The great irony of the gig economy is that free agents have some of the most rigidly prescribed roles imaginable in industrial-style corporate machines. Late-capitalist corporations are some of the most machine-like organizations ever seen in history.
The classic image of Charlie Chaplin caught in a gear train (from Modern Times) is perhaps a better visual metaphor for under-the-API jobs like driving for Uber or delivering for Instacart than it is for actual factory jobs. The addition of software makes the underlying industrial machines more machine-like, not less.
But even when you don’t have an app as your boss, providing you with precise micromanagement cues and feedback to drive your work, it is surprisingly hard to get your mind free of the industrial cog-in-the-machine mindset.
You can take the cog out of the machine, but not the machine out of the cog.
And believe it or not, this is a good thing. There are aspects of coghood you want to preserve when you go free-agent, whether it is above or below the API.
If you’re smart, you want to be a free cog. You don’t want to fetishize complete freedom from structure.
The Upside of Coghood
The thing is, despite the pejorative and dehumanizing connotations, there are many excellent aspects to being a cog in a machine — and excellent for you, the worker, not just your boss, or evil capitalist owners.
To understand why, it is worth taking a moment to understand how gears actually work (cog is an alternative term for both a gear and a tooth on a gear).
Gears transmit torque from one shaft to another, via forces transmitted between the faces of interlocking teeth. Modern gears have what is known as an involute profile — the path traced out by the end of a taut string being unwound from a cylinder. Involute gears have the special property that a steady force is transmitted smoothly at the contact surface (gif from Wikimedia Commons):
Involute gears are the result of centuries of refinement and evolution in gear design. They are the reason why modern machines are efficient, low-noise, and low-vibration. Helical gears (which add an angle to the gear tooth edge), improve things even further.
With the right lubrication and bearing designs, modern gear trains can be nearly noiseless, highly efficient, and capable of generating and transmitting incredible speeds and forces.
If you’ve never watched a gear train in motion, it’s worth finding one and looking closely at it. There’s lots of fun gear videos on YouTube. There is an ASMR-like oddly satisfying quality to many of them.
Take a moment to reflect on the beauty of gear technology. Clever geometry produces a smooth, continuous, and efficient emergent system behavior out of fundamentally non-smooth and discrete individual behaviors. A single gear is a disc with a discrete arrangement of teeth around its rim, yet it can participate in the production of varied smooth movements.
For a paycheck employee at well-run business, the upsides of coghood are automatic, and don’t require much maturity or self-awareness to realize and appreciate. Being part of a smoothly functioning machine can be deeply satisfying, if it is the right machine for you. You are in deep synchronization with people you work with, smoothly handing off your work. Your current work also sets up your own future work, creating a satisfying path of habit refinement and growth for you.
As a free agent though, you have to work to recreate the benefits of coghood for yourself. The key to that is understanding follow through.
Follow Through
What makes an involute gear better than more primitive kinds is that it embodies better follow-through in its geometry. It disengages smoothly, setting up smooth engagement for the next tooth, without interruption or jerkiness in the work being transmitted to the next gear in the train.
This is follow through as in golf or tennis swings: a way of refining atomic actions so they flow better into bigger chains of actions, and set up your own next atomic actions better.
All long-term value is built from the follow-through aspects of atomic behaviors.
An example from my consulting work is writing up notes after meetings. It is one of the very few disciplined follow-through behaviors I’ve managed to develop and actually stick to over years.
During a meeting with a client, I just make take very brief notes in the form of key points and phrases. They are memory cues, not verbatim transcripts. Actually recording and transcribing is not just overkill, it actually works worse.
Afterwards, I write up more careful notes and send them to the client. Before the next meeting, I take a couple of minutes to review the last meeting’s notes (many of my clients do so as well). That’s it. Follow-through doesn’t have to be complex.
This single “involute profile” habit turns a staccato thread of thought and conversation, with lots of potential for inefficient rework/redundancy, into a smooth stream. Before I learned to do this consistently, meetings with clients were often frustrating. I felt like we were unnecessarily going over ground already covered, forgetting relevant things that were said in previous meetings, and even backsliding from good decisions to bad decisions on occasion.
