious)
When talking about this I thought EFT was going to lead to how Twitter and other dopamine hits stop you from getting important stuff done.
Executive Function is a term commonly thrown around in the autistic and ADHD spaces. When read in that context, it makes a *lot* more sense.
From what I hear, neurotypical people have a much higher tolerance for bullshit work and wasteful process. I wouldn't know what that feels like. Beyond 1 or 2 wasted steps and I get mad that someone has designed a process that's actively hostile to its users.
If a task expects too much executive functioning from my ADHD brain, I literally cannot complete the task.
Of course, that sounds a lot more binary than it is: my executive functioning is a product of complex neurochemical interactions. The right balance of medication might give me enough stimulation to do the thing. Stress and adrenaline might give me enough stimulation to do the thing. I might be able to get started, but get stuck halfway through. All I can say for certain (predictably) is that my brain naturally lives below that stimulation threshold.
Years of living without medication (I was diagnosed in my late 20s) left my brain to create habits that try (and fail) to compensate. The main habit I have recognized is an obsession with objectivity: if I could just think about the problem enough to factor out the work, then I wouldn't need to do anything! The result is a collection of knowledge and understanding that isn't tied to experience or achievement. I'm still trying to get the hang of action: moving toward a goal.
Most people can't even imagine what I'm going through. For them, inconvenience is just something they live through. For me, inconvenience is the walls of an endless maze. I would very much like to leave.
People who tolerate it create the Red Queen Problem that kills so many projects. It’s the people who don’t tolerate that shit that put a stop to it.
> the other person is getting to relax or to plan a project?
Habits and subconscious thinking helps, but you do still have to do those tasks, and it does still take thought. You still have to write them down, set up todos, etc.
The idea is that cleaning/chores requires a lot of small things, that isn’t fun, but is mentally taxing. Planning meals, cooking, cleaning, tracking what needs to be cleaned next, timers, etc is the EF being “stolen”.
I see many companies treating their customers like criminals or slaves; many more than used to pull that stuff. It's only going to get worse.
So many times I've looked at a reminder email, put it aside because it pisses me off. Yes I have the money to pay, yes its like 2mins to do in my banking app, yes I will settle it, but No I won't do it now that you effing emailed me about it. I'll do it on my own time...and then I forget till the next annoying reminder email that pisses me off even more.
Some days I wonder if some of this stuff is normal or if it's just me. I'd love to just have an assistant to offload this mental drain to either way.
On the psychological side, I know what you mean but you do seem to be taking things a bit personally. Yes, businesses are big and impersonal and automated, because society is big and impersonal and we have access to a huge range of services, we can't change much based on how pissed off we are.
AI assistants to make life easier for us must only be a year or two away.
However unpopular, I strongly disagree with this take. Looking at the world like this is not productive.
Assuming others are acting maliciously obfuscates what's actually going on (decades of misaligned incentives in the case of FSA) and it removes personal agency.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence [and misaligned incentives].
Designing a good experience and flow for a piece of software is hard. You have to work for it not to be bad rather than work to make it bad.
In the aggregate, technology tends to empower higher-functioning work, by taking over the lower-functioning work.
I started off by programming Machine Code. Languages, compilers, and engineering discipline have allowed me to do a whole world more, than if I was still writing out hex codes, on a pad of paper.
But, when it all boils down, Machine Code is the atomic level (or maybe FET junctions).
In my head I call it high impedance relationship/work it's jumbled together in my head just like impedance is reactive and resistive. Your circuit can work just fine but a high impedance is more sensitive to external factors (external stress) than a low impedance device. Even just the act of monitoring it with an oscilloscope can affect the signal or voltage.
You fix this, not by driving more power (mental energy, more chores whatever) but by balancing the inputs and outputs (grossly oversimplifying here)
If you want to do work a certain way and your partner or coworker can only accept work that looks like theirs then that's a related but separate problem. You decide your partner is overworked at home so suggest hiring a house cleaner, they protest that it would cost too much and "we can do it ourselves if you would just chip in" or let's get rid of our picture books because we have no room on our bookshelves and our kids are all teenagers but "I want to save them for the grandchildren" or
I'll cook breakfast every morning but "then we have to wake up early and eat at 7:00 a.m. instead of wolfing down something 3 minutes before leaving."
