💎 Friday Gems (Disappearing Lunch Breaks,AI Vampire, Consume while Consuming)
How well do you understand the systems you work within?
Hello dear readers,
Another week of AI everywhere all the time and the daily chaos brought on by the current US regime. It’s enough to take what was low level anxiety about our future and push it into our faces.
This seems to be the norm and the speed at which we are moving and consuming can dial our anxieties up to max.
But there is one tool we can use to fight back, our intentionality.
We can choose what we give our attention to. Instead of being swept away by it all we can be intentional in what we work on, how we work, what we consume, and how we use the information coming at us in a thoughtful and mindful way.
Never forget, we hold the power!
On to the this week’s gems!
Today's Gems
Work: Is anyone taking lunch breaks anymore?
The Mindful Designer: The AI Vampire
Mindfulness: 38 ways to create more than you consume, while you consume
Work
Is anyone taking lunch breaks anymore?
Humans have been hungry and time-strapped for as long as we’ve existed. So why haven’t we sanctified the concept of a lunch break like folks in Europe, Latin and South America, or China?
Will the real lunch-skipper please stand up?
Ok, I admit I’m one of those who doesn’t take lunch. I work from home and can’t even remember when the last time I took an hour lunch. Usually I’m eating smaller snacks during the day so I take a quick meal around 12. From the surveys mentioned in this article, it looks like I’m in good company.
Remote work allows us to complete various at-home tasks in our life with greater ease and flexibility (laundry, quick appointments, caring for pets), but it has damaged the dignity of the lunch hour.
This is a good reminder to take the break we need during the day instead of plowing through and not taking care of ourselves first.
57 percent of participants also said they focus better on complex tasks after even a 30-minute lunch break.
Our minds need the break from the screen and the desk to get up, move around, and enjoy a precious moment we have every right to enjoy.
That does it! My goal for today is to take a 30 minute lunch break and not feel guilty about it. ✊🏽
If you work from home, do you take a break for lunch or has it disappeared for you as well? Let me know in the comments!
Source: Eater
The Mindful Designer
The AI Vampire
With a 10x boost, if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they’re fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers’ worth of value.
In the Eater story above, the author mentioned the “curse of competence”, which is when even more work is piled onto those who demonstrate efficiency. That sums up the challenge with the efficiency gains form AI.
AI may make us efficient but at what cost? Burnout, confusion, stress, not to mention being out of a job because who actually gets to keep our efficiency gains?
Hint: It’s not you or me.
Companies are capitalistic extraction machines and literally don’t know how to ease up.
The AI train is barreling through our workday, steamrolling over anything and everything in its way but we are not helpless.
We can control how we act and react.
We can step back to take care of ourselves first and foremost.
Do something without AI. Close the computer. Go be a human.
Source: Medium
Mindfulness
38 ways to create more than you consume, while you consume
the average person processes around 74GB of information a day; that’s comparable to watching 16 movies daily.
That is a lot of information that we are exposed to. From the time we wake up to the time we go to bed it is estimated that we spend almost 7 hours of our day consuming. But how much of it do we actually retain?
I love this post by artist, Tuğba Avci, in her newsletter as slow as possible, where she provides a practical guide to slowing down our media consumption. To become more intentional with what we let in to our minds, to notice more, to think more, to consider more.
The mantra Tuğba shares is:
Create more than you consume while you consume.
While all of the ideas Tuğba shares are great, I want to focus on a single action I can start with and this is the one that I will work on next:
Active album listening. I will not feel guilty of breaking out of a playlist to learn about an artist and listen to their whole album, so I can remember what I consume and appreciate the creative acts.
Source: As Slow As Possible
Drunken noodles are so-called not because the recipe has alcohol, but because they’re so hot you’ll get drunk chugging beer trying to soothe the burn!
From the recipe comments for Drunken Noodles 🍜
Did one of the Friday Gems resonate with you? Please consider commenting, restacking, or sharing it with a friend. This is the simplest and most generous ways to support creative work.
It only takes a moment, but it makes a real difference.❤️
That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.
In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽
