When coding, your brain operates in a high-speed junction: rework the logic of this class, plug into this interface, automate this metric, use this compression scheme and file format…These thoughts enter, are considered, and decided upon like lightning. We are in cache memory. This is the flow state we read about.

The minute you work with other people this screeches to a crawl. Now we’re making roundtrip network calls. This Slow Down Is The Cost Of Working With Other People.

I had a revelation recently about this.

Any representation of a successful business-person you’ve seen - with emails and video calls, getting opinions and sign-ons, putting decks together to convince coworkers of an approach, tailoring delivery to their audience, flourishing the last details on a chart - is mitigating this cost, is mitigating the cost of coworking.

As someone who has chased a fluent, effortless mastery of things, the realization that this cost has been present in all the abstractions of business I use to think surprised me.

I shouldn’t associate the sluggish pace of coworking with unproductivity. How can I, when all the business-people I see specifically dedicate their time to it?