When the other person will only accept work that looks like theirs it's really a mismatch in growth vs fixed mindset. That said, a temporary dedication to matching their work can give them space to see the other solutions and come out of the fixed mindset.
Like all hard problems, a flexible approach is better than hard and fast rules.
When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When writing a jeremiad, anything becomes weighty evidence.
This description fits very well.
(And this is a different claim than that the author is essentially jumping at shadows, which is fine, I think it's a reasonable take, but that's what I was originally responding to.)
In the examples of Newport and Ferriss, the author ironically cites the cure for EFT as the problem. At a high level, net value of any task is gross value - effort value. Newport’s point isn’t to not do small tasks but make time for big ones, and if less important tasks fall by the wayside, then better those than significant work. Ferriss’ point is that of Ricardoian economics at a micro level: not all tasks can be done with equal efficiency by different people, thus route tasks to where they are most efficiently performed.
Irony aside, the essay could be categorized as reverse-CBT. Read more about Lukianoff’s idea at the link below:
https://heterodoxacademy.org/resources/the-coddling-of-the-a...
You're gloating and high fiving yourself for insulting someone on the internet, in the same breath you're asserting that person isn't well adjusted and needs to go to therapy. I'm not impressed.
> Not all tasks can be done with equal efficiency by different people, thus route tasks to where they are most efficiently performed.
The author is asserting some people "route" tasks that don't get them promoted to others. Your counter assertion is that those people are more efficient at not getting promoted?
> Irony aside, the essay could be categorized as reverse-CBT.
This is dangerously close to gaslighting. The author writes about personal experience, and you're asserting it's a product on insufficient therapy or is some kind of anti therapy.
I have insulted no person or thing. This statement appears to be mind-reading itself a straw man.
Don’t lie. I did not write that anyone “needs to go to therapy.” If you care to reply, please address the fact that you lied.
> The author is asserting some people "route" tasks that don't get them promoted to others. Your counter assertion is that those people are more efficient at not getting promoted?
No
>This is dangerously close to gaslighting. The author writes about personal experience, and you're asserting it's a product on insufficient therapy or is some kind of anti therapy.
Thank you for asserting my off hand comment isn’t some bad thing. Read the linked article describing reverse CBT. If you disagree that the EFT author’s mindset towards work isn’t that of reverse CBT, I look forward to rethinking it.
Bullshit. You said they were engaging in the inverse of therapy. You leveled various insults at the author.
> No
It was a rhetorical question. So, "yes," I guess.
> If you disagree that the EFT author’s mindset towards work isn’t that of reverse CBT, I look forward to rethinking it.
You don't need me for that. (And yes, I disagree.)
Again, like your lies about what is written, you lie about “various insults at the author.” It’s plain to see that there is no insult in what was written, especially since you can’t be bothered to quote anything.
You can lie, you can disagree while covering your ears, hopefully one day you can come to grips with the world as it is even if today is not that day.
Good luck with all of that.
Even if it were, theft is a far cry from inciting violence. Eg if I advocated shoplifting (don't shoplift) I wouldn't be inciting violence, I'd be inciting shoplifting. (Theft by violent means is called robbery.)
> (Theft by violent means is called robbery.)
(Legally, that's not accurate.)
_Morally_, all theft is violence. Shoplifting a pack of chewing gum is extremely minor, almost zero but it's not zero. Shoplifting also includes the "flash mobs" which run in and steam items, or the folks who walk into stores (e.g. in California) with trash bags and loot as much as they can fit because they know the employees won't touch them and the legal punishment is almost zero.
That certainly wasn't what I meant by shoplifting but if I said, "we should all start going to big box stores with trash bags and stealing stuff, because the employees will not resist us and we won't have to fear a physical altercation" (again, don't do that, that's not my real position, you shouldn't steal shit) I don't think that is reasonable to call "inciting violence." Inciting violence is literally calling for people to be hurt or killed.
I don't really want to quibble about the precise definition of words, my problem with that comment was that it seemed like an escalation from nowhere, disconnected from what the author was actually arguing for.
Is taking things that belong to someone else not hurting them?
If people steal so much that the business has to close, have the owners been hurt? The employees are now out of jobs -- have they been hurt?
Maybe it doesn't force the business to close, they just have to raise prices on everyone else. Or they have to lay one of their employees off.
Petty theft is still theft. Small injuries are still injuries. Small violence is still violence.
