This post is an introduction to the idea and then as a Part 2 for actions to take. For anyone who hasn't continued into Part 2, it goes into first steps on listening to different performers in your company and basically doing research on what makes everyone tick. There will be a follow-up Part 3. Just want to say that's an interesting way to blog, but a little unsatisfying since I'm not sure if I'll keep coming back for new updates every week.
Interesting topic though! I consider myself both self-motivated and a little lazy at heart so I think I fall into the skilled pragmatist. For me personally it was that realization that I wasn't going to be the 4.0 student, but that I could still get a great 3.5 by doing a lot less work. Sometimes I crank out tons of extra work that helps various people by the simple virtue that its interesting to me. So I think this is hitting a chord with me somewhere.
I find myself in management these days, and the people I manage are all great and talented and as far as I can tell no one is upset with my laissez-faire management style. But I'm always wanting to find how to make the job more interesting for them. The roadmap can often be kind of boring work. When we have interesting projects the work just flies by and you can see the satisfaction on everyone's faces. Would love to just have more of that.
I thought point 2 addressed engagement well. If you can get behind the purpose of the whole company, then understanding why your particular cog is important to the machine will help keep you engaged.
Some really great stuff here. Thanks for your feedback. I like the idea of starting small - I can imagine getting ahead of myself and setting unrealistic expectations. Also, the idea of overlapping your skills is great. It would definitely help to see my progress in another area to remind me what I can do!
If we assume doers as being goal-oriented, then I can see it being easier to educate them in ways to help them get closer to their goals faster and more efficiently. On the other hand, someone who doesn't really care about the goal, isn't going to care as much about getting there sooner or in a better fashion.
That said, I've found myself in both camps on various projects. When you're working on something where the end result is really exciting, it makes a huge difference on you and your team. It's exhilarating. On the flip side, projects were you don't care about the end result, are really brutal to work through. You just work for the paycheck. Any sort of educating about how to do things better feels particularly pointless.
Making work fun is nice, but what really improved my effectiveness was cultivating the ability to do work that wasn't fun, but valuable. I think it depends on your strategy. I will always be able to accomplish what I need to now, but since I'm not passionate, I probably will never be brilliant.
This is great. For some reason, I read it as the point to this was the third kind of laziness, and how to overcome that. It seemed like the least obvious of the three, and also once I read it, how to overcome it was also the least obvious.
And it's a very good thing to bring up. I for one, am always working on something, attending to something, and it's all as a lead-up to the 'something big'. What my co-founder tends to do is realize when we're in this mode and declare it's time to 'step it up a notch'. We do things if we realize we're scared or nervous to do them, purely to get past that and move forward.
Increasingly I have absorbed "work" into a three step feedback cycle - something comparable to OODA but with a more contemplative purpose. It's really intended for creative projects but it scales and generalizes nicely to many life things:
1. Principles - why you do a thing
2. Benchmarks - what defines success and failure at making the thing
3. Mediums - how thing is made
The starting point - the review - is often to-do list like. The to-do list's function is mostly taken care of within five minutes of heading out the door for a walk with out-loud self-talking: "So, yesterday this happened. And I want to do this today." Verbalizing it(while a bit surprising to passerby) makes a huge difference because it does the "getting it out of me" function that all these apps do, and then lets the thought disappear into conversation without a List of Shame forming.
But the thing I say I want to do is usually defined in terms of medium(the specific actions I take or techniques I will be using). If I agree I can drill down to specifics until I've designed an exact step-by-step process. If I disagree with that it's going to happen that I loop around to either the principle(is there a good reason?) or the benchmark(am I measuring the goal correctly?).
Blockage can usually be identified by pointing to one part of the cycle that doesn't work. I have to get all three parts to cohere for an action to matter. So I will have days where I act and then learn that the benchmark is wrong, thus needing to throw away the result but getting a little bit closer to coherent design.
All of this happens outside the formal workplace, mind. The principles and benchmarks of the business, after all, are independent of my own. But it pushes me to find useful perspectives and get away from hours-on-clock production, which I needed to do when I started working for myself. I've ended up with all my income deriving from investment, which could also be seen as "cheating the system". I actually worked backwards from the outcome(hmm, somehow that happened) to what made it happen(identifying and refining how I operate). When I do the analysis it's really clear that the times of my life that were most stressed were the ones where obligations made me act, act, act without being able to go through the loop, so now I'm trying to apply it more consciously.
This assessment, Working Genius [1], helped us out at the company I work for.
The balance we were looking for, from thinking up, creating ideas, to encouraging (galvanizing), structuring, completing, etc, from start to finish.
It helped me explain what I guess I knew, but showed me who I’d need to work with, for best results.
Me, at my best (green), I’m great at Invention and Discernment. Creating and weeding out the potential solutions. In this zone, I can do 8-12hrs easy
At my yellow (I’ll do it, but it drains my energy quick) is enablement and tenacity. I can encourage others and push through my own doubt/insecurity/bug/issue, etc, but anymore than an hour or two of this, and I’m drained.
