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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
Read between
March 8 - March 14, 2021
Even if we accept that the hyperactive hive mind arose largely of its own accord, why did we let it stick around once its flaws became obvious?
“The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,” Drucker wrote in his 1967 book, The Effective Executive. “He must direct himself.”34 This was a radical idea.
The best way to deploy these highly skilled individuals, Drucker concluded, was to give them clear objectives and then leave them alone to accomplish their brainy work however they saw fit.
[Knowledge work] demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.35
Once your organization has fallen into the hive mind, it’s in each individual’s immediate interest to stick with this workflow, even if it leads to a bad long-term outcome for the organization as a whole. It makes your life strictly easier in the moment if you can expect quick responses to messages that you shoot off to colleagues. Similarly, if you unilaterally decrease the time you spend checking your inbox in a group that depends on the hive mind, you’ll slow down other people’s efforts, generating annoyance and dissatisfaction that might put your job in jeopardy.
Drucker was right to point out that we cannot fully systematize the specialized efforts of knowledge workers, but we shouldn’t apply this to the workflows that surround these efforts. A manager can’t tell a copywriter how to come up with a brilliant ad, but she can have something to say about how these commissions are assigned, or about what other obligations are allowed onto the copywriter’s plate, or about how client requests are handled. This goal of putting into place smarter workflows that sidestep the worst impacts of the hyperactive hive mind is of course a substantial endeavor—one that
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The Attention Capital Principle The productivity of the knowledge sector can be significantly increased if we identify workflows that better optimize the human brain’s ability to sustainably add value to information.
Drucker helped the business world understand the emergence of knowledge work as a major economic sector. One of his central messages was the importance of autonomy. “The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,” he wrote in 1967. “He must direct himself.”11 What Drucker realized was that knowledge work was too skilled and creative to be broken down into a series of repetitive tasks that could be prescribed to workers by managers, as was the case with manual labor. There was simply no easy way to take something as abstract as coming up with a new business strategy, or
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Knowledge work is better understood as the combination of two components: work execution and workflow. The first component, work execution, describes the act of actually executing the underlying value-producing activities of knowledge work—the programmer coding, the publicist writing the press release. It’s how you generate value from attention capital. The second component, workflow, is one we defined in the introduction of this book. It describes how these fundamental activities are identified, assigned, coordinated, and reviewed.
When Drucker emphasized autonomy, he was thinking about work execution, as these activities are often too complicated to be decomposed into rote procedures. Workflows, on the other hand, should not be left to individuals to figure out on their own, as the most effective systems are unlikely to arise naturally. They need instead to be explicitly identified as part of an organization’s operating procedures.
I suggest the following design principle for developing approaches to work that provide better returns from your personal or organizational attention capital: seek workflows that (1) minimize mid-task context switches and (2) minimize the sense of communication overload.
Henry Ford took a reliable and intuitive process for building cars and replaced it with something that was more expensive to run, required a lot more management and overhead, was not at all natural, and frequently broke down, sometimes leading to major production delays. Nothing about this would have been easy or obvious. If you were a Ford manager, laborer, or investor during this period, you probably would have much preferred a safer and less disruptive focus on making the tried-and-true method slightly more efficient—the industrial equivalent of promoting better email etiquette.
A natural consequence of leaving the details of how knowledge workers work up to the individual is an entrenchment in workflows that prioritize convenience in the moment above all else. Once we free ourselves from this trap, however, and start systematically rethinking how we work, we’ll inevitably create short-term inconvenience on our way to long-term improvement.
A key insight preached in Carpenter’s book is the need to involve those who are affected by a new work procedure in the design of that procedure. His staff wrote 98 percent of the procedures currently in place and had a “heavy hand” in shaping the remaining 2 percent that Carpenter created himself. As a result, his employees are “fully vested” in these processes. Perhaps even more crucial, Carpenter made it easy to instigate further improvements. “If an employee has a good idea for improving a procedure, we will make an instant modification—with no bureaucratic hang-ups,” he explains.23
Carpenter’s approach makes sense in the context of what’s known as locus of control theory, a subfield of personality psychology that argues that motivation is closely connected to whether people feel like they have control over their ultimate success in an endeavor. When you have a say in what you’re doing (placing the locus of control toward the internal end of the spectrum), you’re much more motivated than when you feel like your actions are largely controlled by outside forces (placing the locus of control toward the external end).
There are three steps necessary to keep these experiments collaborative. The first is education. It’s important that your team understand the difference between workflows and work execution, and why the hyperactive hive mind is just one workflow among many—and probably not a very good one.
The second step is to obtain buy-in on new workflow processes from those who will actually have to execute them. To accomplish this goal, these ideas should emerge from discussion.
The third step is to further follow Carpenter’s lead by putting in place easy methods for improving the new workflow processes when issues arise.
The lesson lurking in this case study is that care must be taken in how you publicize changes to your personal work habits.
A better strategy for shifting others’ expectations about your work is to consistently deliver what you promise instead of consistently explaining how you’re working.
The key property of this system is that the professors and graduate students in my department know nothing about it. I suppose I could try to insist that they all log in to my Trello board to enter new issues or check on the status of old issues. In theory, this might save me a few extra messages, but in reality, no one would actually do this—and I can’t blame them! It takes me about thirty minutes, once a week, to process my board and send update messages. I receive massive benefits from structuring all these issues so clearly, and because I spent a little extra time to make my interface
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The core claim of this chapter is that production process thinking applies equally well to knowledge work as it does to industrial manufacturing. Just because you produce things with your brain instead of your hands doesn’t change the fundamental reality that these efforts must still be coordinated. The importance of organizing decisions about who is working on what, and finding systematic ways to check in on this work as it evolves, applies as much to generating computer code or client proposals as it does to casting brass.