Agreed. But at no point does theft automatically equate to violence. Theft can be violent. Not all theft is violent.
Equating everything to “violence” is just significantly lowering the resolution and intelligibility of the concept conveyed.
Maybe I just think theft is worse, and that violence is relatively less unacceptable than you do.
(To make my ethical position explicit, I believe in nonviolence and I don't believe in theft. But I don't think that's relevant to a discussion about a turn of phrase.)
Senior engineers deal with EFT a lot in mid/junior and even some seemingly seniors who just absolutely abdicate responsibility for anything that is not interesting.
A common example - asking for help debugging by basically just saying "it doesn't work", requiring you to interrogate them with 10 questions before you get to the what/where/why/when/how of "it" and "doesn't work" to actually begin helping them. Helping them causes you more work than necessary because they can't be bothered to write up a decent 2 sentence explanation up front.
Another example - always doing half (at best) of the task, arguably leaving things in a worse state. In a data engineering context, things like making a change in some mappings in your data loader, but only fixing it on new data, leaving old data in a broken state. So now downstream users of the dataset need to be aware of the old bad mapping, the new good mapping, and either the date of cutover/handle both cases. They saved themselves some work, but caused everyone else more work.
The last class I would mention would be coworkers who are basically "prototype devs". Guys, (its always guys) who are fairly creative and fast moving, delivering interesting IDEAS that they are incapable of productionising. These guys are incredibly dangerous to the team if not managed well, as they get ahead of their skis offering products to management that they can't get past the toy stage. The rest of the team is left to write the other 90% of the code, or usually do a full rewrite. As it turns out the toy always takes 1/10th the time of the real solution, and so they have plenty of time to run off and build more toys.
I'd also describe EFT as leaving you feeling like you've lost agency and control of your day.
The second form is where one party requests that the other party perform a task, then inevitably finds fault with the outcome no matter how accurately or effectively the task is done.
Both of these can lead over time to a form of learned helplessness where any initiative is suppressed because any self-originated action is treated as wrong. Eventually the victim gives up and becomes incapable of any real volition.
a good example is microsoft outlook. meeting invites would pop a mandatory three way choice of "send the response now, send the response later or edit the response before sending" every time the accept button was pressed.
a truly infuriating case of eft.
it's like when you have to deal with a smarmy individual. any given instance of smarminess is fine on its face, but the cumulative sum can be unbearable.
OK, but it's already called decision fatigue. And it doesn't seem as if the essay is identifying a novel pathology either.
It's only the 'deny use' half of 'theft', ie it's more like DoS.
IIUC, they do—the thief delegates tedious, finicky work to preserve their own executive function for “important stuff”. They don’t have more executive function than before the task existed, but they do have more than before they delegated it, and the delegation is the theft.
The article is just describing a phenomenon where the people with the power to decide who works on what are not the people in the explicit power structure, and thus don't have the same accountability that usually comes with that power?
It's almost as if they want to be little assembly line workers that make the same CRUD widget over and over. They're not lazy, they're probably also just as stripped of their EF as the rest of us plebs.
> The thief has chosen to prioritize their executive function over another person’s and, having found that this makes their lives easier, repeats this behavior unless it is disrupted.
(Emphasis added.) By imposing the executive function-depleting responsibility onto others, they reserve EF capacity of their own which they wouldn’t otherwise specifically by extracting that cost from others.
I think of theft is something that you catch someone for and punish and potentially get back what was lost or some of it. Negative externalities I think of as something that needs to regulated legally or through some other feedback mechanism.
When the "non-promotable work" of a firm, community, or family gets done "the rising tide raises all boats" if that work is necessary for the organization's profitability and/or autopoiesis.
I am confused as to how you don't see the profit in delegating.
Edit: for example, if I were to borrow your lawn mower with out asking, mow my lawn, and then--crucially--return your lawnmower wouldn't that be theft? Even though you'd only been "denied service" and not lost an entire mower?
In your analogy, it would be more like I'd contacted the housing association to force you to mow your driveway, denying you the time to properly manicure your lawn. I'm not gaining any improvement to my lawn in that case.
The claim is that, instead of you mowing your lawn, you get someone else to do it. What you gain is time, and reduced cognitive load.
