Understanding ‘Spoon Theory’ and Preventing Burnout
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Hampton, Jameson
Spoon theory is a metaphor about the finite energy we each have to do things in a day. While a healthy, advantaged person may not have to worry about running out of ‘spoons,’ people with chronic illnesses or disabilities and members of marginalized communities often have to consider how they must ration their energy in order to get through the day. Understanding how 'spoons' can affect the lives of your developers and teammates can help companies lessen the everyday burdens on their underrepresented employees, leaving them more spoons to do their best work, avoid burnout and lead fulfilling lives.
 Hi, thanks so much for coming to my talk. It's called There is No Spoon, Understanding Spoon Theory and Preventing Burnout. A couple things about me. My name is Jameson, but you can call me Jamie. I'm here, as he said, from Buffalo, New York, which is the home of bad sports. I'm really happy to be here in Phoenix for the first time. I work for AgriList. We're based in Brooklyn, New York, and we do farm management and data software for indoor farms and greenhouses, which is really cool. And you can find me on Twitter at Jamie Bash. My slides are pinned there. One other thing I wanted to introduce about myself right at the beginning. This is something I'm going to go into further in the rest of the talk, but I like to kind of get it out of the way. I am transgender, specifically, I identify as genderqueer or nonbinary. Either of those terms is fine. If you don't know what that means, it basically means three things. Number one, I don't identify as either a man or a woman. Number two, I use the neutral pronouns they. And number three, I have really great hair. I like to bring this up at the beginning, even though I'm going to talk more about it when I go into diversity, because I know people like live tweet and stuff like this. And if you want a live tweet, that's super cool, but just keep in mind my pronouns when you do it. But let's talk about spoon theory. That's what we're here to talk about. So what is spoon theory? It's basically a social metaphor that refers to how much energy we have in a day to do things. And this is both physical and like mental emotional energy. And the spoon itself is the unit of measurement that represents that energy. So what do you notice about these spoons? There's six. And six is kind of an arbitrary number. But the key here is that it's finite. You know, that's how many spoons you have, however many, and that's the limit. That's how many you have. Spoon theory was originally coined in an essay that was published in 2003 by a woman named Christine Miserendino who suffers from lupus. And she kind of came up with this metaphor to describe her life as someone with a chronic physical illness. She had a good friend who, you know, she confided in about what she was going through and who accompanied her to doctors appointments and things like this. And so she kind of thought, oh, well, my friend has an idea of what it's like for me living with this disease. But the problem is, like, if you don't have, if you haven't experienced it for yourself, it's actually really hard to know what it's like. And so this is a quote from her original essay. I wanted something for her to actually hold for me to then take away, since most people who get sick feel a loss of a life they once knew. If I was in control of taking away the spoons, then she would know what it feels like to have someone or something else, in this case lupus, being in control. So spoon theory is kind of referring a lot to, like, invisible illnesses. And one way to think about that is, like, if you have a disability, there might be some things that you just can't do, you know, you just have those limits. Like, for an example, if you were in a wheelchair and you can't really walk at all, you know, you wouldn't be able to take a staircase. Like, you'd need to have accessibility accommodations in order to do that. But, you know, nobody in their right mind would go up to someone in a wheelchair and be like, well, why aren't you just taking the stairs? If someone did that, like, everyone around would be like, wow, what a huge jerk. But, like, that's a really obvious case, and it's not always so clear-cut and obvious. Like, what if there was someone who had a prosthetic leg, and you'd seen them take the stairs before, but then on another day they couldn't do it. You, like, you might not even know that they have a prosthetic leg. And then it's going to be way more tempting for you to be like, well, you did it before, like, why can't you do it now? Even though you don't actually know how much energy it's taking them, how much pain they might be in, like, how many spoons they have to use to go up the stairs, you can't know how many spoons someone else has just by looking at them. And what happens when you run out? I said they were finite, and I mean, the key to that is you have a certain amount, and if you spend them, like, you could hit zero. And once they're gone, they're gone. And your spoons cry, like in crying breakfast, friends. You can borrow extra spoons from yourself sometimes if you run out, but there are consequences to doing that. I like to use video games to describe this, because a lot of us like video games, and energy mechanics are pretty common in video games, and it's a very similar metric to spoons. So this is from one of my favorite games, Stardew Valley, which is a farming simulator, because all I think about is farming. But as you can see in the bottom corner, you have this energy bar. So when you wake up in the morning, it's green. You have your full energy, and you go tend to your crops, and then you do other things, and it's less since it's in the yellow, and the day goes on, and it's in the orange. And then maybe at the end of the day, you're going out to have a drink, and your energy's really low. It's in the red. So the way that this would work in Stardew Valley, this mechanic is if you went to bed right now, and your energy was at this little red, you would wake up the next day, and you'd have the big green bar, like, in the first slide. Or if you kept going, it will let you, like, go below the bottom of that energy meter. But if you do that, then when you wake up the next morning, you're not going to be at full energy. You're going to be, you're going to already have your bar partially depleted. And, like, you got a lot of do. You got a lot of farming to do. You got work to do. So it's, like, really hard when you're not starting out with your full amount. Who does spoon theory affect? I think everyone can benefit from an understanding of spoon theory. Christine Miser and Dino talked about the idea that, like, healthy people have an unlimited number of spoons. And I don't think that's true, because spoons are energy, and nobody has an unlimited amount of energy. But the key here is that, like, an average, healthy person probably has enough that they can get through the average day without having to ration it or really think about it. But I also don't think it's just the chronically ill and, like, physically disabled communities that can benefit from this metaphor. The mental illness community has already started to use this as, like, a communication technique. And I also think that there are, like, marginalized groups of people that it's a good way to express the discrimination that comes along with being part of those communities, too. It gives us a shared language. This is my favorite thing about spoon theory. You know, we're going to talk about some pretty heavy stuff. And sometimes that's stuff that's, like, hard to talk about. Like, it's hard to go up to someone you don't know that well or boss and say, like, I'm having trouble with my health. But if everyone knows spoon theory and is familiar with that language, it's much easier to say, oh, I can't really do that. I don't have enough spoons today. And it makes hard conversations easier. It gives us a greater empathy for others, even if you're not struggling with this, maybe you can have a better understanding of how other people might be struggling. And it gives us a better understanding of our own limits, which is really important, too. I want to talk about, like, the three communities that I mentioned and some of the ways that spoons are expended. Just as a caveat, it's really different for everybody, you know. There's lots of different disabilities, diseases that people have, lots of different marginalized communities that have different problems. So this is kind of generic. For people with physical illnesses and disabilities, you know, constant pain is really exhausting. I feel like this is an obvious one, but it's really important to say. Being in pain makes literally everything you do harder. Like, there's so many things we do every day that are part of our routine. We don't even think about them. But if you have a condition that gives you chronic pain, like, you can't not think about those things. Everything is harder. Personally, I've struggled with intermittent chronic back pain and, like, the fact that sometimes I have it and sometimes I doesn't really highlight this idea that, like, I'm taking for granted the fact that when I'm not having pain, I can tie my shoes and it's no big deal. But