Tech-enabled fatigue
I always find the most frustrating problems to be the things that annoy you every. single. day. Not the one-offs.
The buzzing world of the internet talks a lot about tech enabled products, what about tech enabled fatigue? When’s the last time you sat down to do something, started doing it, gone down the rabbit hole, stood up to do something else, and then forgotten what you were doing in the first place? Maybe it got lost on one of the 156 open tabs that you have (just me?) These are the types of problems that eat away at me. The ones that cause a little bit of frustration each day, and have lasting negative impact.
As my very close friends and family will tell you I suffer from severe split personality syndrome (to confirm - they are kidding). One friend coined it “microirresponsible”. I’ve always liked that.
At work, I am on. I am using 350% brain power. I am reading business books, listening to Acquired, thinking deeply about the future, and thinking lightly about the mindless but necessary tasks. Consciously and strategically not following up with projects I don’t want to do and hoping the senior person who asked me about it forgets (for those wondering that works like 70% of the time). Chasing partners around (physically) since their time is always limited and I need their input on most of my investment deals. Working local hours into east coast hours and then west coast hours. While the jokes are that VCs don’t work, the trick, my friends, is making it look casual and easy. We’re killers at our core.
That, is Work Lizzy.
Other Lizzy is silly and lighthearted, she’s a big giggler. She wants to talk about how celebrities are entrepreneurs and the latest fashion and make up trends. She loves food, tequila and anything that involves chocolate and ice cream. She’s also terrified of that “hobbies” section on your resume since apparently eating chocolate isn’t one.
Work Lizzy has built internal failsafe systems to cover up potential mistakes. God forbid she suffers from tech enabled fatigue… she has systems, color schemes, to-do lists. She has business Whatsapp where each person is carefully filed into their category, she uses different phone settings (work, do not disturb) based on those lists. She only add the email address of the person she’s sending the email to once the email is ready to go. She has a weekly follow up time block on my calendar which is the same time every week and the time where she jots down reminders throughout the week and then actually follows up on them. The work failsafe systems come from years of observing myself and my weird behaviors. She might not enjoy or like admin or bureaucracy, but she understands she has to build flawless systems to ensure that nobody knows how terrible she is at it.
When I tell you that Other Lizzy cannot do anything related to admin, bureaucracy, or anything that would fall into the “COO” bucket. She cannot. I have witnesses. This has cost me real money like when oops I forgot to allocate to my IRA (again), oops I forgot to roll my 401(k). I almost missed my own wedding due to a combination of work factors and my inability to navigate logistics (I made it don’t worry). My latest ~accomplishments include waiting 4 years to see a doctor about a jaw problem (not good) and 2 years to close a bank account with no money in it in the U.S. I’ll also add that every time you leave Israel you need travel insurance and I travel a ton (how many people do you know who can reach Delta Platinum status all from coach) and have done it all of 0 times. At this point my husband automatically does it since he knows it’s not even on my radar.
This sneaky bitch “Other Lizzy” impacts my life every. single. day. I’ve long wondered if I added up the time wasted by my attempts, plus the actual dollars lost, plus the increased cost of not taking care of something on time what that amount would be. I have to imagine it’d be a lot. And, I don’t own a home, I don’t have a pet, I don’t have a dog.
What I’m suffering from, is tech-driven decision fatigue. Suddenly we chase perfection at the expense of making an incremental step, since access to information is no longer our problem. Maybe if I would have just put money in my IRA in the respective year, I could have invested it later and still received the tax benefit. But, no. I had to decide which stock I wanted to invest in before I even allocated the capital. If I need a green dress to be a bridesmaid, I in theory could go to any website, search green dress, and send it to my apartment, But, no. I need the PERFECT green dress that hits me just so in pictures, and looks great in person too. Is respectful but a tad fashion forward. But, not too fashion forward, I work in finance after all.
I’ve long wondered if there is a better way to manage all those wasted hours in my personal life, and how to stop myself from suffering this tech-driven decision fatigue (okay but is it really my fault!? It’s me vs. BILLIONS of dollars of marketing spend and they just ~get me)… and I’ve come to realize the source of the issue is quality, not quantity. The quantity exists, for any problem I have the tech is available to me. The issue is the quality of the product, how do I know that I can trust the output?
I’ve come to believe that my conclusion from the pandemic driven trends isn’t that software is eating the world, it’s that yes, our lives are increasingly digitized and that it has increased the importance of physical proximity. That the future is human. And, digitally enhanced.