It's kind of a childish thing to say about your manager since that is just how the cookie crumbles, but still a real exchange. Managers delegate certain tasks so they have time to focus on other tasks. Some managers delegate almost everything and leave you wondering if they do anything at all.
The person in the article feels their partner is also delegating to them and so they feel as though they have no executive function by the end of the day.
In regards to work though, that is just how some jobs are structured. You get paid to take certain load off of your 2IC or Manager or whoever.
Perhaps a better example is when a manager delegates tasks, which is what the article is ultimately complaining about. No money changes hands. The manager gains time and room for focus on other tasks, by delegating menial focus sapping tasks to other people. I think the article is a bit silly, because that is the point of the separation of those roles, but they aren't ultimately wront about what is happening.
I am sorry, but I re-read the article and still cannot understand why you believe this. The author gives three major examples:
1. Customer EFT: "sitting on hold with the company that manages my health flexible spending account"
2. Workplace EFT: "they see a need to be filled or have been asked or tasked with taking on more"
3. Household EFT: "Having a husband creates an extra seven hours a week of housework for women."
You seem to be interpreting the article as primarily about #2, Workplace EFT, and furthermore about one facet of workplace political dynamics, namely command hierarchy.
I'll allow that command hierarchies are nominally the principal aspect of a corporation, but one of the author's goals, I believe, is to shed light on the dynamics surrounding and running obliquely to that aspect. She takes pains to emphasize the gendered and allegedly random way "those tasks so often fall to the same group of people". The tasks about which the author complains are explicitly not those within one's job title and/or line of duty but, rather, the surreptitious assignment of service to which the employee did not explicitly consent when taking the job but now "feel they cannot turn down".
Long story short, I am a little blown away with your assertion that "the article is ultimately complaining about" something which is at the most tangential to the article's subject and possibly even--as in my interpretation--deliberately not being addressed.
Theft implies taking something that isn’t yours to take, which appropriately shames the perpetrator of their actions.
So what happens when my executive functioning is stolen? Debt. I am eternally indebted to any task that demanded more executive functioning than I could provide. And society demands I pay up one way or another: that's the ADHD tax. Couldn't finish homework? Gotta stay after school. Couldn't work on the company project before its deadline? Get fired. Couldn't cold-call 2 dozen mental health clinics to find an opening that works with my insurance? No meds or therapy for me.
Every social system that interacts with me is designed with a baseline expectation of executive functioning: I experience that as a DDoS attack.
I think both terms are correct, and you are welcome to use whichever best fits the context you are using it in.
This seems like it should be well known. This article makes it seem like a new insight, but it is real and has been known about.
For Corporations: Is it theft? It is what you are paid for. Think of the "Executive Function" as a resource, and the corporation is paying you for it, and yes, in human organizations, it trickles down. The Higher in the Hierarchy you go, they also get tired. Then down the Hierarchy, the decisions trickle down, and the next layer also makes decisions and gets tired, and so on, down to the lowest person deciding how to write one line of code.
Sure -> In every human organization there will be people that are 'passing the buck'. Or here 'not not taking responsibility at their level and passing the decision down to their underlings'.
For ADHD: Everyone has a finite amount of "executive function". And People with ADHD have to be more judicious with guarding it.
Gender: And yes, in home life, with bills, and getting kids to school on time, it wears everyone down. And yes, in some (maybe most) relationships, the woman is beset upon with more of the daily chores. That un-fairness is also well documented. But that doesn't mean this is a gender phenomena.
Task delegation can be cooperative or abusive, as the article points out. It might be called theft if there is something owed and taken away from, but for that, it has to be that participation in executive decision was a right of employee or contractor to begin with (for that, they have to investigate under what agreement they work, what type of organization and expectations were set). Some contractors are happy to deliver a part or component to specifications, get paid and not participate in strategic decision making, others want to be part of the mission, and decide higher level goals together. It depends on the type of social contracts we enter into!
Btw., the "Executive Function Theft" as defined in the article, is an important social issue in the area of abuse of power, but reading plainly, it can be confused with good illegal leadership takeover without abuse of power, and with positive social outcomes.
I could just as easily say that she has committed theft of my attention span because I had to read her ill-considered opinion in order to fairly criticize it. But I won't say that, because it was my choice to do so and I am not a victim.