then it can feel insurmountable at another time. The emotional drain of worry. I mean, when you're sick, that's, like, a really heavy burden on your shoulders to think about. Reduce mobility. Decrease accessibility to places. This is another thing that just makes it hard to do daily activities, like, go places. And if you need special treatment, special accommodations, you know, that can garner unwanted attention, which is also really stressful. And frequent health care. I mean, health care is great because it helps us manage things we've got going on in our lives with our health, but it can also make you weak. Like, think about someone who's going through chemo. They need that to manage their illness, but it's taking up a lot of their spoons right there. Mental illnesses are similar in many ways to the last slide, because, like, mentally ill people are also chronically ill, but society treats it a lot different. So I think there's different things to talk about. Constant emotional distress is also exhausting. I feel like this should be obvious because everyone's had some emotional distress and it's very awful. And being told to get over it is kind of what I was getting at when I say it's not treated the same. There's kind of this weird perception that people with mental illnesses should pull themselves out of it and get over it. And it's not treated as a disease in the same way. Being told to get over it is a huge burden because people are taking the burden and putting it back on you, expecting you to, like, minimize your own struggling. And it also can cause people to second guess their right to even be sick. Like, if people tell you you're faking for long enough, you might start to feel like you are faking or like it's some sort of failure on your part rather than you have a disease. And it can be socially ostracizing, partially for those reasons, partially because some of the symptoms can cut you off from your support network or make you be perceived as selfish or flaky. And also because some things are socially taboo in and of themselves, like eating disorders. And there can be a physical aspect, too. Panic attacks are really hard to describe, but I'll kind of try. They're one of the most physical things that has ever happened to me. I feel flushed, feverish, heavy breathing, high heart rate, sometimes I'll hyperventilate, I'll feel really nauseous, sometimes I'll throw up. It's very, very physical and it looks scary from the outside. It looks enough like I'm having a stroke or a seizure that I have to warn people in my life. It's like, no, it's okay. You don't have to call an ambulance. But the point is it's really serious and it can be really scary. And the last thing, marginalized groups. Again, less common to apply spoon theory, too. But I think it really works in this relevant. It turns out being discriminated against sucks. And if you're experiencing that every day, you know, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or whatever, you're starting your day from a place of fatigue. I think emotionally dealing with the political climate has been hard for a lot of people lately. But for marginalized people, it's even worse. It's really exhausting to watch the news every day and see bad news about your rights and people you know, getting murdered, committing suicide. It's so tiring and such a burden. And then people expect you to talk about it because it's like, you're a minority and you should talk about minority issues, even if it's like not something you want to talk about or even think about. As a non-binary person, I have to justify my own existence a lot. I have to explain to people what non-binary means all the time. And I don't mind doing it in theory. Not everyone knows, and I think everyone should know. And the easiest way is for me to tell them. But sometimes there's a subtext where if I don't do a good enough job explaining it, then they're not going to accept the explanation and then they're not going to accept me. So it ends up feeling like I'm begging for people's approval by educating them. And microaggressions are a thing that I've literally done an entire talk about, so I'll try not to be too long-winded. But basically microaggression is a scary word, but it's kind of less blatant examples of discrimination that are often coming from like well-meaning people that don't want to be jerks or don't realize it. Something that if it happened to you once, it would be annoying and you would get over it. But since it happens so many times, it becomes like more and more hurtful, like a mosquito bite. A few examples of microaggressions, every marginalized group of people deals with different ones. You don't sound black. I think we all know why that's like not a cool thing to say to anybody, hopefully. You don't look transgender. Okay. How did you expect me to look? For people with different ethnic backgrounds, well where are you from anyway? Chicago. Where are you really from? Chicago. This one is for like lesbian couples. Who's the guy in your relationship? Nobody. We're lesbians. That's kind of what that means. And for women in tech and attending tech events, are you the secretary? No. Why would you assume I was non-technical? I wonder why. So when I said it was like a mosquito bite, like if someone had one mosquito bite and they complained about it, you might be like, well come on, it's just one mosquito bite. But not everyone gets bit by mosquitoes at the same rate. And if you're covered in those bites from head to toe all the time, like yeah, you're in your right to complain about that because that sounds awful. I want to do a short exercise about like going through an average morning from the perspective of a few different people and see where spoons might get spent. Again, just an example, but I think there's something to be said for it. So here's our control group morning. The average morning for like a healthy, advantaged person. Getting up, getting ready, commuting to work, getting to work. Nothing special, nothing crazy or overly difficult. You might lose a spoon or two on this ordeal potentially. Maybe it's really crowded on the train or you get to work and the elevator's broken, you have to take the stairs, you're kind of out of shape, so it's a huge pain. But overall, you've pretty much got under control. Now let's imagine that you have an illness that gives you chronic pain. First of all, you're going to start off with less spoons in the beginning because you didn't sleep well, you know, you were in pain overnight again. So you get out of bed and you get ready. It hurts a lot to sit up, you're getting dressed, it's taking a lot longer because you're in pain. Maybe you take a bunch of medications, potentially some of them have side effects that even though you're used to them, it still sucks that you're nauseous in the morning. You're spending a spoon on that for sure at least. Maybe you're commuting to work on that crowded subway from the previous example, but you're getting jostled and it's really painful every time, but nobody thinks to give up a seat for you because you're not obviously disabled. You're carrying your bag and your back hurts and it's really rough. And now you get to work and the elevator is out for you too, but instead of like a mild inconvenience, this is a huge problem. You know, climbing stairs is really hard for you, but what else are you going to do to get to work if there's no accessibility? So you climb the stairs, it takes you 20 minutes, you have to pause for a rest halfway through, you're late for work, you're at your pain threshold, and you've spent a couple of spoons on that ordeal. You get in, you were late, so you don't have time for coffee, and you have extra work piled up partially because of that and partially because you had doctor's appointments that you had to take half days for earlier in the week, which you have almost every week. So that's a lot less spoons. We're going to do it again. It's like Groundhog Day. We just have to keep living out the same day over and over. Now imagine if you had anxiety and panic disorder. This is what I'm talking about because it's kind of what I've experienced and what I know. Oops, you had a panic attack last night and you went way over your capacity and borrowed spoons from yourself, so you're also starting with less. When you wake up, you know, all these bad feelings from having a panic attack are kind of coming back to you like a bad hang over, even though you haven't been drinking. Also keep in mind that clinical depression is linked to like a whole long list of other mental illnesses and disorders, so it's really common for people to have to deal with that on top of whatever else specifically plagues them. Getting out of bed and getting ready. When I'm having a bad anxiety day, it can be really hard to get out of bed, and it's not just like I don't feel like it. I have sometimes really intense inexplicable fears of like leaving my house or even leaving my room, but unfortunately that's not really something that you can call off work for, so you'll have to push through it in this scenario. I can't drive when my anxiety is bad either, so a crowded subway sounds kind of terrifying, but it's the lesser of the two evils because I can't crash my car into anybody. So you're on the subway, it's crowded, your heart is racing every time someone bumps into