mental-health

Authenticity is not a weakness, and it shouldn’t be your downfall.

cantechit Uncategorized , , , ,

A break from doing the tech to working in tech….

I’m me. People who actually know me, know me. I’m nowhere near perfect. I have a ton of flaws, and over the years I’ve tried (sometimes hard, sometimes not hard enough) to become a better version of myself. Sometimes it’s two steps forward and ten steps back. Sometimes I catch myself mid-mistake and think, “Why the hell did I just do that?” and I’m genuinely pissed at myself for it.

The reality is I push. I’ve always pushed. As a kid I tested every limit, and as an adult I still do. Other people seem to have learned the softer edges of that impulse. I know the edges exist. I just… don’t always stop at them. It’s not ignorance. It’s wiring.

I’m driven to do big things. I get a lot of FOMO. I’m not a university or college grad, and that fact has sat in the back of my head for decades like a quiet countdown timer. The fear that at any minute the career could end and I’d be back doing whatever random job I could find. When I screw up, that specific fear hits hardest. I still wake up some mornings thinking “I’m getting fired tomorrow.” People say “You’d get hired anywhere.” Ever actually tried that in a competitive space when the narrative isn’t clean? It’s not the soft landing people imagine.

At my core, the thing that cuts both ways is authenticity. Wearing my emotions on my sleeve. Being exactly who I am in the moment. That same authenticity is what gets me in trouble sometimes, and it’s the thing I worry will one day burn the whole thing to the ground.

We live in a world where one mistake, one slip, one sentence said out loud or typed too fast can’t be taken back. The permanent record is real now. Even writing this I’m sitting here asking myself “Should I really put this out there?” or “Maybe I should just keep quiet.” – I have colleagues who made one mistake too far, and an angry mob turned friend to foe, and did everything they could to burn that person career and life to the ground. I have seen some ugly ugly things done by angry internet mobs against people who made a bad mistake. Humans make mistakes, it doesn’t make some of what I have seen in the past ok.

Pick any of the thousand diagnoses floating around. I’m sure I have a little bit of all of them. I just think it’s the human condition. The drive, the FOMO, the self-doubt, the occasional emotional overshoot — they’re not unique. Research keeps showing that something like 70% of professionals deal with imposter feelings at some point. Even people who look like they have it completely figured out still hear the same voice.

Brené Brown has spent years studying this exact tension. She describes authenticity as “a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real.” She also warns that trading authenticity for safety often exacts its own cost — anxiety, resentment, a kind of quiet grief. Vulnerability is the birthplace of the good stuff: connection, courage, creativity. But she never pretends it’s risk-free. I feel this to my very core.

I’ve been a people leader for about 15 years now, and the one thing I keep learning is that leaders never stop learning how to be better leaders. Two people I keep coming back to are Brené Brown and Marcus Buckingham. They come at it from different angles, but they both point at the same hard truth.

If you want authenticity and vulnerability on your team, you have an obligation to respect it, honour it, even cherish it. And if you’re going to do that, you also have an obligation to be prepared to pull the chute when someone goes over the line — and to do it in a respectful, leadership way that helps them rein it in. The key is not kicking them when they’re down. Being too safe, as Brené talks about, creates its own problems. We want our people to be vulnerable, which means we have to show them it’s actually okay to be. That requires creating the conditions where they can drop the armor without getting punished for it.

There’s another version of this that doesn’t look like punishment but still wears people down. Someone once called it “toxic coaching” — the leader who is constantly pushing people to be better, even when something is already good. If you catch yourself saying “that’s great, but…” all the time, that might not actually be great. Sometimes good things need to just be good things. Constant developmental pressure, even when well-intentioned, can feel like the armor never gets to come off. People stop bringing their real selves because they know the next sentence is always going to be the improvement note.

Marcus Buckingham has always pushed the idea that great managers don’t treat everyone the same. They see the individual. They focus on what people do best and help them lean into it. Authenticity isn’t some soft luxury — it’s the only sustainable way to get real contribution. People can smell when you’re faking it. As he puts it, if you’re faking your beliefs, they can smell it, and they don’t want to follow it. The same applies upward. I want to be authentic because being fake is exhausting. It’s like a six-year-old’s lie that just keeps compounding until you can’t even remember the first one, and now you’re in real trouble.

But authenticity only works if the people above you have enough humility and compassion to meet it. If you want vulnerability from your people, you have to lead with compassion. You can’t constantly brow-beat them — or constantly coach them — and then act surprised when they put the armor back on. Who we are is how we lead. If the environment only rewards the polished, controlled, or perpetually improving version, that’s the version you’ll get — and you’ll lose the real contribution that comes with the unfiltered one. This will require real cultural change in organizations to achieve.

So what do you do with that?