Much as is observed in actual natural settings, in the informal process workplace, dominance hierarchies emerge. If you’re brash and disagreeable, or are a favorite of the boss, you can, like the strongest lion in the pride, avoid work you don’t like by staring down those who try to pass it off to you, ignoring their messages, or claiming overload. On the other hand, if you’re more reasonable and agreeable, you’ll end up overloaded with more work than makes sense for one person to handle. These setups are both demoralizing and a staggeringly inefficient deployment of attention capital. But
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The Process Principle Introducing smart production processes to knowledge work can dramatically increase performance and make the work much less draining.
Finally, to support this process-centric approach to work, Johnson insists that the whole company take processes seriously. He sees getting these processes right as the core to their success. Every employee of Optimize is expected to spend at least the first ninety minutes of every day in a deep work block, free from inputs (some people, like the manager profiled above, spend much more). One of the key uses of this morning block is to think about processes and how to improve them. As Johnson explained to me, it takes time to figure out how best to structure the crazy inputs and interaction
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These examples of effective production processes share the following properties: It’s easy to review who is working on what and how it’s going. Work can unfold without significant amounts of unscheduled communication. There’s a known procedure for updating work assignments as the process progresses.
This is the third time we’ve encountered a similar pattern: information about knowledge work arranged into columns of cards on a board.
Recently, a more refined approach to deploying tasks on boards as a productivity tool has emerged. In this approach, boards are divided into named columns, and work tasks are arranged as vertical stacks of cards under the column that best describes their status.
A key idea driving agile project management is that humans are naturally pretty good at planning. You don’t need complicated project management strategies to figure out what to work on next; it’s usually sufficient to just have a group of informed engineers get together and discuss what makes sense. The key caveat in this belief, however, is that we’re able to effectively apply our planning instinct only if we have a good grasp of all the relevant information—what tasks are already being worked on, what needs to be done, where there are bottlenecks, and so on. Cards stacked on boards turn out
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Task Board Practice #1: Cards Should Be Clear and Informative
At the core of the task board method is stacking cards in columns. These cards typically correspond to specific work tasks. It’s important that these tasks are clearly described: there shouldn’t be ambiguity about what efforts each card represents.
Task Board Practice #2: When in Doubt, Start with Kanban’s Default Columns
When in doubt, start with the default setup from the Kanban methodology, which includes just three columns: to do, doing, and done. You can then elaborate this foundation as needed.
Task Board Practice #3: Hold Regular Review Meetings
A foundational idea in agile methodology is that short meetings held on a regular schedule are by far the best way to review and update task boards. Agile rejects the idea that you should let these decisions unfold informally in asynchronous conversations on email or instant messenger.
A standard format for these meetings is to have each person briefly summarize what they’re working on, what they need from other people to make progress for the rest of the day, and what happened with the tasks they had committed to working on the day before. It’s during these review meetings that new tasks can be identified and new people assigned to them.
Task Board Practice #4: Use Card Conversations to Replace Hive Mind Chatter
The Personal Kanban solution to this problem is to organize this mess of expectations with a personal task board. Benson suggests using three columns. The first is labeled options, and it’s where you arrange all your obligations into neat stacks of Post-it notes: one note per task. “Now we’ve taken that horrible mass of work and turned it into a very cognitively pleasing rectangle.” The second column is labeled doing. This is where you move the Post-its corresponding to the tasks that you’re actually working on right now.
Which brings us to the done column. This is where you move the tasks you complete. In theory, you could just discard a Post-it once you completed its task, but as Benson implies, the psychological boost of physically moving the Post-it from doing to done is a powerful motivator.
Individual Task Board Practice #1: Use More Than One Board
maintain a separate board for every major role in your professional life. At the moment, I play three largely distinct roles as a professor at my university: researcher, teacher, and DGS. I deploy a different task board for each of these roles, so when, for example, I’m thinking about teaching, I’m not also confronted with unrelated tasks about research or the graduate program.
Individual Task Board Practice #2: Schedule Regular Solo Review Meetings
During these solo review meetings, go over all the cards on the board, moving them between columns and updating their statuses as needed. This shouldn’t take long: five to ten minutes is usually sufficient if you’re doing this regularly. And these sessions don’t have to be too frequent:
As soon as you believe that a task board can no longer be trusted as a safe place to store your obligations, you’ll revert to more frantic, hyperactive hive mind messaging.
Individual Task Board Practice #3: Add a “To Discuss” Column
For each of these three categories of colleagues, I added a column to my DGS task board labeled to discuss at next meeting. Whenever a task arises that requires input from one of these individuals, I sidestep my instinct to shoot them a quick email by instead moving the task to the appropriate to discuss column.
This hack might seem straightforward, but its impact on my work life has been profoundly positive. Imagine, for example, that a stack of five cards builds up under the to discuss column for my department chair during a given week. In a twenty-to-thirty-minute meeting, the two of us can come up with a reasonable plan for each of these cards. If I had to instead shoot off a quick email for each of the tasks, the result would be five different conversations occurring in my inbox that I’d have to tend throughout the week—leading to dozens of extra inbox checks each day and frustratingly fractured
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Individual Task Board Practice #4: Add a “Waiting to Hear Back” Column
Once you’ve identified a process that does seem like a good candidate for automation, the following guidelines will help you succeed with the transformation: Partitioning: Split the process into a series of well-defined phases that follow one after the other. For each phase, clearly specify what work must be accomplished and who is responsible. Signaling: Put in place a signaling or notification system that tracks the current phase of each output being generated by the process, allowing those involved to know when it’s their turn to take over the work. Channeling: Institute clear channels for
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Most organizations or teams have some processes that are good candidates for automation. This is not, however, a transformation to take lightly, as the overhead in working out all the details of these processes can be substantial.