you, you feel like you're starting to panic. On really bad days, you might even feel like a paranoia that people around you are like following or tracking you somehow, which is really terrifying even if it's not true. By the time you get to work, you've already worked yourself up into a state and you're feeling kind of nauseous. Anxiety has a compounding effect. Once you're feeling anxious, everything around you is going to make it worse, even things that normally would be okay. Now you're freaked out, you're overanalyzing the tone of the receptionist when she says good morning to you, you're overanalyzing wordings and your emails. Having a panic attack yesterday actually makes you more susceptible to having another one today because of this stupid thing called secondary anxiety, which I call it stupid because I know it's stupid even when I'm experiencing it that's like, oh, I'm feeling anxious, I hope I don't have a panic attack, oh my god, what if I have a panic attack and then I get so nervous about it that I work myself up into it just because I didn't want it to happen. It's something that I know is stupid even in the moment, but I just can't make it stop. So you're losing at least a spoon and freaking out about nothing, and if you actually work yourself all the way up to a panic attack, it's pretty much game over. I'm not really useful for anything else for the rest of the day. One more time. This is the last Groundhog Day, I promise. Now you're a member of a marginalized group. Again, I'm going to go with what I know and we're going to talk about what it might feel like to be transgender. You get up and get ready. Maybe you wake up in a pretty good mood, but then when you're brushing your teeth, you know, you look in the mirror and don't super recognize the person that's looking back at you. Gender dysphoria is another thing that's kind of hard to describe. But kind of imagine if like tomorrow morning you woke up in the body of like not the gender that you've associated yourself with your whole life. You know, every time you see your reflection or hear yourself speak, it's going to feel wrong and it's going to be impossible not to notice and think about it. Getting dressed can also be a burden. I wear a binder, which is hard to get on and it's uncomfortable to wear during the day. So that's at least the spoon getting ready. You take the subway and you get catcalled. Somebody calls you a freak and you don't feel good about it. Four or five strangers passively misgender you that they just don't know any better. They're not trying to be jerks. But it may have you feeling down. Then you're reading the news. They passed a bill that limits the rights of trans kids in schools and another trans woman of color was murdered in your city over the weekend. So now that catcall that you felt crappy about earlier is making you feel like really legitimately nervous. You get to work. You climb the stairs. The receptionist misgenders you again even though you've told her a million times. So you correct her again and she makes a comment about how being trans is the only thing you ever talk about. But it's really hard not to think about it when it's jarring every time you hear someone make a mistake. Think about the metaphor from earlier. If you suddenly woke up and everyone was using the opposite pronoun for you, I think you would notice it every time. Now you get to work. But you feel like you have to work harder and talk louder in order to get noticed for anything you're doing. Which means you have to spend more spoons to get the same amount of work done. Incidentally all women in the tech industry have to deal with this one. As you can see privilege is a big factor. Nobody has unlimited energy. Nobody is the terminator. You know there's going to be times in everyone's lives when there's things going on that you have to spend more spoons on. Maybe your mom is in the hospital and you're taking care of her. It's taking a lot of your energy and you're really worried. Maybe you're in the hospital because you got sick. Maybe you have a newborn and you haven't slept through the night in three or four months. These are definitely things that are going to require you to spend more spoons. The difference between these kind of things and the kind of things from the previous example are that A, most of these kind of things are temporary. And B, someone in those other three categories is just as likely to have to deal with one of these things on top of all those other things. And then it's just compounding. So the lesson here is basically saying just because you have privilege, I'm not saying that your life can't ever be hard. Everybody's lives are hard sometimes. But it's not hard because you have privilege. It's hard even though you have privilege. Well how does this affect me? I'm not accusing you of being Brids rights activist, although a lot of people are like that. But it depends on who you are. If you're in one of the groups I just described, I'm sure you're already managing your spoons every day, even if you don't think about it like this. But I do think this metaphor is useful to help you think about it. I mean it's tiring to manage your spoons, but it's also tiring to watch other people not have to manage their spoons. And it makes you feel like there's something wrong with you that you have to do it. So thinking consciously about it is a good way to start practicing self-care, which is super important. And actually it's more than just important. It's like necessary to do in our lives. I used to feel like taking care of myself was like a really selfish thing to do. I think we're trained to feel like we have to sacrifice our own well-being to please other people. And especially in our industry and especially in the startup culture, I feel like a lot of places have a social status involved with being a martyr. But it turns out we can't give anything in our lives 100% unless we make sure that we're taking care of first. And there are two major things that help me change the way I think about it. I saw talk about burnout last year by my friend Mary Fangval. And she talked about this metaphor of putting on your own oxygen mask before you put on others. And it really changed my life to think about it that way. You're not just helping yourself first because you care about yourself more. You're helping yourself first because then you'll be equipped to help other people. And also this quote by Audre Lorde. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It's self-preservation. And that's an act of political warfare. The way I see it as a trans person, like just existing, is kind of an act of political resistance. So it's kind of my responsibility to protect myself so that I can keep standing up for my community. The greater I am and the more I succeed, the more powerful my resistance is because I'm doing it in the face of people who want me to fail. I think a lot of people picture self-care like this. And it can look like this. But on other days, it can look like this too. I did an art project recently where I kind of intentionally practiced self-care every day for a month and analyzed how it was making me feel. And the thing that really struck me is how different it can look on different days. Like on days when I can and I have enough spoons, self-care can really mean accountability, holding myself accountable for doing the things I have to do and the relief I feel when I get things done. But on other days, you know, I can't do that. I don't have the spoons. And then self-care can look like giving myself permission to rest and forgiving myself when not everything I might do gets done. So the art of self-care is kind of being able to figure out which you need at the moment at any given time and being kind to yourself. Well, maybe if you're not one of the people in the groups I was talking about, but you're an employer or a manager, I will guarantee you that some of the people under you are in those groups. And I hope that the exercise I did going through the morning kind of made it obvious why this is a huge problem. Like, did you see how many spoons some of your employees might have to spend before they even get started working at the beginning of the day when you want them to like feel refreshed and ready to do stuff? So it's affecting productivity. You know, everyone needs energy to do their best work, of course. But it's not just work. You know, their whole lives are going to suffer around that. If we all have stressful jobs, jobs that are stressful at least sometimes, and if you have to use all your energy to stay a float-in, busy job, like what's happening to your work-life balance, like it's destroyed. So it's about empathy too. Like, hopefully you care about your employees and you want them to lead fulfilling lives outside of their jobs. So this is basically just a recipe for burnout. Now let's talk about Agile. This is the chart you need to understand to understand the next section of my talk. Just kidding. You don't need to know about Agile. But a lot of us use at least a little bit of Agile in our days. And I think that spoon theory and Agile methodology are kind of similar and kind of related. I think a lot about velocity at work. That's an intangible unit of measurement. Sound familiar? And if you want to prioritize your team dynamic, like Agile pushes, you know, you can't