I don’t have a clean system. All I really have is the same imperfect loop most of us run: notice it, feel the regret, try to do better next time. Name the pattern when it shows up. Lean harder on the people who already know the full version of you — the ones who can say “Hey man, I get it, you’re upset, that’s okay” without making it a referendum on your character. My best friend does that for me. He knows me better than almost anyone, and I suspect it’s because he’s wired the same way. He is my 1000% safe space, he’s the one I can call 24×7, who will drop whatever and listen to me. Now don’t get me wrong, he won’t sugar coat, or tell me it’s ok if I did something wrong – but as he says “Let’s do the floor work”. He knows who he is, and I cherish him like no other human on earth for being my friend.

And yes — sometimes when things get frustrating or the pile gets too high, I catch myself thinking “Can’t I just get someone else to do this?” because I’ve had enough. That’s human too. The work is learning when that thought is a legitimate signal to rest or ask for help, and when it’s just the old escape hatch. Adulting is hard.

If you’ve had a bad interaction with someone — personal or professional — try giving them a little grace. You don’t know the full weight they’re carrying that day. Most of us are doing the best we can with the wiring we were given, and the scoreboard rarely looks as clean from the inside as it does from the outside.

I’m still trying. That’s all I’ve got.

AI Was Supposed to Give Me My Time Back. Spoiler: It Didn’t. And Honestly, I’m Part of the Problem.

cantechit Uncategorized , , , ,

Let’s do the math out loud.

I’m shipping somewhere between 10x and 20x more output than I was two years ago. Internal tools that would’ve taken a contracted dev team six weeks now take me an afternoon. Research that used to mean three days of tab-hopping is a 20-minute prompt chain. Whole apps — real, working ones — get vibed into existence on a Saturday while my kid eats cereal.

By every productivity logic ever invented, I should be working two days a week.

I’m working closer to seven if you add up work and personal projects.

What the hell happened? AI was supposed to be the thing that finally gave us the time back. Instead it gave us more work to do, more things to chase, more rabbit holes to fall into, more shiny new tools to evaluate, more agents to babysit. The output went up. The hours didn’t go down. If anything, they went up too.

I keep telling myself I’ll write less this week. I keep not doing that. Rathole, I have been asked why I stopped writing – I used to do it more, but as I always say – I’ll write when I feel like I have something to say – lately it’s becoming clear in this series I do, if nothing else it’s cathartic for me to write it down even if I am not sure if someone is listening

Henry Ford Already Proved This Was Possible — In 1926

Here’s the part that drives me a little crazy.

On May 1, 1926, Henry Ford cut his factory workweek from six days to five — 40 hours instead of the usual 50-60 — and kept everyone’s pay the same. He didn’t do it because he was a saint (he absolutely wasn’t). He did it because he’d been quietly studying his own workforce and found something the rest of industry didn’t want to hear: tired workers made more mistakes, had more accidents, and produced less per hour than well-rested ones.

Ford famously said it was “high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege.” Productivity went UP after the change. Loyalty went up. Turnover went down. Other manufacturers grudgingly followed. Twelve years later the Fair Labor Standards Act made the 40-hour week federal law in the US.

That’s the model. Less hours, same (or more) output, better humans. Proven a century ago with a stopwatch and a Model T assembly line.

So now, in 2026, when I have a tool that legitimately makes me 10-20x faster at most of what I do — by the Henry Ford logic, my workweek should be collapsing. Not just to four days. To two.

And it’s not.

Why It’s Not Happening (And Won’t)

I went looking for the answer in a few places. It’s not one thing. It’s a stack.

Microsoft’s own data is the kicker. Their 2025 Work Trend Index surveyed 31,000 workers across 31 countries and crunched trillions of M365 productivity signals. The headline result: knowledge workers are now interrupted on average every two minutes — 275 times a day. This is entirely my life, I could write entire articles about how I don’t do my best work when I am task switching. One in three say the pace of the last five years has made it impossible to keep up. 53% of leaders demand productivity increase; 80% of the workforce reports they don’t have the time or energy to do effective work. Microsoft literally calls it the “Infinite Workday”. Their own warning is brutal and quotable: we risk using AI to accelerate a broken system.

Which is exactly what’s happening. We didn’t redesign the workday around AI. We just bolted AI onto the existing infinite one and made the meter spin faster.

Then there’s Jevons. I mentioned this in my Cisco AI Summit post — Sam Altman flagged it on stage. The Jevons Paradox is the 19th-century observation that when something becomes more efficient to use, we don’t use less of it; we use way more. Coal got cheaper, coal consumption exploded. Compute got cheaper, compute consumption exploded. Now AI is making knowledge work cheaper, and Box CEO Aaron Levie went viral last December arguing the same thing applies: cheaper intelligence won’t shrink work, it’ll expand it. The bar for “what counts as a deliverable” just keeps moving up.

French consultant Bertrand Duperrin nailed it in a February 2026 piece on AI work intensification: if nothing stops, then everything gets added. AI becomes a machine for densifying, for multiplying iterations, for expanding the scope of what’s required. Less a transformation of work than an intensification of it.

