“Battle-short” is a mental health metaphor conveyed to me by SG some time ago. SG is exceedingly competent and has done lots of very cool projects that for the sake of anonymity I will not detail here (but she, and they, are so so cool y’all), and cares a lot about Getting Shit Done, especially when the Shit is Important or Valuable; frequently, the Shit has a hard deadline of some kind, or some urgency to it. This poses a problem: we are all finite creatures, and even when working towards some genuinely important and desirable goal or attacking some thorny but necessary task, we might run up against constraints of time or energy or willpower. Sometimes, we don’t actually have the time or space we need to take breaks and rest consistently - maybe if we do that we’ll be beaten to the punch, or it’ll mean we take so long that something precious in the world will be lost permanently. A tempting solution would be to buckle down maximally hard, grit your teeth, commit yourself over-fully to the task at hand, and battle-short yourself. This is only sometimes a good idea and not to be done lightly.
To talk about metaphorical mental-health-sacrifice battle-short, I need to talk about actual literal battle-short first. Suppose you’re on a modern military base, and you’re kept safe from the enemy by all sorts of electrically-powered machines - electric fencing, cameras, telecom equipment from radio to internet, maybe even automated defense turrets, the whole nine yards. Normally, you want for those systems to be able to fail safely: if some fencing causes a short in the system, ideally what happens is a fuse blows in your fusebox to avoid a potentially harmful overload, hot wires, and maybe even a fire. A fire in your electrical system would be quite bad! But suddenly, a report comes in from central command - the enemy is coming in force, and they’ll be on your doorstep in hours, maybe minutes. In such circumstances, you probably care more about your electric fence and telecom and such working than you care about your motors overheating or your fusebox literally catching fire - you can put out a fire, but if your electric fence or telecoms are down, or your turrets can’t shoot, then that’s actively more dangerous to you than some damaged equipment or a shed burning down. As such, you literally weld a copper bar in place over the fuse, ensuring that even if the fuse blows, the equipment will still function, even if doing so causes overload damage to the circuit or even the equipment. The day is saved and the enemy repelled, but at the cost of some permanent damage to equipment and a lot of extra maintenance and repair to be done. At least the base wasn’t overrun, though.
Maybe you can see where this is going for the mental health metaphor. Some deadline looms in your future, or some crisis threatens you, and for one reason or another, you don’t have the time or the resources or the reliable assistance to make an ordinary job of it. Worse yet, for whatever reason failure is not actually an option, and probably neither is half-assing it. So… great! You can get things done just by locking in hard enough, committing yourself fully to the task at hand, foregoing explicit leisure and explicit meal breaks and relaxation time and maybe sleep, and generally taking off as many safeties and stripping away as many best-practice limiters from your workflow as you can manage. So, to ask the obvious question: why is this a bad idea to do repeatedly?
First and foremost, it’s worth noting that when you battle-short yourself, you’re taking out a hefty loan against your future productivity - and happiness, and mental health, and quite possibly physical health - in exchange for a bit more of a boost right now. Be very clear: that loan will come due, and the interest rate can be ruinous, especially if left to compound for too long. Another way of looking at this sizable drawback is the proverb about machines - that if you don’t schedule downtime and maintenance, that downtime and maintenance will be scheduled for you by force majeure.
There’s also an argument that this post is one big infohazard, because now, having read it, you might go try to battle-short yourself to get ahead on (doubtless vitally important) work. I don’t recommend doing this, not least because it seems like not everyone can do it straightforwardly. But more importantly: battle-shorting is something of a Faustian bargain; having done it once and discovered that you can get away with it - and even seem to be ahead on margin! - you might be tempted into forcing yourself into it repeatedly in the name of some noble goal. Again, don’t do this. Some part of you will see only that you’re working yourself to the bone and never seeing any near-term fruits of your labor at all, and will rebel violently against the terms you’ve dictated to yourself; we might think of this as a generator finally giving way, or a labor strike sprouting from repeated grievances, or a declaration of bankruptcy and default. You will breach a trust between aspects of yourself which will be costly and painful to get back.
The whole dynamic is a major way in which burnout can happen. (Maybe I’ll talk about others eventually.) Each time you battle-short yourself, you fall further behind on vital maintenance and stocks of vital spiritual nutrients - another metaphor I’ll discuss in a later post - and that can look to be going just fine for a while until very suddenly it’s not fine at all, and not only is the metaphorical fusebox on fire, but all your generators are broken, the stock of spare parts has run out, and half your soldiers have deserted. Don’t end up in that state. Don’t battle-short yourself, even if it feels virtuous, unless you absolutely have to. Hopefully now that you have a name for this practice you can recognize it and avoid it or at least be extremely judicious.
