Social Energetics and the end of projects
Last week I briefly mentioned about how the crunch time at the end of a project feels different when you work remotely. Yesterday I found this article from Alex Hutchinson (whose books on endurance and exploration are well worth reading) on why working out with friends feels easier.
when the rowers repeated exactly the same workout alongside their teammates rather than alone in the room, their pain threshold increased twice as much. There was something about the act of communal exercise that altered the brain’s perception of discomfort.
The article carries on going through the work of Emma Cohen on "social energetics" which suggests that synchronicity (e.g. rowers all doing the same movement, or perhaps workmates all hunched over a laptop) and social connection influence your perception of fatigue. That feeling of fatigue is there to stop us pushing ourselves so hard we use up all our energy, but being around people who you care about and who care about you lets you put in more effort without your perception of effort rising.
This could get filed under science proving something we all know intuitively to be true, but I think it gets at the importance of well designed teaming in organisations and, though it does pain me slightly to say it, the importance of being physically present with each other at work.
Nike + ChatGPT and a missed opportunity
I'm not normally one for hot takes but this speaks to my love of running and technology and I spent a bunch of time earlier in the year exploring ChatGPT apps for a UK retailer so here we go...
Nike launched this shoe finder app for ChatGPT. It's super simple and looks/feels amazing. BUT, the point of a ChatGPT app is that ChatGPT has a bunch of context about you and you can then give it the ability to take some action for you using that knowledge. My ChatGPT knows loads about my running because I used to use it to sense check my training plans, but the Nike app ignores all that and makes me fill out a form.
This second image is me asking the Claude Code instance I have set up as a coach (ask me later) what Nike shoes it would recommend. It is certainly not as fun to use but its recommendation is rooted in my actual training and my injury history. It's great.
So this could be Nike testing ChatGPT as a channel and/or getting out an MVP, or perhaps avoiding customer complaints from errant ChatGPT recommendations, or perhaps it's not aimed at anyone serious enough about running to talk to an LLM chat bot about it. But I do hope that it evolves into a tool that uses the strengths of LLM chatbots: that rich, personal context.
Personal software > platforms
I've been rebuilding my website over the last couple of weeks with the help of Claude Code. Yesterday I had it refactor some old stuff I had coded all by myself(!) and bring it into the site. So now my data auralisation experiments have a home again!
It's things like that that remind me why I think it's important to have your own space on the internet one that is designed and built to your specifications and not those of a platform. It's fun to be able to shape and tweak something to work exactly how you want to.
This is the promise of personal software – custom, deeply personal apps spun up by agents to help you do what you want in the way you want to do it. I'm bullish on this, even if the history of the internet tells us that it will probably be done on a big tech owned platform.
An ending, and another ending begins
As my last post hinted at I finished up a project at the beginning of this week. Except it hasn't quite finished after all. A recalibration of output means I need to recalibrate my energy and get set up for another fairly intense two week push.