That’s me. That’s exactly me. I’m not doing less; I’m doing the same five-day week with five times the surface area.

And the historical pattern says don’t expect this to change. Back in 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote a famous essay called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” predicting a 15-hour workweek by 2030. He wasn’t crazy — he just assumed humans would bank productivity gains into leisure. A 2022 LSE revisit of the prediction found the productivity gains absolutely happened (real GDP per capita more than quadrupled), but we didn’t take them as time off. We took them as more stuff, bigger houses, longer retirements. Lifetime leisure DID rise about 58% in the UK — but almost all of it from people living longer in retirement, not from working less while employed.

We’re four years from Keynes’ 2030 deadline. The average full-time worker is nowhere near 15 hours. The Henry Ford 40-hour week, set up for factory floors a hundred years ago, is somehow still the ceiling and the floor for knowledge work designed for digital agents.

So the world had its chance — multiple chances — and chose more consumption over more time, every single time.

The Confession: I Could. I Won’t.

Here’s the part where I have to be honest, because this whole post would be a cop-out otherwise.

I’m not just a victim of the system. I’m one of the people running the meter.

Could I do my actual “value” work in two days and then sit on my hands for three? Honestly, probably yes. METR’s May 2026 survey of technical workers puts the median self-reported speed change from AI at 3x and median value-of-work change at 1.4–2x. I’m self-aware enough to know I’m above the median — building with multiple agents in parallel, vibe-coding tools in hours that used to take weeks. The math is the math. I could compress.

But I won’t. And not because some boss is making me — I’m in a fairly senior role and I have a lot of control over how I spend my hours. The reasons are uglier and more personal than that:

  1. I’m addicted to the capability. I wrote about this in AI Companies Are Straight-Up Drug Dealers. When the billing glitch killed my agentic access for two days I felt actual withdrawal. Sitting on my hands for three days a week while I have a Claude Opus session sitting RIGHT THERE that could be building something? Not happening.
  2. The competition resets the bar instantly. I wrote about this too in Falling Behind. The second I deliver an internal tool in two days that used to take six weeks, that becomes the new normal. Next week’s ask is bigger. There’s no going back to the slower pace because the world I work in already adjusted to the faster one.
  3. I want to build cool stuff. Two days a week of work means three more days of “what should we build today?” That’s not rest. That’s just a different kind of building. I’m also building my own stuff on my hours and days off.. Disconnecting is harder than ever.
  4. My brain is buzzing along with the GPU. I wrote about this in The AI Acceleration Trap — the VRM hum, the insomnia, the skipped meals. I KNOW it’s costing me. I keep going anyway. That’s not a productivity story. That’s an addiction story dressed up in productivity clothes.

And here’s the kicker — there’s a 12-person software startup called Convictional that actually did the Henry Ford move in mid-2025. Moved to a 32-hour, four-day workweek. No pay cut. They credited AI absorbing enough manual work to make it possible. One company. Twelve people. That’s the entire counter-evidence I could find. Nobody else is volunteering this. Bosses won’t. Boards won’t. Investors won’t. Jevons won’t. And honestly? Neither will I. If I do it, someone else will be glad to keep the 40 hour.

So What Do We Do? Honestly… Probably Nothing.

This is the part where I’m supposed to give you the five-point action plan to reclaim your time, and I’m not going to insult you with one. I don’t have one. The 5-day, 40-hour week survived the Industrial Revolution, electrification, the PC, the spreadsheet, the smartphone, the internet, the gig economy, and a global pandemic. It’s not going to fall to AI either. The only thing that changes is how much we cram into those five days.

It’s a little like the line in rally — there’s a place on every stage where you KNOW the smart move is to lift off the throttle, scrub some speed, and bank a clean exit. And yet the same drivers who know that, including me on Fire Access Road 507 with absolutely no prize money on the line, keep their foot in it. Because the throttle feels good and lifting feels like losing. The math says lift. The hands keep pressing.

So I’m not lifting. I’ll aim for the traction from the ruts like Crazy Leo taught m, I’m probably going to keep pushing 6-7 days a week. I’ll keep my guardrails from the Acceleration Trap post — protect sleep, eat actual meals, take walks, keep the agents on a leash so they don’t burn through credits or my nervous system overnight. But the workweek itself? It’s not getting shorter for me, and unless your boss is Henry Ford reincarnated as a 2026 CEO with a stopwatch and a conscience, it’s probably not getting shorter for you either.

May as well enjoy the ride. Just don’t ignore the buzzing.

Your turn: Are you doing 5-10x the work in the same hours and getting away with it, or have you actually carved out time back? Did your employer give it to you, or did you take it? Or are you like me — could compress your week to two days and refusing to, because the dopamine and the FOMO are louder than the math? Drop it in the comments. I’m reading every one.

(Catch up on the AI builder series if you’re new: Falling Behind → AI is Underpriced (But Not For Long) → GitHub Copilot Price Jump → Drug Dealers → The AI Acceleration Trap → and now this one.)