At my red zone (if I start doing this, I start getting frustrated) is Wonder and Galvanizing. I don’t get energy from rallying people or from wondering about too much, I’d rather figure it out, not dream it out. If I have to talk to rally people over, for more than 5 min, I’m drained and frustrated. Or if we are “pointlessly-brainstorming” and “accepting any input”, I’m checked out 5 min in.
Anyway, there are plenty of good suggestions here, but this helped in figure out what kind of people to surround yourself/team with for completing projects, etc
Agree on this being a good strategy. It also does a good job of covering the case where you learn that you aren't actually that interested in X, or are only interested enough to get a particular task done.
I put in "How can we become 20% more efficient", seeded a few mediocre ideas, and started hitting the AI button. This is what we've got (I'm going to get promoted to Director for sure!):
* Get interns to fix all the tech debt
* Hire an Agile consultant
* Have a big party to celebrate meeting deadlines
* Fire a whole bunch of people
* Write a letter to your employees to complain about how hard you work (go viral!)
* Write another letter to your employees to complain about how hard you work (go viral!)
* Move all the servers to the cloud
* Bring all the servers to your house and connect them to a home server
* Use more Microsoft products
* Hold all-hands meetings to complain about how hard you work
* Go golfing and then complain that you're too busy to get your work done
* Outsource to India
* Work through the weekend
* Force everybody into the office
* Ignore the problem, find a way to blame the other departments, this is the way it's always been done, it must be their fault
* Put monitors on the wall to check how fast we are
* Spend more on the Scrum Master
* No-meetings weeks
* Lead by example, work harder than your team
* Work harder, longer and smarter
* Take a big stack of papers home to read over the weekend
* Open a free drinks bar in the office
* Make a big production of telling your boss that you're too busy to work late
* Re-write the backend in Ruby using Rails
* Get a lucrative job offer from Google
* Convince your wife to let you build a data center in the shed
Nice blog post. I especially like the idea of the "mediocrity trap" that occurs when we realize that we can get B results by investing 20% of efforts but need to invest 80% of effort before we start getting to A work.
Thank you Sam! I really enjoyed your essay, especially this theme you repeated:
> Finally, to repeat one more time: productivity in the wrong direction isn’t worth anything at all. Think more about what to work on.
If anyone has pointers on how they found the right thing to work on, I’m sure that would help a lot of people.
I can add my anecdote, which is seeing patterns of repetitive, unfulfilling work being done, and inventing ways to simplify them for the goal of reducing suffering. Also, not going solo and exploring what/who inspires you. For instance, I find Bret Victor’s work very inspiring.
Thanks for the comment. Wanted to add that, for me personally, effort _has_ to follow fun, and only then it's efficient, and, most importantly, sustainable. This post was partially inspired by an awesome book called Company of One by Paul Jarvis, btw.
Oh totally, I was just thinking about taking your same concept and applying it to more specific topics, like mental warm-ups before taking on your task list at work and what effects that would have on your work ethic, well-being and abstract thinking. :)
These seem to be more "12 steps to be someone who people think gets things done". Most of these steps are about image management rather then production.
Number 1 can be efficient but it isn’t satisfying if it was taken straight from a cookbook.
> But there is nothing instrinsically superior to the joy of #2 compared to #1. It's just a psychological/emotional preference.
I’m not sure about that. Feeling mastery and competence is intrinsically rewarding. And that’s easier to achieve with point number 2; if your mental model aligns more with the real thing then you are less likely to make mistakes and to have to look up reference material—you are less likely to get estranged from the task at hand.[1] And you are less likely to be bewildered by all the apparent complexity that surrounds you and that the sage old ones just tell you to put up with and to not question. I don’t think you would even mind being less efficient as long as you are in that sweet groove of point number two.
A lot of the points touched on in the original article and this thread are conducive to deeper, creative and more meaningful work in general. You should say no to meaningless distractions. I just finished reading this book about it, so, good timing... https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted-...
I really appreciate this advice, this is a great framework by which to judge my goals and keep me focused on relevant tasks. Do you recommend any books or articles I should read that expound on this mindset?
Interesting topic though! I consider myself both self-motivated and a little lazy at heart so I think I fall into the skilled pragmatist. For me personally it was that realization that I wasn't going to be the 4.0 student, but that I could still get a great 3.5 by doing a lot less work. Sometimes I crank out tons of extra work that helps various people by the simple virtue that its interesting to me. So I think this is hitting a chord with me somewhere.
I find myself in management these days, and the people I manage are all great and talented and as far as I can tell no one is upset with my laissez-faire management style. But I'm always wanting to find how to make the job more interesting for them. The roadmap can often be kind of boring work. When we have interesting projects the work just flies by and you can see the satisfaction on everyone's faces. Would love to just have more of that.
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