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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
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July 31 - August 5, 2023
Tools such as Acuity, ScheduleOnce, Calendly, and, of course, x.ai (to name a few examples among many) make it easy for other people to set up meetings with you during times when you’re available.
There’s really no reason why anyone should still have to waste cognitive cycles in dragged-out scheduling conversations.
the average cost of these meeting-scheduling protocols is significantly lower than what’s required by the status quo of energy-minimizing email ping-pong.
Office Hour Protocols
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the iconoclastic cofounders of the software company Basecamp, published a book titled It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work.10 The book describes a collection of ideas for cultivating an effective workplace culture they call “the calm company,”
Office hour protocols seem to work best for activities that are not too negatively impacted by these delays. This is why Basecamp’s experts and Boston’s venture capitalists embraced office hours: they reduced the large cognitive cost of distracting messages while introducing delays that didn’t yield any major impact on daily effectiveness.
Client Protocols
Sean’s company began adding a section titled “Communication” to every statement of work. “We want the client to be aware of all of this at the front of the project,” he told me. The new section specified the rules for communication between the client and the company, including, as Sean emphasized to me, what to do when urgent matters arose.
It’s all about managing expectations.”
Another important point is the need for clarity. Sean’s company included a detailed description of their client protocol in the statement of work all their clients signed. This was smart.
Nonpersonal Email Protocols
The very earliest email accounts were associated with individual people, in other words, because the user accounts for mainframe time-sharing systems were originally set up in this way. Once this connection was made, it stuck.
This arbitrary and seemingly innocent decision to associate email with individuals ended up playing a role in the rise of the hyperactive hive mind workflow.
Because email addresses are associated with people, it was easy to deploy this tool to support this type of conversation, starting us down the slippery slope that eventually led to uncontrolled messaging.
By depersonalizing communication, you have many more options to optimize it.
Short-Message Protocols
Nikias came up with a simple solution: “I keep all of my emails brief—no more than [the length of] an average text message.”
What happens to the emails that demand an interaction more involved than what can fit into a text-length reply? Nikias calls the person or asks them to set up a meeting.
he instead used a simple approximation: he would keep all his emails to five sentences or fewer.
Always keeping emails short is a simple rule, but the effects can be profound.
Once you no longer think of email as a general-purpose tool for talking about anything at any time, its stranglehold on your attention will diminish.
Status Meeting P...
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bigger issue with this style of communication protocol is that its effectiveness will rapidly diminish if you allow the status meetings to become longer and less focused.
Short, structured check-ins can be empowering. As soon as you let these gatherings devolve into looser, more standard-style meetings, they become a tedious burden.
Weekly meetings are too infrequent and vague. They take up too much time and often feature people trying to weasel out of commitments through doublespeak and conversational diversion.
Status meetings, by contrast, are both frequent and structured in the questions they demand of participants: What did you do, what are you going to do, what’s in your way? These two shouldn’t be confused.
Tenner cites a study by the economist Stephen Roach which found that between 1980 and 1989, investment in advanced technology in the service sector grew by over 116 percent per worker, while the workers’ output increased less than 2.2 percent during the same period.
He also cites a study by economists at the Brookings Institution and the Federal Reserve that calculated the “contribution of computers and peripherals as no more than 0.2 percent of real growth in business output between 1987 and 1993.”2
instead of reducing labor, computers end up creating more work.
As Sassone argues, this trade-off can be lopsided. When you eliminate support staff, the skilled professionals become less intellectually specialized, as they have to spend more time on administrative work that computers made just easy enough for them to handle on their own. As a result, it now requires more of these professionals to produce the same amount of valuable output for the market, as they have fewer mental cycles free to conduct this specialized work.
organizations he studied could immediately reduce their staffing costs by 15 percent by hiring more support staff, allowing their professionals to become more productive.
Knowledge workers with highly trained skills, and the ability to produce high-value output with their brains, spend much of their time wrangling with computer systems, scheduling meetings, filling out forms, fighting with word processors, struggling with PowerPoint, and of course, above all, sending and receiving digital messages from everyone about everything at all times.
We think we’ve advanced because we no longer need secretaries or typing pools, but we don’t factor in how much less bottom-line-boosting work we actually accomplish.
The sheer quantity and variety of tasks in a non-specialized work environment make the hive mind workflow unavoidable.
When you’re faced with an overwhelming incoming stream of unrelated tasks, you don’t have enough margin in your schedule to create smarter alternative workflows—there’s just too much bombarding you
The Specialization Principle In the knowledge sector, working on fewer things, but doing each thing with more quality and accountability, can be the foundation for significantly more productivity.
there are few things more valuable than someone who consistently produces valuable output, and few approaches to work more satisfying than being given the room to focus on things that really matter.
state in which you work on less, but do this work much better;
“With XP, we want you to come in, work super hard for eight hours, then go home and think about other things,” Woodward explained. This is not an act of generosity, but instead a recognition of the limits of the human mind.
The core of the specialization principle is the idea that less can be more.
If you design workflows that allow knowledge workers to spend most of their time focusing without distraction on the activities for which they’re trained, you’ll produce much more total value than if you instead require these same workers to diffuse their attention among many different activities.
Do Less, Do Better
“I know how addictive busyness [is],” she writes, but this “whirlwind” isn’t compatible with producing accomplishments that provide lasting meaning and pride.
Work Reduction Strategy #1: Outsource What You Don’t Do Well
attempt to outsource the time-consuming things that you don’t do well.
Work Reduction Strategy #2: Trade Accountability for Autonomy
Busyness is controllable: if you decide to be visibly busy, you know with certainty that you can accomplish this goal. Producing high-value results under scrutiny, as Amanda is now committed to doing, is much more demanding!
to gain something valuable like autonomy means you have to offer something unambiguously valuable in return. You must, in other words, become accountable for what you produce if you want the freedom to improve how you do so.
Not all efforts create the same value for your organization. If you spend more time on the high-value activities at the expense of spending less time on the low-value activities, you’ll produce more value overall.
it’s almost always worth it. The rewards of becoming significantly more effective at the things that really count will swamp the pain of overcoming the minor obstacles this specialization generates.
