Your Workflow is Already Easy Enough

Photo by Smartworks Coworking on Unsplash

It seems that everywhere you look, someone is publishing an article about how to make your “workflow” easier. Removing bottlenecks, reducing management, scalability, and increasing automation. This type of talk has infiltrated virtually every industry, from software development, to writing books.

By “easy workflow”, they mean to diminish inputs into automated projects that involve as little human maintenance as possible. Reduce the effort that it takes to complete a project. Normally, this is not a bad thing. However, sometimes we can “optimize” too much.

What good could possibly come out of optimizing the world out of something until the it is void of quality and purpose?

Do we not have enough streamlined, optimized workflows as it is?

I’m a writer and I have to research a lot of things. Researching how to be more lazy at doing my job isn’t one of them. The “frameworks” develop on their own. These are things that are not going to have a benefit from using software. Even in 2006, we had most of the software that we would ever need to be productive.

What tech is putting out there right now is devoid of innovation. They realize that they hit a plataeu in the 2010s, and now they are actually trying to sell code to buyers like it’s a product with unit economics.

Lines of code can help us innovate, but they are not, themselves, the product. Python was an innovation in software, but python itself was never a commodity. Companies did not stamp “made with Python” on the package of any software, because what you used to make something isn’t a benefit to anybody but you. You don’t knit a sweater and then sell it at the market with “made with a needle”.

However, this is just what software companies do with artificial intelligence. They use it as a placeholder feature for a new version of a product when there really isn’t anything new in the version.

This cognitive offloading slips into culture.

Every now and then, you hear or read someone make a comment about how films, books, and other media just don’t seem as good as they used to. Why? We want it out fast.

Remember when a movie would be released at the theater, and then it would be months until you would be able to rent it on VHS or DVD?

There is something to that. It’s called anticipation. People waited months for the iPhone, the PS2, and Star Wars sequals to come out. They would camp outside of shops until they opened to anticipate these things. This didn’t do anything but make the product more successful. People don’t do these things anymore. There are two reasons why. The first reason is that people are used to these things and their novelties don’t produce the same sensory “dopamine” that they once had. The second reason is because of the lack of “new” things that are produced. Technology seems to have hit its innovative peak with artificial intelligence — not because artificial intelligence is that good, but because of “shiny object syndrome”.

In the 20th Century, marketing types were often capable of being creative. Likewise, creative types could understand marketing. These days, creative types refuse to learn how to promote in fear that this makes them “consumerist”. This is why their creations often go undiscovered and disappear into the internet.

Likewise, marketing types refuse to be creative, because they believe that they are math people.

Blame society for making that bifurcation. Those who are reading who are from the United States realize how our communities are diligent to file all of its members into the “book type”, “math type”, “creative type”, or “jock”. You can’t be a combination of any of those things. Doesn’t happen. Anymore, at least.

They like artificial intelligence because they are addicted to cognitive offloading that often comes from being people who are over reliant about software.

These types let the statistics determine the decisions about what to do with the product. It has come to the point where conference rooms, once full of people discussing important product features have decided to just let the dashboard do that part. There is no limit to their cognitive offloading. They will cognitive offload to the point where they literally do not have a job description anymore.

This is why they like artificial intelligence so much, and talk about it like they just made a rich friend—they can kick back and order takeout and let the “math” determine the decisions.

Marketing staff doesn’t care. They want things done fast. Fast product design. Fast product management. Quick release. Little build up. And this is why everything looks so cheap and unimaginative. The go-with-what-is-proven-to-work does have a point of diminishing returns. Taking shortcuts with research and development, automating brainstorming, and cutting out the ideation process will just create low-quality “stuff”.

Don’t we have enough low-quality stuff being pushed for us to buy?

It’s not that optimization and reduced workflows are “bad”. It is that they reduce quality. Getting things done is more important than getting the right thing done. Good stuff usually takes some effort to make.

Check out my Medium at Medium.com/@chaunceybeacon