be a cohesive team unless everyone understands each other. And that includes knowing each other's limits. How can you predict velocity if you don't have an understanding of what types of things are holding some of your employees back or slowing them down? Obviously, if you can remove those kind of barriers, velocity is going to increase. And Agile methodology says that your employees are your number one resource. I believe that. And if you also believe that, you should be really focused on treating them well and making sure that they're okay. All right. So maybe I've convinced you. You're like, Jamie, I'm in. But how am I supposed to fix it? Like, maybe I have employees that have had illnesses their entire lives or like they're experiencing systematic racism in their lives. Like, how am I, I can't fix that for them. Obviously, nobody expects you to do that. But when you talk about student theory, you're really talking about levels of burden. And there are definitely things you can do as an employer to lessen people's burdens. You have to recognize that their health is more important than their work. This is the martyr thing again. The reason that that's such a pervasive idea is because a lot of companies encourage it. But it's not healthy to expect your employees to think of work as the most important thing in their lives. Provide adequate health care for them. Not only is being sick tiring, but it's also really expensive and really stressful. So good health care is going to help people manage their disease. But it's also going to give them peace of mind, which is going to help conserve energy also. Treatmental illness is an illness. Here's a pro tip. If you see someone freaking out about something that you think is nothing, they wish that they weren't freaking out more than you wish that they weren't freaking out because it's more of a burden on them than it is on you. And make accessibility a priority. You know, nobody wants to be an afterthought. But making your employees comfortable is going to involve considering what needs they might have before they have to come and ask you for special considerations. If you're planning your office, planning events, and thinking about accessibility, it's going to make everybody more comfortable. And it's not going to make people feel like they were called out because they had to come ask you to change something. Accessibility here is like a huge umbrella that is also a whole another talk. But some of the things I'm thinking about are access to your building and facilities, appropriate bathrooms. That's a big thing in the trans community, but also for people with mobility issues. And huge kudos for Valscom for having gender neutral bathrooms, I almost cried. Transportation considerations and events that your employees can enjoy. Not everyone has fun doing physical activities. Some people have special diets. Some people can't drink alcohol. Some people have extreme social anxiety and social events that are mandatory are going to be a real stressor for them. So just think about it. This is basically all about keeping people's needs in mind when you do stuff. You might not want to give the impression of special treatment for certain employees, but you know, some people just need different considerations to perform at the same level. Fair isn't always equal. I really love this graphic. Like if someone who has a chronic illness is late to work a lot or misses more work than someone else and you're more lenient with them, you're not giving them special treatment. You're giving them a consideration they need to be able to do their job. And you also got to keep it in mind when you're looking at their work. You know, if someone isn't as productive as someone else, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're not as smart or not as hardworking. It could be because they have barriers caused by their situation. There's an example that I want to use because it's really real and really relevant, but I do want to preface it a little bit because there's kind of this current trend that I've been seeing on like medium where men will write articles that's like, I pretended to be a woman and now I believe in sexism, but I didn't before. And it's annoying to a lot of people because like, why can't we listen to people without having to experience everything for ourselves before we believe it? But I'm still going to use this example because it's really good. We did an experiment. For two weeks, we switched names. I signed all client emails as Nicole, and she signed as me. Folks, it fucking sucked. I was in hell. Everything I asked or suggested was questioned. Clients I could do in my sleep were condescending. One of them asked if I was single. Nicole had the most productive week of her career. I realized the reason she took longer is because she had to convince clients to respect her. The point here is that you might not even realize what kind of advantages you have over other people. And that's what empathy is. He learned empathy by doing this experiment, but if we could think more about what other people might get going through, maybe we could learn empathy before we get to this point. Company culture is a phrase that kind of makes me cringe sometimes because it's like really often used as an excuse to like justify some of the crappy things I've been talking about, like non-tolerance and making people work too hard. But you can promote a company culture that is accepting and is empathetic. So how do you do that? I actually speak louder than words. It's not enough to just say that you want a good culture. You have to actually do stuff to back it up. I want to tell a short story about where I work at AgriList. And on my first day, I was really nervous. I was already out as trans when I joined AgriList, and everyone knew and was very accepting. So I wasn't too worried, but you still get worried. And I was filling out paperwork on my first day, and on our payroll form, there was like a gender question that had two options, and I was like, oh, I don't know what to do. So I emailed my boss, like the CEO of our company, on my first day, and I was like, oh my god, this is suicide. But I was like, I don't know what box to click. What do I do? And she wrote me back, and first she was like, oh, I'm really sorry. I think it's really crappy that they only have two. Like it's 2016. They should have more. And I felt pretty good. I was like, okay, she agrees with me. She knows where I'm coming from. But then she said, in fact, I'm going to email Trinet right now and tell them that I don't think it's right that they only have two and that they should add more. And I was like, whoa. Like she really wanted to put her money where her mouth is with that, and it made me feel like I was going to be really safe working for her. Don't demand that minorities do all the diversity work. I think this comes from a, it's not coming from a crappy place. Like I think if you want to do better, it seems like obvious to go ask marginalized people like, hey, can you educate me on this? How can I do better? But the problem is that a lot of people just want to go about their day without doing a bunch more free work when they're already having trouble managing their spoons. So it's not always like a cool thing to do to dump that on them. I'm kind of the exception. I really like, I give talks about it. I like to talk about it. I like when people send me questions and I can help them. But I'm kind of an exception and I don't want people to think that because it was okay for me. It's okay to do that to strangers. So I always make this caveat. But do listen to your underrepresented employees. And if they tell you stories, you have to believe them. There's a culture of people not wanting to come forward to tell about how they've been like harassed or discriminated against because they feel like it's not going to be taken seriously. The best way to combat that is to just always take everyone seriously. There's kind of a joke in tech that all women in tech know each other. And it's a little bit true in the sense that it means that word of travel is fast. Like if you're a jerk, people are going to know. But the converse is also true if you're really not a jerk, people are also going to know. And just don't tolerate crappy behavior. This is action speak louder than words again in a different form. If you say you're not going to tolerate something and then you do, you're just showing that you're untrustworthy, that you care more about appearing to be a good ally than actually being a good ally. Inaction also speaks louder than words. So think about if you're in action is saying what you want to say. This is one of my favorite quotes. If you're not willing to remove a toxic contributor from your project, you're accepting toxic behavior as a culture and norm. So you have to think about how you want to act, how you want to be perceived, and how those things link together. I have some recommended reading. This is the original spoon three essay at the top. We have article about invisible illnesses and article about diversity in tech. The next one is a video of the burnout talk that I mentioned by Mary Thangvong. And the last one is a really great video from the cerebral palsy foundation. It's called The Quest for the Rainbow Bagel and it's about navigating New York City as a physically disabled person. Thank you so much. I hope your spoons aren't crying. Hopefully they're a beautiful flower. You can follow me on Twitter or see my website. Thank you.