(With thanks to @Lucie Philippon and @johnswentworth for encouragement and feedback, among many.)
“Battle-short” is a mental health metaphor conveyed to me by SG some time ago. SG is exceedingly competent and has done lots of very cool projects that for the sake of anonymity I will not detail here (but she, and they, are so so cool y’all), and cares a lot about Getting Shit Done, especially when the Shit is Important or Valuable; frequently, the Shit has a hard deadline of some kind, or some urgency to it. This poses a problem: we are all finite creatures, and even when working towards some genuinely important and desirable goal or attacking some thorny but necessary task, we might run up against constraints of time or energy or willpower. Sometimes, we don’t actually have the time or space we need to take breaks and rest consistently - maybe if we do that we’ll be beaten to the punch, or it’ll mean we take so long that something precious in the world will be lost permanently. A tempting solution would be to buckle down maximally hard, grit your teeth, commit yourself over-fully to the task at hand, and battle-short yourself. This is only sometimes a good idea and not to be done lightly.
To talk about metaphorical mental-health-sacrifice battle-short, I need to talk about actual literal battle-short first. Suppose you’re on a modern military base, and you’re kept safe from the enemy by all sorts of electrically-powered machines - electric fencing, cameras, telecom equipment from radio to internet, maybe even automated defense turrets, the whole nine yards. Normally, you want for those systems to be able to fail safely: if some fencing causes a short in the system, ideally what happens is a fuse blows in your fusebox to avoid a potentially harmful overload, hot wires, and maybe even a fire. A fire in your electrical system would be quite bad! But suddenly, a report comes in from central command - the enemy is coming in force, and they’ll be on your doorstep in hours, maybe minutes. In such circumstances, you probably care more about your electric fence and telecom and such working than you care about your motors overheating or your fusebox literally catching fire - you can put out a fire, but if your electric fence or telecoms are down, or your turrets can’t shoot, then that’s actively more dangerous to you than some damaged equipment or a shed burning down. As such, you literally weld a copper bar in place over the fuse, ensuring that even if the fuse blows, the equipment will still function, even if doing so causes overload damage to the circuit or even the equipment. The day is saved and the enemy repelled, but at the cost of some permanent damage to equipment and a lot of extra maintenance and repair to be done. At least the base wasn’t overrun, though.
Maybe you can see where this is going for the mental health metaphor. Some deadline looms in your future, or some crisis threatens you, and for one reason or another, you don’t have the time or the resources or the reliable assistance to make an ordinary job of it. Worse yet, for whatever reason failure is not actually an option, and probably neither is half-assing it. So… great! You can get things done just by locking in hard enough, committing yourself fully to the task at hand, foregoing explicit leisure and explicit meal breaks and relaxation time and maybe sleep, and generally taking off as many safeties and stripping away as many best-practice limiters from your workflow as you can manage. So, to ask the obvious question: why is this a bad idea to do repeatedly?
First and foremost, it’s worth noting that when you battle-short yourself, you’re taking out a hefty loan against your future productivity - and happiness, and mental health, and quite possibly physical health - in exchange for a bit more of a boost right now. Be very clear: that loan will come due, and the interest rate can be ruinous, especially if left to compound for too long. Another way of looking at this sizable drawback is the proverb about machines - that if you don’t schedule downtime and maintenance, that downtime and maintenance will be scheduled for you by force majeure.
There’s also an argument that this post is one big infohazard, because now, having read it, you might go try to battle-short yourself to get ahead on (doubtless vitally important) work. I don’t recommend doing this, not least because it seems like not everyone can do it straightforwardly. But more importantly: battle-shorting is something of a Faustian bargain; having done it once and discovered that you can get away with it - and even seem to be ahead on margin! - you might be tempted into forcing yourself into it repeatedly in the name of some noble goal. Again, don’t do this. Some part of you will see only that you’re working yourself to the bone and never seeing any near-term fruits of your labor at all, and will rebel violently against the terms you’ve dictated to yourself; we might think of this as a generator finally giving way, or a labor strike sprouting from repeated grievances, or a declaration of bankruptcy and default. You will breach a trust between aspects of yourself which will be costly and painful to get back.
The whole dynamic is a major way in which burnout can happen. (Maybe I’ll talk about others eventually.) Each time you battle-short yourself, you fall further behind on vital maintenance and stocks of vital spiritual nutrients - another metaphor I’ll discuss in a later post - and that can look to be going just fine for a while until very suddenly it’s not fine at all, and not only is the metaphorical fusebox on fire, but all your generators are broken, the stock of spare parts has run out, and half your soldiers have deserted. Don’t end up in that state. Don’t battle-short yourself, even if it feels virtuous, unless you absolutely have to. Hopefully now that you have a name for this practice you can recognize it and avoid it or at least be extremely judicious.