Working the way I work is sub-optimal by many standards.

Over the years, I’ve figured out all sorts of ways to do my work more efficiently, but sometimes pull back from those approaches because the “enhanced” methods diminish my experience in some way.

Recently, for instance, I tried using an AI-powered summarizer to get a sense of a news story rather than reading and summarizing it myself. I was able to technically do my work using those externally generated bullet-points, but at the end of the day I felt ignorant about the very things I was keen to understand; I felt like an intermediary cog, sucking up words from one location and transcribing them to another, and that made the labor—though somewhat shorter in duration—a lot less valuable for me.

These sorts of speed bumps haven’t diminished my enthusiasm for figuring out little tweaks to my toolbox and workday peculiarities, though, and one of the most successful broad-based adjustments I’ve made has been focusing on the affordances I have in my life, my space, and my mindset.

An “affordance,” in this context, is something in one’s perceptual range that expresses or augments one’s action potential.

(That’s my definition: the coiner of the phrase, a psychologist named James Gipson, defined an affordance as a “value-rich ecological object” that provides benefits or causes injuries.)

So an affordance can be as simple as a doorknob—an object in our environment that tells us, “Hey, there’s a door here that you can open or close,” while also enabling that opening-closing action—or as complex as architecture or symbols/writing that tell us an area is off-limits, with the implication of punishments should we violate the designated boundaries (reduced action potential).

This concept is especially useful for user-interface designers and architects and product designers, because when you’re wire-framing an app or blueprinting a school building or manufacturing a tea kettle, you want to make sure the intended users of these things understand what they’re for and what actions they enable/encourage or designate as off-limits (click this button to see the menu, go down this hallway to get to the principal’s office, but don’t open this door which is full of cleaning chemicals, push this button to turn the kettle on or off).

This concept can be useful on a personal scale, too, though, if we take stock of the affordances in our spaces and lives, and then adjust them to better suit our desired outcomes.

I have a little art table set up right next to my main living room workspace, and I make sure to keep things on that table a little bit organized, but not too organized. I also always clean my palette and refill the water glass when I’m done for the day, because I’ve found that when I have a minimum amount of friction between me and sitting down to make something (without feeling like things are so tidy that I shouldn’t defile its perfection), I do so more frequently and casually.

This is a very minor adjustment to the art-related affordances I have in my life and space, but I’ve made similar trivial (though impactful) amendments to my audio recording setup, the arrangement (and composition) of apps on my phone and laptop, and to how my bedroom furniture is arranged.

How might I rearrange my work schedule to make more time for the people I’d like to spend time with? How might I change-up my writing habits so I’m able to write when my mindset is most optimized for it? How might I shove myself out the door when I need socialization, while also making and maintaining space for productive isolation and internal assessment?

How might I orient my time and energy and resources toward things that are important to me today, while also encouraging the sort of exploration that will someday lead to the evolution and/or replacement of those priorities?

There are other ways of framing these sorts of life/work design choices and adjustments, but I like the concept of recalibrating for “action potentials” because it helps me build spaces and lifestyle frameworks I can appreciate aesthetically and philosophically, but which also amplify my capacity and capabilities by smoothing some paths, while de-emphasizing (reducing the action potential of) the ones I’d like to dilute or remove.

If you found value in this essay, consider buying me a coffee :)