She seems to be trying to criminalize the ordinary back and forth of social life. We have roles and make use of those roles. We have power and make use of it. For instance, her description of the healthcare situation is all covered, directly or indirectly, in her contract with the healthcare insurance provider; or else it is simply a matter of saying no. Don't do any of that work. Suffer the consequences. It's not theft-- it's the marketplace at work.
How long before someone calls EFT a "microaggression?" Yet another front in the culture wars will open up between people who can't be bothered to assert themselves (and apparently, according to her, women don't assert themselves very much) and those who put the energy in to be assertive.
Imo it is not abuse if there isn't any threat and you simply can say no. If you keep saying yes to everything you coworkers ask from you, what do you expect is going to happen? It is your own responsibility to not be a doormat, that is abusing yourself.
Another equally valid answer: If I care about you, and to the degree I care about you, I willingly modify my behavior to help you live better and more happily, regardless of the how you may deserve or not deserve it.
My wife is one of those people who will work themselves to the point of collapse without complaining. I have to be careful what I ask for because she will assign herself secret tasks to provide it. I don’t lecture her on how she deserves her misery, I remind her that I am the only person around here who swore an oath to help her, and she should ask me for what she wants and expect me to provide it. Then I try to volunteer when I see her working at something I can do. And I try to make myself easy to approach. After 32 years we have a pretty good understanding— but her endurance is worsening over time and so there are new challenges.
The underlying reality she seems to ignore is that the people who master and decide the details actually run the shop in very real ways. There is power there, if she is not too offended to see it.
In retrospect I should have just spent the same amount of time transferring the contents of that account somewhere else (somewhere that is already set up). At the time I didn't realize how little work is required for such a change.
I would definitely not get too arrogant that you don't have this problem, just that you haven't been swamped yet. Haven't pushed this threshold.
On other end of spectrum, I've also encountered people that are always 'chill', and don't have this problem. But they are also not the people moving the needle, or being assigned the difficult tasks.
It's a balance. Sure, it's easy to not have this problem simply by not pushing yourself. But the ones that do push themselves and get overwhelmed, or have difficulties, are also not a good example.
While this seems like we'd be a fairly carefully protected resource, over time, just everything started being thrown at us, including stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with our team. It's a big international company with different managers on other teams coming and going, so it's never clear who in the company knows about our team yet.
- early on, it was just a few people making requests directly to me, and a small portion of my day was turning down these requests
- as time went on, the team grew, we succeeded more, and more and more irrelevant requests started coming. We turned them down, but the amount of requests and the irrelevance and importance of the requests were all increasing, the latter two often linked very closely together
- at some point, we started getting exceptional push-back when we turned down requests. the first few times were rough; manageable, but I had to dedicate a few meetings/days to getting rid of this request and the requestors were very upset when I turned them down
- eventually it got to the point where a good 40-50% of my week was dealing with irrelevant requests and increasingly aggressive resistance when I turned it down
- the requestors around this time began just trying to circumvent me; find the people on the team I was leading who were not as good at saying "no", and getting the tasks in that way. I had to eventually put a full stop on requests that didn't come via a specific channel; this in turn resulted in a lot of drama from other teams complaining we were being prima donnas, and arguing with higher management if we should have the _right_ to insist on requests coming via a specific channel (something basically every team does...), which eats up more of my time as I'm having to explain to execs that have absolutely no idea about this aspect of the company, but believe the requestors when they say "yes, this team must solve this", keeping in mind that the task has absolutely nothing to do with our team, they just want us to deal with it
- a corollary to the above point, keep in mind the requests are still coming in while this debate is happening since the debate is whether or not we can restrict the channels for making requests, so my teammates are still being harassed every day by these requestors
- finally we get "approved" for the right to a dedicated single channel for the requests, and the requestors just ignore it anyways; there is no reprimand for the persons not following the approved process, and the entire debate was a pointless exercise
- I'm spending 80% of my time now arguing with these requestors and telling why we're rejecting their requests. Most of these requestors are repeat visitors, so it's not like they don't know these reasons and rules, they just don't care, they don't want to deal with the shitty task they made
- eventually, the requestors realize they don't need to request it to me, they just need to request it to an exec who has _some_ oversight over our department, give those execs enough worry to convince them we need the best, and the requests are routed to my teams. so I end up accommodating and adding meetings with these execs on the regular in hopes that they at least ask me if this really needs my team or not (spoiler: most never ask, they just lay down their decree and expect it to be done). My week is now about 95% just telling people to knock this shit off, but the tasks keep coming
- my team is burnt out, we're absolutely fed up with all the work, and even worse, we're having troubles sorting when we really do need to be on a task as there are just so many, so actual projects we _should and could have helped with_ are now in trouble as they got deprioritized. these are indeed important projects that need us, and by the time we get to them, they're in such bad shape due to mismanagement and awful decisions that it's a ton of work to get the project off life-support, and that is typically as far as we can take it before we have to shift the focus to another dying project
There's a lot here, but remember, my team is filled with IT specialists and we're supposed to be helping on specific difficult projects that align with our specialties and nothing more. Yet now more than 90% of my job is just solving arguments or problems that other teams created, doing work that has 0 to do with our team's original focus, struggling to keep the projects that are our focus just barely treading water, and constantly having to explain to extremely aggressive and emotional people that their personal unwillingness to have tough conversations with clients or their unwillingness to fix their own mistake is their problem to solve, not ours.