 Hi, thanks so much for coming to my talk. It's called There is No Spoon, Understanding  Spoon Theory and Preventing Burnout. A couple things about me. My name is Jameson, but you  can call me Jamie. I'm here, as he said, from Buffalo, New York, which is the home of bad  sports. I'm really happy to be here in Phoenix for the first time. I work for AgriList. We're  based in Brooklyn, New York, and we do farm management and data software for indoor farms  and greenhouses, which is really cool. And you can find me on Twitter at Jamie Bash.  My slides are pinned there. One other thing I wanted to introduce about myself right at the  beginning. This is something I'm going to go into further in the rest of the talk, but I like to  kind of get it out of the way. I am transgender, specifically, I identify as genderqueer or  nonbinary. Either of those terms is fine. If you don't know what that means, it basically means  three things. Number one, I don't identify as either a man or a woman. Number two, I use the  neutral pronouns they. And number three, I have really great hair. I like to bring this up at the  beginning, even though I'm going to talk more about it when I go into diversity, because I know  people like live tweet and stuff like this. And if you want a live tweet, that's super cool, but  just keep in mind my pronouns when you do it. But let's talk about spoon theory. That's what  we're here to talk about. So what is spoon theory? It's basically a social metaphor that refers  to how much energy we have in a day to do things. And this is both physical and like mental emotional  energy. And the spoon itself is the unit of measurement that represents that energy. So what  do you notice about these spoons? There's six. And six is kind of an arbitrary number. But the key  here is that it's finite. You know, that's how many spoons you have, however many, and that's the  limit. That's how many you have. Spoon theory was originally coined in an essay that was published  in 2003 by a woman named Christine Miserendino who suffers from lupus. And she kind of came up with  this metaphor to describe her life as someone with a chronic physical illness. She had a good  friend who, you know, she confided in about what she was going through and who accompanied her to  doctors appointments and things like this. And so she kind of thought, oh, well, my friend has an idea  of what it's like for me living with this disease. But the problem is, like, if you don't have, if  you haven't experienced it for yourself, it's actually really hard to know what it's like. And so  this is a quote from her original essay. I wanted something for her to actually hold for me to then  take away, since most people who get sick feel a loss of a life they once knew. If I was in control  of taking away the spoons, then she would know what it feels like to have someone or something else,  in this case lupus, being in control. So spoon theory is kind of referring a lot to, like, invisible  illnesses. And one way to think about that is, like, if you have a disability, there might be  some things that you just can't do, you know, you just have those limits. Like, for an example, if  you were in a wheelchair and you can't really walk at all, you know, you wouldn't be able to take a  staircase. Like, you'd need to have accessibility accommodations in order to do that. But, you  know, nobody in their right mind would go up to someone in a wheelchair and be like, well, why  aren't you just taking the stairs? If someone did that, like, everyone around would be like, wow,  what a huge jerk. But, like, that's a really obvious case, and it's not always so clear-cut and  obvious. Like, what if there was someone who had a prosthetic leg, and you'd seen them take the  stairs before, but then on another day they couldn't do it. You, like, you might not even know that  they have a prosthetic leg. And then it's going to be way more tempting for you to be like, well,  you did it before, like, why can't you do it now? Even though you don't actually know how much energy  it's taking them, how much pain they might be in, like, how many spoons they have to use to go up  the stairs, you can't know how many spoons someone else has just by looking at them. And what happens  when you run out? I said they were finite, and I mean, the key to that is you have a certain amount,  and if you spend them, like, you could hit zero. And once they're gone, they're gone. And your spoons  cry, like in crying breakfast, friends. You can borrow extra spoons from yourself sometimes if you  run out, but there are consequences to doing that. I like to use video games to describe this,  because a lot of us like video games, and energy mechanics are pretty common in video games,  and it's a very similar metric to spoons. So this is from one of my favorite games, Stardew Valley,  which is a farming simulator, because all I think about is farming. But as you can see in the  bottom corner, you have this energy bar. So when you wake up in the morning, it's green. You have  your full energy, and you go tend to your crops, and then you do other things, and it's less since  it's in the yellow, and the day goes on, and it's in the orange. And then maybe at the end of the day,  you're going out to have a drink, and your energy's really low. It's in the red. So the way that this  would work in Stardew Valley, this mechanic is if you went to bed right now, and your energy was at  this little red, you would wake up the next day, and you'd have the big green bar, like, in the first  slide. Or if you kept going, it will let you, like, go below the bottom of that energy meter. But if  you do that, then when you wake up the next morning, you're not going to be at full energy. You're  going to be, you're going to already have your bar partially depleted. And, like, you got a lot of  do. You got a lot of farming to do. You got work to do. So it's, like, really hard when you're not  starting out with your full amount. Who does spoon theory affect? I think everyone can benefit from  an understanding of spoon theory. Christine Miser and Dino talked about the idea that, like, healthy  people have an unlimited number of spoons. And I don't think that's true, because spoons are energy,  and nobody has an unlimited amount of energy. But the key here is that, like, an average, healthy  person probably has enough that they can get through the average day without having to ration it or  really think about it. But I also don't think it's just the chronically ill and, like, physically  disabled communities that can benefit from this metaphor. The mental illness community has already  started to use this as, like, a communication technique. And I also think that there are, like,  marginalized groups of people that it's a good way to express the discrimination that comes along  with being part of those communities, too. It gives us a shared language. This is my favorite thing  about spoon theory. You know, we're going to talk about some pretty heavy stuff. And sometimes that's  stuff that's, like, hard to talk about. Like, it's hard to go up to someone you don't know that well  or boss and say, like, I'm having trouble with my health. But if everyone knows spoon theory and is  familiar with that language, it's much easier to say, oh, I can't really do that. I don't have enough  spoons today. And it makes hard conversations easier. It gives us a greater empathy for others,  even if you're not struggling with this, maybe you can have a better understanding of how other  people might be struggling. And it gives us a better understanding of our own limits, which is  really important, too. I want to talk about, like, the three communities that I mentioned and some  of the ways that spoons are expended. Just as a caveat, it's really different for everybody, you  know. There's lots of different disabilities, diseases that people have, lots of different  marginalized communities that have different problems. So this is kind of generic. For people  with physical illnesses and disabilities, you know, constant pain is really exhausting. I feel like  this is an obvious one, but it's really important to say. Being in pain makes literally everything  you do harder. Like, there's so many things we do every day that are part of our routine. We don't  even think about them. But if you have a condition that gives you chronic pain, like, you can't not  think about those things. Everything is harder. Personally, I've struggled with intermittent  chronic back pain and, like, the fact that sometimes I have it and sometimes I doesn't really  highlight this idea that, like, I'm taking for granted the fact that when I'm not having pain,  I can tie my shoes and it's no big deal. But then it can feel insurmountable at another time. The  emotional drain of worry. I mean, when you're sick, that's, like, a really heavy burden on your  shoulders to think about. Reduce mobility. Decrease accessibility to places. This is another  thing that just makes it hard to do daily activities, like, go places. And if you need special  treatment, special accommodations, you know, that can garner unwanted attention, which is also  really stressful. And frequent health care. I mean, health care is great because it helps us manage  things we've got going on in our lives with our health, but it can also make you weak. Like, think  about someone who's going through chemo. They need that to manage their illness, but it's taking up a  lot of their spoons right there. Mental illnesses are similar in many ways to the last slide,  because, like, mentally ill people are also chronically ill, but society treats it a lot  different. So I think there's different things to talk about. Constant emotional distress is also  exhausting. I feel like this should be obvious because everyone's had some emotional distress and  it's very awful. And being told to get over it is kind of what I was getting at when I say it's not  treated the same. There's kind of this weird perception that people with mental illnesses  should pull themselves out of it and get over it. And it's not treated as a disease in the same way.  