More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
Started reading
February 5, 2022
we cannot tame it with minor hacks—we need to replace it with a better workflow. And to do so, we must soften Peter Drucker’s stigma against engineering office work.
It was in 1913, around five years after the introduction of the Model T, that Ford made the next logical leap in this process tinkering: What if instead of moving workers between stationary cars, the cars moved past stationary workers?
In today’s world, we’ve become used to complex manufacturing processes, but it’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of this innovation when it was first deployed at a large scale by Ford. It used to take more than twelve and a half labor hours to produce a Model T. After the assembly line, this time dropped to ninety-three minutes.
At its height, his mammoth Highland Park factory would roll a new Model T through its doors once every forty seconds.
Rheingans’s bet was that once you eliminated both distractions and endless conversations about work, five hours per day would be sufficient for people to get done the main things that mattered for the company.
What mattered just as much as how much capital he had was how he deployed it.
It’s now widely accepted that continued industrial growth requires continual experimentation and reinvention of the processes that produce the stuff we sell.
As Drucker reminds the reader, since 1900 the productivity of the manual laborer increased by a factor of fifty!
Rheingans is thinking about his organization with a Henry Ford mindset, by which I mean he’s looking for bold new ways to deploy his capital to produce more value.
The coaches also encouraged employees to embrace stress-reducing mindfulness exercises like meditation and to improve their physical health through practices like yoga. Rheingans’s goal was for everyone to slow down; to approach their work more deliberately and with less frantic action; to realize that they were “running all the time without getting anywhere.” With these changes in place, five hours suddenly proved to be more than enough to accomplish the work that used to require a much longer day.
It’s a small victory won in the wrong war.
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.
In the knowledge sector, by contrast, the primary capital resources are the human brains you employ to add value to information—what I call attention capital. But the same dynamics hold: different strategies for deploying this capital will generate different returns.
constant network switching required by the hyperactive hive mind is far from optimal,
His core insight was that when his employees relied on the hive mind, their days were structured by incoming messages, which dictated what they worked on and kept them jumping back and forth between many different projects simultaneously, limiting the quality of attention they devoted to any one objective. Devesh decided to reverse this dynamic. He wanted his employees to decide what to work on and then, once they made that decision, limit their attention to this choice until they were ready to move on to something else.
As Devesh explained to me, his company’s efforts now revolve around Trello. If you’re assigned to a project, all of your work, including discussion, delegation, and relevant files, is coordinated on its corresponding board—not in email messages, not in Slack chats.
Though email is still used for non-urgent administrative issues and private one-on-one conversations, its importance is greatly diminished. Inboxes are something you might now check once or twice daily, similar to a physical mailbox.
This new workflow encourages single-tasking. When one of Devesh’s employees decides to work on a given project, the only information or discussion they see on its board relates to the project.
“The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,” he wrote in 1967. “He must direct himself.”
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. The hyperactive hive mind is a workflow, as is Devesh’s
...more
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.
In these previous chapters, I argued that there’s a large cognitive cost to switching your attention from one target to another. Any workflow that requires you to constantly tend conversations unfolding in an inbox or chat channel is going to diminish the quality of your brain’s output. I also argued that communication overload—the feeling that you can never keep up with all the different incoming requests for your time and attention—conflicts with our ancient social wiring, leading to unhappiness in the short term and burnout in the long term.
seek workflows that (1) minimize mid-task context switches and (2) minimize the sense of communication overload. These two properties are the knowledge work equivalent of Henry Ford’s obsession with speed.
Regardless of the source of these interruptions, when it comes to producing value with your brain, the more you’re able to complete one thing at a time, sticking with a task until done before moving on to the next, the more efficiently and effectively you’ll work.
The optimal way to deploy our human brains is sequentially.
The second property cited above attempts to reduce the cognitive toll of feeling like everyone needs you at all times.
you decide when to communicate about a project; you don’t let the project decide for you.
Minimizing context switches and overload is not the whole story when it comes to engineering better workflows. This should guide your experiments in the short term, but in the long term, you must still monitor the key bottom line metric: the quantity and quality of valuable output you’re producing. For a knowledge work organization, this means tracking the impact of new workflows on revenue, while for an individual knowledge worker, this might describe the rate at which you’re hitting milestones or completing projects.
Leaving behind the simplicity of the hyperactive hive mind, in other words, might create a steady stream of inconveniences for everyone involved.
one of the key explanations for the hyperactive hive mind’s persistence in the knowledge sector is that it’s really convenient in the moment for the individuals who use it. There are no systems to learn or rules to remember; you simply grab people electronically as you need them.
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.
McCay connects leadership in the modern world to the ability to constantly experiment with how work is accomplished, while stoically handling the resulting complexity:
The man of the hour is the one who can handle the complex problems created by the increasing speed of invention …. He is the man of exceptional originality. He is the man who has disciplined himself to keep acquiring new knowledge and skills. He has created new production concepts, marketing concepts, approaches to financing.14
In modern knowledge work, we’ve largely lost interest in moving boldly ahead, embracing the resulting hardships as the cost of doing business better than before. We still talk about “innovation,” but this term now applies almost exclusively to the prod...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In business, good is not the same as easy, and fulfilling is not the same as convenient. Deep down, knowledge workers want to feel as if they’re producing important output that takes full advantage of their hard-won skills, even if this means they can’t always get a quick response to their messages.
The issue in using the assembly line as a positive example is that the experience of actually working on one of these lines was anything but positive.
If you slacked off your attention for even a moment, you could stall the entire line—forcing workers into an unnatural combination of boredom and constant attentiveness.
“For assembly-line workers, work was relentless and repetitious,” writes Freeman. “Assembly-line work proved physiologically and psychologically draining in ways other types of labor were not. More than ever before, workers were extensions of machinery, at the mercy of its demands and pace.”
It’s instead to point out the power of experimenting with different ways of deploying capital—a process that differs greatly between the industrial and knowledge sectors.
The goal of these changes is to make it both easier and more sustainable for the knowledge worker to actually accomplish important things, not to coerce them into doing more things, faster—a strategy that’s unlikely to succeed in the long term when dealing with cognitively demanding work.
If anything, the hyperactive hive mind already has us trapped in a digital Modern Times, futilely trying to keep up with email messages that arrive faster and faster. The attention capital principle can help us move past this misery.
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.
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 He takes this employee involvement so seriously that he now requires his service representatives to submit at least a dozen proposed improvements before they qualify to receive their annual performance bonus.
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).
Locus of control theory therefore unavoidably applies: it simply won’t work to radically change workflows without the input of those who must use them.
A common method for handling these personal workflow overhauls is to clearly explain the structure of your new approach to your colleagues, perhaps accompanied by an unassailably logical explanation for why you’re making these changes.
there was a period of a couple of years in which tens of thousands of knowledge workers around the world began receiving some variation of the above autoresponder from their life-hacking colleagues.
I’ve come to believe that these experiments are best executed quietly. Don’t share the details of your new approach to work, unless someone specifically asks you out of genuine interest. Be wary of even providing new expectations, such as “I generally don’t see email until after 10:00 a.m.” or “I check my inbox only a few times a day.” These provide hard edges that skeptical colleagues, clients, or bosses can begin to easily chip away.
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.
