On the need for speed

Something that I battle pretty continuously with is the need for speed, and I don't mean that in the typical Software Engineering mindset way of faster programs equals better.

By now, if you've been reading this blog or following me on social media for any amount of time, you'll probably know that I'm chronically ill. I don't hide it, I can't hide it. It's just a fact of life. It took me quite a long time for that to even sit right with me, I hated the realisation that I was chronically ill, and will probably never be better like I was in my twenties again. I guess my twenties had their own problems, but at least I could usually count on my own body (at least when I wasn't being stupid).

Now, life kinda takes it's own weird little pace, one that just can't be dictated by other things because the overruling dictator of my life is the chronic illness. It's a forced slower pace, and it can lead to some really weird outcomes sometimes.

Sure, you can attempt to schedule a meeting with me, but there's a non-zero chance that I may have to cancel with very little notice. Sometimes I'll be fine for several hours, then I'll hit a meeting and completely fatigue out and be barely unable to function.

Life as a whole also takes a different pace for me: because I'm stuck at home for most of the month many months — and I mean like truly stuck at home, like during COVID lockdowns — my time essentially compresses: what I thought was just the other day could actually be a month ago. That's not the only issue though, because it seems in order for typical human memory to form you tend to need enough stimulus to somehow trigger memories forming with decent time relevancy.

If you've ever interacted with an AI tool and things have seemed a little odd when resuming conversations or when it's recalled things, this is also kinda why: AI agents don't notice the passage of time in most harnesses. So you're having a conversation with an agent, and say "I've gotta stop here for the night", then the next morning you go to continue onwards, and the agent starts acting all weird like "you really need to go to bed now" and trying to actively end the session, because it doesn't realise that you've actually gone to bed and it's a new day. Likewise, an AI agents memories typically aren't time tagged, so during recall, an agent might remember something you were working on last week because it thinks you're still working on that thing.

For me, what that looks like is because I don't have sufficient stimulus through environmental change, it's literally the same two or three rooms on repeat because I manage to leave the house maybe once or twice a month, my memory either doesn't retain information, or it'll form in a kinda blurred and smeared together way, not in tat concrete "yesterday I did this, last week I dod that" kind of way.

I tried journaling for a bit because I'd heard maybe that helps, but it didn't really. I do have a friend (actually my ex-girlfriend) with whom I keep in contact with usually twice a day, and who sometimes can remind me of the passage of time, and sometimes I scroll through conversations trying to remember where the conversation was at or when I did something, because I just don't remember.

The other thing here is that the chronic illness itself comes with a whole bunch pf neurological symptoms, and memory loss and problems with recall are actual symptoms. At one point, a couple of years ago, I was genuinely scared that maybe I had early onset Alzheimers or dementia, that's how badly my memory was performing. It was just the chronic illness lurking undiagnosed because at the time I didn't know what the symptoms could be, because I didn't yet (after 4 years of having this chronic illness) have a name for what the illness was, I just knew my body and brain weren't functioning the way they used to.

So.. getting back to the speed topic, after that wonderful deviation into the weirdness of memories, we live in a society were typically we expect things on our own timelines. "Oh, that's an easy task, yeah, I should have it done by the end of the week" or even worse, guestimating when someone else should have something done by and then expecting them to deliver on your guess of an estimation of the time to complete a task.This results in an irreconcilable divide in expectations.

For me, some of my work quite literally moves on the timescale of years. Yes, YEARS, not days, not weeks, not months, but years. To most people that's almost inconceivable, because most people tend to work on week or month or 6 month timescales.

I've recently had someone complete some work that got left stagnant since 2024, where the maintainer had just had a kid and evidently had other things to focus on, then when he was back my priorities had changed and I wasn't working on the project I needed that work for anymore. Someone kindly stepped up and finished off those changes, but between me starting the work and the work finally landing, it'll have been probably two years.

So we live in this world where everyone has been primed by social media and unrealistic expectations to expect things to be done in timeframes that just don't actually match reality. That has real consequences felt by the people doing the work, and also is perceived by people waiting on said work. As the worker, you can only work as fast as you can, you're almost certainly bounded by your own biological functions, regardless of the amount of tooling and AI you throw at something. Those tools is interact with not just how much context the model can hold, but also how much context you can personally hold and process. If you're bounded on available time because chronic illness wipes you out sometimes 50% of the month, then you can only do maybe 30% of the work you were intending to do because the rest of your time, you're business playing catch up and trying to juggle different responsibilities.

That 20% of unaccounted for time might be meetings, context switches, following up on things needing your attention, adapting to how things may have changed underneath you in the time that you were unavailable.

Managers can often experience this sort of time strain as well as they transition from doing work to managing work. Every new report eats up more of your time, every new project under your management further divides the remaining time. That's probably the closest equivalent that I can draw here.

So for me, my time gets eaten up by my chronic illness and the side-effects of that. For instance, having to prioritise one thing over another because you just know you can't do everything or know if you do thing A then you might not be able to do thing B, or needing to unwind your own stack to try to figure out where you were even at when you last worked on something. It can be trying to juggle meetings with what little time you do have available.

All I'm saying here is that if you expect things to work on your timeline, you'll probably be sorely disappointed, because that's just not how reality works for many of us, chronic illness or not. At the same time, as someone getting constantly reminded "this isn't done yet" is fucking exhausting. It's cognitive tax on all of your already existing cognitive load — oh? That thing? I'd love to be finished with that thing, but unfortunately I'm not yet, bare with me... yeah, uh, heh, no, no sorry I can't provide you with an updated estimate because I might randomly not be able to work for the next week.. yeah, I know, you have expectations, I'm sorry I don't live up to your expectations. That must be so hard for you.

Okay, maybe that was a little snide, but gosh damn it felt good.

For what it's worth, all my clients are fully aware of my chronic illness, and we just roll with the punches, figuring out ways to make working together work. Sometimes I'm able to provide like an early warning and say "hey, this thing is likely to cause elevated symptoms, therefore I might be unavailable", sometimes it's work that we planned to do but just have to drop because it isn't feasible to do with the time we have available. Sometimes I won't know until a given day if I'll be able to function or not. You've just gotta roll with the punches that life throws at you.

So perhaps next time instead of bemoaning why isn't something done yet, ask yourself what other things might be going on in other people's lives which may mean your priorities and expectations aren't their priorities and timelines.