Being told to get over it is a huge burden because people are taking the burden and putting it back  on you, expecting you to, like, minimize your own struggling. And it also can cause people to second  guess their right to even be sick. Like, if people tell you you're faking for long enough, you might  start to feel like you are faking or like it's some sort of failure on your part rather than you  have a disease. And it can be socially ostracizing, partially for those reasons, partially because  some of the symptoms can cut you off from your support network or make you be perceived as selfish  or flaky. And also because some things are socially taboo in and of themselves, like eating  disorders. And there can be a physical aspect, too. Panic attacks are really hard to describe,  but I'll kind of try. They're one of the most physical things that has ever happened to me. I  feel flushed, feverish, heavy breathing, high heart rate, sometimes I'll hyperventilate,  I'll feel really nauseous, sometimes I'll throw up. It's very, very physical and it looks scary from  the outside. It looks enough like I'm having a stroke or a seizure that I have to warn people in  my life. It's like, no, it's okay. You don't have to call an ambulance. But the point is it's really  serious and it can be really scary. And the last thing, marginalized groups. Again, less common to  apply spoon theory, too. But I think it really works in this relevant. It turns out being discriminated  against sucks. And if you're experiencing that every day, you know, racism, homophobia, transphobia,  or whatever, you're starting your day from a place of fatigue. I think emotionally dealing with the  political climate has been hard for a lot of people lately. But for marginalized people, it's  even worse. It's really exhausting to watch the news every day and see bad news about your rights  and people you know, getting murdered, committing suicide. It's so tiring and such a burden. And  then people expect you to talk about it because it's like, you're a minority and you should talk  about minority issues, even if it's like not something you want to talk about or even think about.  As a non-binary person, I have to justify my own existence a lot. I have to explain to people what  non-binary means all the time. And I don't mind doing it in theory. Not everyone knows, and I think  everyone should know. And the easiest way is for me to tell them. But sometimes there's a subtext  where if I don't do a good enough job explaining it, then they're not going to accept the explanation  and then they're not going to accept me. So it ends up feeling like I'm begging for people's  approval by educating them. And microaggressions are a thing that I've literally done an entire talk  about, so I'll try not to be too long-winded. But basically microaggression is a scary word,  but it's kind of less blatant examples of discrimination that are often coming from  like well-meaning people that don't want to be jerks or don't realize it. Something that if it  happened to you once, it would be annoying and you would get over it. But since it happens so many  times, it becomes like more and more hurtful, like a mosquito bite. A few examples of microaggressions,  every marginalized group of people deals with different ones. You don't sound black. I think we  all know why that's like not a cool thing to say to anybody, hopefully. You don't look transgender.  Okay. How did you expect me to look? For people with different ethnic backgrounds,  well where are you from anyway? Chicago. Where are you really from? Chicago. This one is for  like lesbian couples. Who's the guy in your relationship? Nobody. We're lesbians. That's  kind of what that means. And for women in tech and attending tech events, are you the secretary? No.  Why would you assume I was non-technical? I wonder why. So when I said it was like a mosquito bite,  like if someone had one mosquito bite and they complained about it, you might be like,  well come on, it's just one mosquito bite. But not everyone gets bit by mosquitoes at the same  rate. And if you're covered in those bites from head to toe all the time, like yeah,  you're in your right to complain about that because that sounds awful. I want to do a short  exercise about like going through an average morning from the perspective of a few different  people and see where spoons might get spent. Again, just an example, but I think there's  something to be said for it. So here's our control group morning. The average morning for like a  healthy, advantaged person. Getting up, getting ready, commuting to work, getting to work. Nothing  special, nothing crazy or overly difficult. You might lose a spoon or two on this ordeal  potentially. Maybe it's really crowded on the train or you get to work and the elevator's broken,  you have to take the stairs, you're kind of out of shape, so it's a huge pain. But overall,  you've pretty much got under control. Now let's imagine that you have an illness that gives  you chronic pain. First of all, you're going to start off with less spoons in the beginning  because you didn't sleep well, you know, you were in pain overnight again. So you get out of bed  and you get ready. It hurts a lot to sit up, you're getting dressed, it's taking a lot longer  because you're in pain. Maybe you take a bunch of medications, potentially some of them have side  effects that even though you're used to them, it still sucks that you're nauseous in the morning.  You're spending a spoon on that for sure at least. Maybe you're commuting to work on that crowded  subway from the previous example, but you're getting jostled and it's really painful every time,  but nobody thinks to give up a seat for you because you're not obviously disabled. You're  carrying your bag and your back hurts and it's really rough. And now you get to work and the  elevator is out for you too, but instead of like a mild inconvenience, this is a huge problem.  You know, climbing stairs is really hard for you, but what else are you going to do to get to work  if there's no accessibility? So you climb the stairs, it takes you 20 minutes, you have to  pause for a rest halfway through, you're late for work, you're at your pain threshold, and you've  spent a couple of spoons on that ordeal. You get in, you were late, so you don't have time for  coffee, and you have extra work piled up partially because of that and partially because you had  doctor's appointments that you had to take half days for earlier in the week, which you have  almost every week. So that's a lot less spoons. We're going to do it again. It's like Groundhog Day.  We just have to keep living out the same day over and over. Now imagine if you had anxiety and  panic disorder. This is what I'm talking about because it's kind of what I've experienced and  what I know. Oops, you had a panic attack last night and you went way over your capacity and  borrowed spoons from yourself, so you're also starting with less. When you wake up, you know,  all these bad feelings from having a panic attack are kind of coming back to you like a bad hang  over, even though you haven't been drinking. Also keep in mind that clinical depression is linked  to like a whole long list of other mental illnesses and disorders, so it's really common for people  to have to deal with that on top of whatever else specifically plagues them. Getting out of bed  and getting ready. When I'm having a bad anxiety day, it can be really hard to get out of bed,  and it's not just like I don't feel like it. I have sometimes really intense inexplicable fears  of like leaving my house or even leaving my room, but unfortunately that's not really something  that you can call off work for, so you'll have to push through it in this scenario.  