I absolutely can empathize with the article as it's basically all I do at my work anymore, and it's really awful to wake up and wonder "who's bullshit am I going to have to deal with today?" when I should just be setting up a few environments and writing a bit of code while mentoring the team I'm a part of. The fact that everyone participating in this EFT has been told in no ambiguous terms many times why their requests are bad and not for our team, but I guess the company decided at some point we're just going to waste everyone's time arguing on such things instead of doing IT work at some point.
Guess I missed that meeting in favor of explaining to some exec why the project their team proposed is basically giving away thousands of work hours for free just because some sales team didn't have the courage to tell a small and awful client "nah we aren't doing that"
The EFT here creeped in and more or less turned a team that always succeeded on the goals they were actually hired and trained to accomplish and now is being held responsible for the success/failure of so many other teams, including those that have nothing to do with any of our specialties. We lost members who went on to better things, and to this day I still am only happy for them that they were able to make that change when they did.
It's not about whether or not we _can_ accomplish the load, and that's not what the article is about. It's about others pushing their items they don't want to deal with onto others, and how much effort goes into that from the others instead of just doing their work, and how EFT is toxic once it becomes accepted for persons to engage in EFT.
(To be clear: sure you can be tired and have less 'executive function' left, but that doesn't itself imply that being asked to use 'executive function' uses it up)
i focus on what i’m good at
it so happens to be things i like doing
and it also so happens to be things that the market finds valuable
with roommates i find solutions like hiring cleaning staff, for some though it’s the principal of who does the work and you can’t swap the work out
those differences are the things that tear people apart
but that’s just part of life
sometimes someone has to change or accept something if neither can then pain ensues
Personal opinion, when that person is your boss, just do your job.
When that organization is supposed to serve you but makes you do work, look for an alternative.
The author is unhappy with the social order, which is fine. Her error and transgression is in the misappropriation of the concept of “theft.” That is an important concept. We use it to keep order.
It’s like someone pulling a fire alarm to report that she feels really hot.
If it's a coworker you can ignore it.
If it's your manager and for whatever reason you deem it unfair, reflect on exactly why, then bring it up with the manager, then see if you can align. If not, start looking for other options.
Whether these things are hard or not, is a different and independent issue. New things in life are usually hard.
Some people believe that we owe it to one another to be considerate to one another, ie to take responsibility for one another's emotional well-being.
Yes, that "underlying idea" is actually quite common in polite society if not outright ubiquitous. In fact, I'm fairly certain that its absence is considered a psychological pathology.
It's not right to cry "theft" as if it is unethical to leave things undone that should not be done by anyone, or as if it is unethical to delegate to people to whom it is in your lawful power to delegate. It is, in a way, EVIL, to call that theft. It trivializes the notion of theft.
I understand that Newport argues that and tasks shouldn't be done at all, but this is not at all a fair representation of the author's position.
> It is, in a way, EVIL, to call that theft. It trivializes the notion of theft.
You can critique their rhetoric but "evil" is an overreaction. Indeed, your critique that they are weakening the definition of theft applies to your use of "evil".
That being said, I would be happy to see us hold one another to higher empathic standards than have been expected in corporate culture for the last century. At least one 2008 research study suggests that Narcissistic Personality Inventory scores were on the rise since 1989[0]--among undoubtedly WEIRD[1] college students.
0. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5342670_Egos_Inflat...