The Spoon Model

The spoon theory describes the daily life of people with medical conditions and their limited energy resources for doing seemingly everyday tasks. The model goes like this: each day you’re given a handful of spoons, which you will use for an activity. When the spoons are used up, you need to lay down until the next day. The difference between healthy people as they have an ever-renewing amount of spoons and can push themselves. while the medically-challenged must work within their limited allotment.

“Most people start the day with unlimited amount of possibilities, and energy to do whatever they desire, especially young people. For the most part, they do not need to worry about the effects of their actions.”

Just the daily tasks associated with living (getting dressed, making breakfast, getting on the bus) will cost spoons. Often once these spoons are allotted, there are aren’t many left for extra activities. Furthermore, simple problem like skipping a meal or being too cold can reduce the spoon allocation to the point where even normal activity is beyond the budget. Sometimes even pushing or overspending the spoon budget can seriously reduce the number of spoons available for the next few days.

It’s a very good and highly recommended read to understand how life is with a chronic illness or disability. I also think it’s a good metaphor for the daily workload of a IT worker.

I think folks outside of IT (and especially management) think they are like healthy people with boundless energy. However, most IT shops are burdened with technical debt dealing with poorly installed or poorly implemented software and architecture. They only have so many spoons! So when we security folks come in with “You need to patch everything right now!” 

Boom! All the spoons are gone. That means less time for other things that might affect your risk profile, like fixing broken anti-virus, monitoring & responding to security alerts, encrypting laptops, and removing accounts for terminated users. And this doesn’t count all the other things IT has to deal with that affect uptime, their user’s satisfaction and their own sanity.

I’m not sure every security professional realizes that they need to remember that IT has only so many spoons and only so many requests are going to be followed through on. We all need to plan carefully less we make things worse.