The trouble is that the attention knowledge workers spend isn’t on “the execution of discrete tasks, but instead interactions with others about these tasks.”
Knowledge workers also are granted more independence than those working a more traditional factory line. This means it’s up to knowledge workers to improve their effectiveness to keep up.
A whole genre of books, blogs and podcasts are dedicated to this. Last year, writer Cal Newport contributed Slow Productivity. To sum it all up: Do fewer things, work at a natural pace and obsess over quality.
But don’t confuse “do fewer things” with “accomplish fewer things,” he writes. Instead, we need to avoid “task engines,” like hosting events — which spin off many overlooked tasks — unless we mean it. He recommends no more than three missions at a time.
(My three missions at the moment: To be a committed parent and husband; To run a profitable and impactful news orgs; To be an active journalist who encourages people to appreciate a complex world. That means I should limit everything outside of those) .
To get there, he recommends setting 5-year goals, doubling initial timelines when estimating any given project and using as many recurring systems as possible (morning meetings; afternoon calls; limited 1:1s; no-meeting Fridays)
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- Do fewer things, work at a natural pace and obsess over quality
- “Accomplishment without burnout not only is possible, but should be the new standard”
- Peter Drucker’s 1999 paper on knowledge worker productivity: Different than manufacturing, quantifying productivity is “the biggest challenge” but this author says Drucker’s six “major factors” but not actual quantifiable — so he didn’t solve much
- Tom Davenport’s 2005: Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers
- Agricultural productivity statistics led to the Norfolk four course system that didn’t leave fields fallow and boosted agricultural revolution in United Kingdom
- This productivity statistics approach was taken into Industrial Revolution
- “The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail“ argued Peter Drucker and his influential 1967 book The Effective Executive, “he can only be helped. But he must direct himself.”
- So we started to use “visible productivity as a crude proxy for actual productivity”
- Jane Austen didn’t write a little in between busy projects as her nephew’s biography implies and others repeated. Instead when she got chunk of time she was monumentally productive (This is far more common than mythology of squeezing in creative output)
- All work has the overhead tax of email and meetings and checkins that mean the more you do at same time the less productive you are in output
- Don’t confuse “do fewer things” with “accomplish fewer things”
- Knowledge workers use a “stress heuristic” to take on less — we do as many zoom meetings as we can until it is too stressful
- “Overload is not fundamental to knowledge work. It’s instead largely a side effect of the crude ways in which we self manage our work volume.” 65
- Limit your missions (3 tops)- to limit your tasks
- Author argues Ben Franklin found slow productivity in his 30s, when he attempted to expand to a third printing franchise in the West Indies His apprentice David Hall fell ill while traveling to Philadelphia. Franklin kept him in Philadelphia to recuperate, but found that David Hall ran the shop better than Franklin. So Franklin scrapped the West Indies expansion and went on to his many other inventions with his newfound time. In 1748 he made David Hall a full partner and began his focus on electricity
- In Jill Lepore 2013 book “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin,” author argues that Franklin’s sister had similar intellect to her brother but demands on women meant she had no outlet for it
- “In many cases, it’s not the actual execution of a small commitment that generates distraction, it’s instead the cognitive effort required to remember it, to worry about it and to eventually find time for it in your schedule.” 83
- Autopilot schedule (same task, same place, same ritual); structured emails (to reduce back and forth) and time blocking
- David Allen’s 2001 Getting Things Done (GTD)
- The trouble is that the attention knowledge workers spend isn’t on “the execution of discrete tasks, but instead interactions with others about these tasks”
- Docket clearing: schedule an all team meeting to knock out and communicate rather than let tasks linger
- A conference is a task engine
- Pseudo productivity: a time focused response to the variety and autonomy of knowledge work that makes assessment difficult
- 2018 MIT logjam paper: Rather than push method, “breaking logjams in knowledge work” paper focused on a change to a “pull” method
- If you can control, this is a simulated pull method:
- Step 1: Separate the “holding tank” and active projects (not just tasks): active should only have three at a time
- Step 2: intake procedure, by clarifying how many projects are ahead
- Step 3: weekly List clean
- John Gribbin’s 2003 book The Scientists makes clear: Galileo, Newton and the like took years and often decades to translate inspiration into clarifying their breakthroughs
- Authors essay: on pace and productivity
- “It’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster”
- Lee’s pondering study of Ju/‘hoansi: Hunter gathering was less work and better fed than had been expected — updated by Mark Dyble with “uneven” work in the Philippines hunters versus new rice farmers
- Set 5 year goals and double your initial timelines when you estimate projects to get there
- Georgia O’Keefe In The “quiet wonder” of Lake George gave her success: this was “seasonality “ in which she would produce there in the summer
- Kerouac told Steve Allen in a 1959 interview that he wrote On The Road in three weeks, but this was clarified in a 2007 NPR interview with his brother in law: Kerouac typed a draft in three weeks but he worked on it for years
- Jewel, who was homeless turned down a signing bonus: Hardwood grows slowly
- Commit to quality on these fewer goals: more quality both demands and enables slowness
- Choose more money or more free time?
- Ira Glass: we start with good taste but we have to produce a volume of work to close the gap between our taste and our ability – improve for your taste
- MFA programs improve writer taste more than ability
- In adult nonfiction you’re either Stephen Covey (7 Habits of Highly Effective People) or Malcolm Gladwell ((I don’t know what the author means by this, because he didn’t clarify much, but I am assuming he means Covey gave specific advice and Gladwell’s narratives are to be drawn from))
- “When you gather with other people who share similar professional ambitions, the collective taste of the group can be superior to that of any individual.” — referencing CS Lewis and the Inklings
- 2017 New Republic story: “Who can afford to write like John McPhee?,” referencing the long deliberate approach he takes