I can't drive when my anxiety is bad either, so a crowded subway sounds kind of terrifying,  but it's the lesser of the two evils because I can't crash my car into anybody. So you're on  the subway, it's crowded, your heart is racing every time someone bumps into you, you feel like  you're starting to panic. On really bad days, you might even feel like a paranoia that people  around you are like following or tracking you somehow, which is really terrifying even if it's  not true. By the time you get to work, you've already worked yourself up into a state and you're  feeling kind of nauseous. Anxiety has a compounding effect. Once you're feeling anxious, everything  around you is going to make it worse, even things that normally would be okay. Now you're  freaked out, you're overanalyzing the tone of the receptionist when she says good morning to you,  you're overanalyzing wordings and your emails. Having a panic attack yesterday actually makes  you more susceptible to having another one today because of this stupid thing called secondary  anxiety, which I call it stupid because I know it's stupid even when I'm experiencing it that's  like, oh, I'm feeling anxious, I hope I don't have a panic attack, oh my god, what if I have a panic  attack and then I get so nervous about it that I work myself up into it just because I didn't want  it to happen. It's something that I know is stupid even in the moment, but I just can't make it stop.  So you're losing at least a spoon and freaking out about nothing, and if you actually work yourself  all the way up to a panic attack, it's pretty much game over. I'm not really useful for anything  else for the rest of the day. One more time. This is the last Groundhog Day, I promise.  Now you're a member of a marginalized group. Again, I'm going to go with what I know and we're  going to talk about what it might feel like to be transgender. You get up and get ready.  Maybe you wake up in a pretty good mood, but then when you're brushing your teeth, you know,  you look in the mirror and don't super recognize the person that's looking back at you. Gender  dysphoria is another thing that's kind of hard to describe. But kind of imagine if like tomorrow  morning you woke up in the body of like not the gender that you've associated yourself with your  whole life. You know, every time you see your reflection or hear yourself speak, it's going to  feel wrong and it's going to be impossible not to notice and think about it. Getting dressed  can also be a burden. I wear a binder, which is hard to get on and it's uncomfortable to wear  during the day. So that's at least the spoon getting ready. You take the subway and you get  catcalled. Somebody calls you a freak and you don't feel good about it. Four or five strangers  passively misgender you that they just don't know any better. They're not trying to be jerks.  But it may have you feeling down. Then you're reading the news. They passed a bill that limits  the rights of trans kids in schools and another trans woman of color was murdered in your city  over the weekend. So now that catcall that you felt crappy about earlier is making you feel like  really legitimately nervous. You get to work. You climb the stairs. The receptionist misgenders you  again even though you've told her a million times. So you correct her again and she makes a comment  about how being trans is the only thing you ever talk about. But it's really hard not to think  about it when it's jarring every time you hear someone make a mistake. Think about the metaphor  from earlier. If you suddenly woke up and everyone was using the opposite pronoun for you, I think  you would notice it every time. Now you get to work. But you feel like you have to work harder  and talk louder in order to get noticed for anything you're doing. Which means you have to  spend more spoons to get the same amount of work done. Incidentally all women in the tech industry  have to deal with this one. As you can see privilege is a big factor. Nobody has unlimited  energy. Nobody is the terminator. You know there's going to be times in everyone's lives when there's  things going on that you have to spend more spoons on. Maybe your mom is in the hospital  and you're taking care of her. It's taking a lot of your energy and you're really worried.  Maybe you're in the hospital because you got sick. Maybe you have a newborn and you haven't  slept through the night in three or four months. These are definitely things that are going to  require you to spend more spoons. The difference between these kind of things and the kind of  things from the previous example are that A, most of these kind of things are temporary.  And B, someone in those other three categories is just as likely to have to deal with one of  these things on top of all those other things. And then it's just compounding. So the lesson  here is basically saying just because you have privilege, I'm not saying that your life can't  ever be hard. Everybody's lives are hard sometimes. But it's not hard because you have privilege.  It's hard even though you have privilege. Well how does this affect me? I'm not accusing you of  being Brids rights activist, although a lot of people are like that. But it depends on who you  are. If you're in one of the groups I just described, I'm sure you're already managing your spoons  every day, even if you don't think about it like this. But I do think this metaphor is useful  to help you think about it. I mean it's tiring to manage your spoons, but it's also tiring  to watch other people not have to manage their spoons. And it makes you feel like there's something  wrong with you that you have to do it. So thinking consciously about it is a good way to start  practicing self-care, which is super important. And actually it's more than just important. It's  like necessary to do in our lives. I used to feel like taking care of myself was like a really  selfish thing to do. I think we're trained to feel like we have to sacrifice our own well-being  to please other people. And especially in our industry and especially in the startup culture,  I feel like a lot of places have a social status involved with being a martyr. But it turns out  we can't give anything in our lives 100% unless we make sure that we're taking care of first.  And there are two major things that help me change the way I think about it. I saw talk about  burnout last year by my friend Mary Fangval. And she talked about this metaphor of putting on your  own oxygen mask before you put on others. And it really changed my life to think about it that way.  You're not just helping yourself first because you care about yourself more. You're helping  yourself first because then you'll be equipped to help other people. And also this quote by  Audre Lorde. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It's self-preservation. And that's an act of  political warfare. The way I see it as a trans person, like just existing, is kind of an act of  political resistance. So it's kind of my responsibility to protect myself so that I can keep standing  up for my community. The greater I am and the more I succeed, the more powerful my resistance is  because I'm doing it in the face of people who want me to fail. I think a lot of people picture  self-care like this. And it can look like this. But on other days, it can look like this too.  I did an art project recently where I kind of intentionally practiced self-care every day for  a month and analyzed how it was making me feel. And the thing that really struck me is how different  it can look on different days. Like on days when I can and I have enough spoons, self-care can really  mean accountability, holding myself accountable for doing the things I have to do and the relief I  feel when I get things done. But on other days, you know, I can't do that. I don't have the spoons.  And then self-care can look like giving myself permission to rest and forgiving myself when not  everything I might do gets done. So the art of self-care is kind of being able to figure out  which you need at the moment at any given time and being kind to yourself.  Well, maybe if you're not one of the people in the groups I was talking about, but you're an  employer or a manager, I will guarantee you that some of the people under you are in those groups.  And I hope that the exercise I did going through the morning kind of made it obvious why this is a  huge problem. Like, did you see how many spoons some of your employees might have to spend before  they even get started working at the beginning of the day when you want them to like feel refreshed  and ready to do stuff? So it's affecting productivity. You know, everyone needs energy to do their best  work, of course. But it's not just work. You know, their whole lives are going to suffer around that.  If we all have stressful jobs, jobs that are stressful at least sometimes, and if you have to  use all your energy to stay a float-in, busy job, like what's happening to your work-life balance,  like it's destroyed. So it's about empathy too. Like, hopefully you care about your employees  and you want them to lead fulfilling lives outside of their jobs. So this is basically just a recipe  for burnout. Now let's talk about Agile. This is the chart you need to understand to understand  the next section of my talk. Just kidding. You don't need to know about Agile. But a lot of us  use at least a little bit of Agile in our days. And I think that spoon theory and Agile methodology  are kind of similar and kind of related. I think a lot about velocity at work. That's an intangible  unit of measurement. Sound familiar? And if you want to prioritize your team dynamic, like Agile  pushes, you know, you can't be a cohesive team unless everyone understands each other. And that  includes knowing each other's limits. How can you predict velocity if you don't have an understanding  of what types of things are holding some of your employees back or slowing them down? Obviously,  if you can remove those kind of barriers, velocity is going to increase. And Agile methodology says  that your employees are your number one resource. I believe that. And if you also believe that,  you should be really focused on treating them well and making sure that they're okay.  