🍪🥄 Cookies and Spoons

🍪🥄🍪🥄🍪🥄🍪🥄🍪🥄🍪

Of late, I have been spending a lot of spoons* on re-arranging my back end technology. A few things came to my attention, including a large upcoming renewal bill... while at the same time my concern for data residency has been growing.

In the process, I discovered a new metric: the cookie. 🍪

Not the kind that gets stored on your computer to track your visits to websites.

The kind that are yum to eat: crispy, buttery, rich, indulgent and sweet. That lovely moment of the first cookie after a long elimination diet with no added sweeteners at all (still waiting for that to end, over here...)

The Cookie🍪™ (😄) is a metric that measures how much cognitive friction a decision eliminates, or, mathematically, how many spoons it restores to the energy cache.

It's not a reward, it's relief.

One of the things that has become very clear in the process is that I am not pulled toward All the Shiny Features. In fact, I'm moving away from a couple of pieces that have many more shiny features than I want, need or use, which clutter up the use of the platform, and cost a lot (of time, energy, money, or all three) without earning their keep.

This all started with the relief I felt when I cancelled two subscriptions. I said, off-handedly, 'that earned 6 cookies.'

My email program, for example: when I send one of my hilarious, mind-altering, amazing emails (😄) I simply have to copy an old 'campaign' to drafts (c'mon, seriously, it's just an email, people!) and then open it, change the name, write the subject line and subheading, click 'edit email' (still not there yet!) and then make sure all the links work (mystery behind the platform, sometimes they break for no discernible reason which make it so I can't even save the draft until I figure out which of the half-dozen or so links it might be this time), write it, go find a couple of images to go with it on one of the royalty-free image sharing sites, download it, upload it, resize it (for each image), select it and link the photo credit, then click to preview the draft, close the preview, save it, go back to the screen where I pick who it sends to, send a preview to myself, then pick the date and time to have it send 'automatically' and click the schedule button. Then, a few hours later, I read the sample email, realize there's a typo or some of my classic 'mental shorthand' that doesn't make sense to anyone but me, or an image didn't come through, so I have to go back, click 'unschedule' and re-open the draft, click 'edit email,' change the mess, preview it, save the replacement, pick the people to send it to again, and reschedule it and click 'schedule' again. Easy peasy. What is that, 11 spoons?

Who designed this?

Every step before writing is friction.
Every decision to make, every link to check, every screen to load, every field to fill or confirm before sending is friction.
Every click away to a different platform (or a completely different program) is friction.

Individually, they're tiny, quick, and so embedded in the whole system that they're 'just how it's done' ...

Yet, they accumulate.

How long does it take to get to the point where I can write an email and how many steps is it to schedule it to send, and how many of those steps are repeated to remove a single unintended S on the end of one word? Time. Friction. Repetitive decisions and repetitive clicks.

Spoons being used, over and over, before the task can even be started, much less completed.

This new platform, I type, pick an image or two with a very simple search field, resize it so it's not the whole screen and sometimes crop it, preview the draft, close the preview, click the publish button, select the recipients, and the time to send and I'm done. If I come back a few hours later to look at it, or notice an issue in the email I get, I open the article, make the modifications and click 'update.'

And, true to the Spoons Metric, because it uses so much less mental energy to just write and publish the freakin' article, I've already written more of them in a month than emails I've sent in the last year on the other platform.

More cookies for Linda! 🍪🍪🍪

Why?

Because it takes far less cognitive load, doing things that are – at least for me– wholly unrelated to writing the article.

I'm not maximizing productivity (although that has happened incidentally.)

I'm maximizing my available humanity.

Designing Architecture for Humans

Through this month, I've created a collated stack of technology that all, effectively, stays in its own lane: a scheduler that schedules meetings and nothing else. A website that publishes (hi there!) and nothing else. An email newsletter sending platform that only sends email.

I started out looking for the best software alternatives to what I was already paying for.

Then I started looking at the architecture of my whole technology stack – for each piece to work together smoothly, and stay in its designated lane, and not trap me (or my data) in a 'but we do everything' platform with decreasing features and increasing prices (anyone out there still using Microsoft365 will recognize this profit-driven activity...)

Then I realized that I was looking for decisions that made my body relax. Essentially: 'how many future spoons did this decision give me back?' Cookies 🍪🍪.

Cookies aren't rewards for 'doing it right' or even 'saving all the money,' or the Western world's favourite: more productivity. Cookies are about how humans recognize good architecture before they can articulate it.

🍪 A cookie is the observable phenomenon.

The Cookie Metric

A Cookie (🍪) is the unit of value created when an architectural improvement permanently reduces friction, cost, complexity, or dependence.

Cookies are not awarded for:

• new features
• shiny interfaces
• AI-powered synergistic synergy™

Cookies are awarded for:

• deleting subscriptions
• simplifying systems
• reducing lock-in
• improving data ownership and residency
• making future decisions easier
• freeing mental bandwidth

Most architecture is evaluated using technical metrics: feature lists, performance, scalability, cost, uptime, productivity, clicks, hits, conversions.

But humans don't experience architecture through benchmarks. They experience it through relief.

Sometimes that relief is so tangible that it deserves cookies.

Good architecture doesn't merely solve today's problem.

It quietly eliminates the use of tomorrow's spoons.

Every subscription you no longer manage.
Every integration you no longer babysit.
Every renewal you no longer dread.
Every platform that knows where it ends.

Or, from a parenting viewpoint:

Every shirt you no longer have to launder, fold, put away.
Every toy that never gets underfoot again.
Every activity you never have to gather things and get out of the house on time for.
Every developmental stage you no longer feel the need to push.

Each one returns a little cognitive bandwidth. A spoon or two.🥄🥄

And those tiny returns compound, one chocolate chip at a time 🍪.

You see, what may appear to be lazy from the outside was never me objecting to complexity, or even learning complex and challenging things.

It was my whole energy field objecting to repetitive unnecessary complexity.

Good architecture doesn't make me a better machine.

It stops me from having to be the machine.
___________
*Spoons: a handy metaphor for the mental and physical energy needed to perform a task, often used to explain the problem for invisible disabilities, like this:

Suppose everyone starts the day with 10 spoons, and every task uses up one or more, depending on the energy that it requires. For most people, getting up, getting ready and leaving for work, including breakfast and maybe doing some dishes, uses a spoon.

For someone with an invisible disability, getting out of bed might take 2 spoons, showering another 3, getting dressed 2 more.

For most people, getting out the door to work uses up 1/10th (or a lot less) of their daily mental and physical energy.

For someone who doesn't become fully restored after sleep (which may mean they start the day with 6 spoons instead of 10), who struggles with independent movement, whose mitochondria just doesn't make energy the same way, might use up more than half of their daily allotment before they reach for the doorknob.

Which has resulted in 'I don't have the spoons for that' entering everyday conversation.