Once I started my note-taking, all that changed. Meeting sequences began to feel like steady forward progress with very little backlash. Context-switching between clients got much more pleasant (particularly important on days when you have back-to-back meetings with entirely different clients, which I try to avoid, but sometimes happens).
Clients often don’t recognize the value of the notes initially. Superficially, it seems like make-work. But as the relationship develops, they realize that it’s the core of why sparring with an external consultant is valuable at all. Even if you never refer back to the notes, and your client never does either, the very fact of writing them up lends a smooth continuity to the conversation track, and a sense of accumulating insight and value. It is at the heart of the deliberate practice element in executive sparring.
The idea generalizes.
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If you do design, you should have follow through around how/where you save your design files after each session, and how you log the evolution of a piece of design.
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If you do contract programming, your disciplines around checking in and checking out code during work sessions, and your commit messages, are a big part of your follow through.
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If you conduct workshops, debriefs with participants, and reviewing your own “game tapes” when available, are part of follow through.
The basic idea is simple, but not reducible to a formula: identify the threads of repeating behaviors that make up your consulting practice, decompose them into repeating actions that are like gear teeth, and audit their follow-through structure. If the atomic behavior feels frustrating, chances are the frustration is where you need to focus, to discover better follow-through profiles.
Discover, not invent or design.
Invention and design tend to add artificial ritual and ceremony rather than follow-through per se. While these can be helpful additional elements, they are not substitutes for good follow through, which must be discovered, and evolved through trial-and-error refinement.
The Natural Shape of Work
Follow through is about respecting the momentum of every atomic action, and uncovering the value inherent in the “extra” effects that appear naturally when you let that action run its course. Follow through is about letting the action end where it wants to end, not where it stops producing legible, billable value.
Follow through is about letting work assume its natural shape. Paradoxically, it can feel very unnatural the first few times you do it. Remember it is not the natural shape of your mind or body. It’s the natural shape of the work, which involves elements besides you. This is the idea of “good form,” which is about the relationship among you, your tools, the work output, and the behaviors of others for whom it is work input.
Often, the sign that you’ve discovered the natural shape of work is that you can describe it in a simple way. Note how I explained an involute profile — in terms of the unwrapping of a taut string wrapped around a cylinder. If you have good mechanical instincts, you may be able to see why that implies smooth contact forces. Even though the mathematical equation of an involute curve is complex, there is something very natural and intuitive about this common description (it’s how instructors typically explain gears in machine design classes).
Discovering the natural shape of work means looking carefully at the “geometry” of your atomic behavior and improving it through trial-and-error.
If you do it right, follow-through will be simple enough that you can learn to practice it almost unconsciously, but not so simple that it doesn’t do the job of transmitting work to the next person, and setting up your own next action, smoothly.
For a paycheck employee in a good job, a good manager might instill good follow through in you, if you if you’re lucky. As a free agent, you’ll generally have to do it for yourself. And in a way that generalizes across your gigs.
If you offer a single skill, think of that skill as a single gear wheel, with each instance of use of that skill as a tooth. Whatever you do must smoothly hand-off useful work in two directions — to the tooth engaged with yours (the customer or client’s complementary behavior) and to yourself in the future — the next tooth coming up behind the currently active one.
If you offer complex combinations of skills, things get more complex of course.
Designing for Cogginess
As you refine the core behaviors of your consulting practice, you should build the follow-through into the definition of your work, and incorporate it in how you price your services. You should design your services for cogginess.
If your client is not willing to pay for follow through, they don’t understand how you create value, and it’s your job to explain and market yourself better so they do.
While it can be easier in the short term to simply hide the follow-through behaviors in an opaque pricing structure, in the long run it’s better for you and your clients if follow through is visible to both of you, and appreciated by both of you.
If you are a well-developed free cog, everything you do will smoothly drive value for the client, and set up your own future behaviors. That’s the definition of a good work habit, and a good — as in satisfying for you — work ethic is built up of many different good work habits.
And if you’re positioning, explaining, and pricing your services correctly, your client will recognize all this. And be willing to pay for it.
That’s what it means to be a free cog.