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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
Read between
July 31 - August 5, 2023
Sprint, Don’t Wander
During a Scrum sprint, a team works exclusively on a single specific deliverable, such as adding a new feature to a software product—no complex task lists, schedules filled with meetings, or intricate daily planning processes are needed.10 This productivity hack has become an accepted best practice in this field.
book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.12
Regular sprints also support longer-term changes to your workload by making it easier for individual knowledge workers to lobby for fewer obligations overall.
Budget Attention
imagine, for the sake of argument, that a new rule was enacted that demanded that service time was carefully measured and not allowed to exceed a fixed budget without the explicit permission of your dean. Reaching a state of extreme service overload would become more difficult in this scenario.
There are three keys for a strategy of this type to work. First, it must start from the premise that your time and attention are limited. Second, it must quantify how much of your time and attention is currently dedicated to whatever category of work you’re attempting to budget. And third, whoever is responsible for determining how much work of this type you have to do must confront your current commitments when asking you to do more, even if this person is you.14
deep-to-shallow work ratios, which I first proposed in my book Deep Work. The idea is to agree in advance with your supervisor how many hours each week should be spent on the core skilled activities for which you were hired, and how much on other types of shallower support or administrative work. The goal is to seek the balance that maximizes your value to your organization.
Meeting budgets are also common. The idea is to block off on your calendar the times you’re available for meetings. These blocks should add up to the total amount of time you think is reasonable to spend in meetings in a given week.
In both field and laboratory studies, the researchers found that women are more likely to volunteer for “non-promotable” service tasks than men. Women are also asked to do these tasks more frequently than men, and say yes more often when asked.
Supercharge Support
Most modern knowledge work organizations treat individuals as general-purpose computers that execute a turbulent mixture of value-producing and administrative tasks—often unequally distributed, and not at all optimized for any particular big picture objective.
Our rush to cut payrolls by having everyone handle their own administrative work through computer interfaces provided only the illusion of streamlining.
Supercharging Idea #1: Structure Support
When you’re no longer required to fragment your attention by jumping back and forth between what’s in front of you at the moment and any number of asynchronous conversations piling unpredictably in your inbox, each discrete task takes less total time.
In the moment, it might seem like the ability to just fire off messages would be a real time-saver, but when everyone is doing the same thing, everyone ends up buried in an inbox, struggling to make reasonable progress on anything.
Supercharging Idea #2: Build Smart Interfaces Between Support and Specialists
Supercharging Idea #3: As a Last Resort, Simulate Your Own Support Staff
“For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.”
Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. . . . A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe.
email made the hive mind workflow possible, but it didn’t make it inevitable.
It follows that the potential productivity gains of breaking the stranglehold of the hyperactive hive mind workflow are staggering—on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars of increased GDP, if not more.
It’s absurdly ahistorical and shortsighted to assume that the easy workflows we threw together in the immediate aftermath of these tech breakthroughs are somehow the best ways to organize this complicated new type of work.
The Luddites in this current moment are those who nostalgically cling to the hyperactive hive mind, claiming that there’s no need to keep striving to improve how we work in an increasingly high-tech world.