All right. So maybe I've convinced you. You're like, Jamie, I'm in. But how am I supposed to fix it?  Like, maybe I have employees that have had illnesses their entire lives or like they're  experiencing systematic racism in their lives. Like, how am I, I can't fix that for them. Obviously,  nobody expects you to do that. But when you talk about student theory, you're really talking about  levels of burden. And there are definitely things you can do as an employer to lessen people's burdens.  You have to recognize that their health is more important than their work. This is the martyr  thing again. The reason that that's such a pervasive idea is because a lot of companies encourage it.  But it's not healthy to expect your employees to think of work as the most important thing in their  lives. Provide adequate health care for them. Not only is being sick tiring, but it's also  really expensive and really stressful. So good health care is going to help people manage their  disease. But it's also going to give them peace of mind, which is going to help conserve energy also.  Treatmental illness is an illness. Here's a pro tip. If you see someone freaking out about something  that you think is nothing, they wish that they weren't freaking out more than you wish that  they weren't freaking out because it's more of a burden on them than it is on you.  And make accessibility a priority. You know, nobody wants to be an afterthought.  But making your employees comfortable is going to involve considering what needs they might have  before they have to come and ask you for special considerations. If you're planning your office,  planning events, and thinking about accessibility, it's going to make everybody more comfortable.  And it's not going to make people feel like they were called out because they had to come  ask you to change something. Accessibility here is like a huge umbrella that is also a whole  another talk. But some of the things I'm thinking about are access to your building and facilities,  appropriate bathrooms. That's a big thing in the trans community, but also for people with mobility  issues. And huge kudos for Valscom for having gender neutral bathrooms, I almost cried.  Transportation considerations and events that your employees can enjoy. Not everyone has fun  doing physical activities. Some people have special diets. Some people can't drink alcohol.  Some people have extreme social anxiety and social events that are mandatory are going to be a real  stressor for them. So just think about it. This is basically all about keeping people's needs  in mind when you do stuff. You might not want to give the impression of special treatment for  certain employees, but you know, some people just need different considerations to perform at the  same level. Fair isn't always equal. I really love this graphic. Like if someone who has a chronic  illness is late to work a lot or misses more work than someone else and you're more lenient with them,  you're not giving them special treatment. You're giving them a consideration they need to be able  to do their job. And you also got to keep it in mind when you're looking at their work.  You know, if someone isn't as productive as someone else, it doesn't necessarily mean that  they're not as smart or not as hardworking. It could be because they have barriers caused by  their situation. There's an example that I want to use because it's really real and really relevant,  but I do want to preface it a little bit because there's kind of this current trend  that I've been seeing on like medium where men will write articles that's like,  I pretended to be a woman and now I believe in sexism, but I didn't before. And it's annoying to  a lot of people because like, why can't we listen to people without having to experience everything  for ourselves before we believe it? But I'm still going to use this example because it's really good.  We did an experiment. For two weeks, we switched names. I signed all client emails as Nicole,  and she signed as me. Folks, it fucking sucked. I was in hell. Everything I asked or suggested  was questioned. Clients I could do in my sleep were condescending. One of them asked if I was single.  Nicole had the most productive week of her career. I realized the reason she took longer  is because she had to convince clients to respect her. The point here is that you might not even  realize what kind of advantages you have over other people. And that's what empathy is. He learned  empathy by doing this experiment, but if we could think more about what other people might get going  through, maybe we could learn empathy before we get to this point. Company culture is a phrase  that kind of makes me cringe sometimes because it's like really often used as an excuse to  like justify some of the crappy things I've been talking about, like non-tolerance and making people  work too hard. But you can promote a company culture that is accepting and is empathetic.  So how do you do that? I actually speak louder than words. It's not enough to just say that you  want a good culture. You have to actually do stuff to back it up. I want to tell a short story about  where I work at AgriList. And on my first day, I was really nervous. I was already out as trans  when I joined AgriList, and everyone knew and was very accepting. So I wasn't too worried, but you  still get worried. And I was filling out paperwork on my first day, and on our payroll form, there  was like a gender question that had two options, and I was like, oh, I don't know what to do.  So I emailed my boss, like the CEO of our company, on my first day, and I was like, oh my god, this  is suicide. But I was like, I don't know what box to click. What do I do? And she wrote me back,  and first she was like, oh, I'm really sorry. I think it's really crappy that they only have two.  Like it's 2016. They should have more. And I felt pretty good. I was like, okay, she agrees with me.  She knows where I'm coming from. But then she said, in fact, I'm going to email Trinet right now  and tell them that I don't think it's right that they only have two and that they should add more.  And I was like, whoa. Like she really wanted to put her money where her mouth is with that,  and it made me feel like I was going to be really safe working for her. Don't demand that minorities  do all the diversity work. I think this comes from a, it's not coming from a crappy place.  Like I think if you want to do better, it seems like obvious to go ask marginalized people like,  hey, can you educate me on this? How can I do better? But the problem is that a lot of people  just want to go about their day without doing a bunch more free work when they're already having  trouble managing their spoons. So it's not always like a cool thing to do to dump that on them.  I'm kind of the exception. I really like, I give talks about it. I like to talk about it.  I like when people send me questions and I can help them. But I'm kind of an exception and I don't  want people to think that because it was okay for me. It's okay to do that to strangers. So I  always make this caveat. But do listen to your underrepresented employees. And if they tell you  stories, you have to believe them. There's a culture of people not wanting to come forward to tell  about how they've been like harassed or discriminated against because they feel like it's not going to be  taken seriously. The best way to combat that is to just always take everyone seriously.  There's kind of a joke in tech that all women in tech know each other. And it's a little bit true  in the sense that it means that word of travel is fast. Like if you're a jerk, people are going to  know. But the converse is also true if you're really not a jerk, people are also going to know.  And just don't tolerate crappy behavior. This is action speak louder than words again in a  different form. If you say you're not going to tolerate something and then you do, you're just  showing that you're untrustworthy, that you care more about appearing to be a good ally than actually  being a good ally. Inaction also speaks louder than words. So think about if you're in action is  saying what you want to say. This is one of my favorite quotes. If you're not willing to remove  a toxic contributor from your project, you're accepting toxic behavior as a culture and norm.  So you have to think about how you want to act, how you want to be perceived, and how those things  link together. I have some recommended reading. This is the original spoon three essay at the top.  We have article about invisible illnesses and article about diversity in tech. The next one is a video  of the burnout talk that I mentioned by Mary Thangvong. And the last one is a really great video  from the cerebral palsy foundation. It's called The Quest for the Rainbow Bagel and it's about  navigating New York City as a physically disabled person.  Thank you so much. I hope your spoons aren't crying. Hopefully they're a beautiful flower.  You can follow me on Twitter or see my website. Thank you.
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