Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
80000hours.org
Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
1–10 of 60 posts
Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
#2There’s no comments in here yet, but I cant possibly read the article. Guess Ill go check Slack.
Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
#3> By contrast, most knowledge work today operates with no deliberate structure at all. Instead of carefully constructed processes to get the most out of each person, we just hand out tasks and leave people to organise themselves organically in whatever way feels easiest to them.
I've very much felt this pain in a few of my roles. I understand the need for this sort of many-hats-wearing, elbow-greased approach to solving business problems in a startup. But it's infuriating working in late-stage startups (or even mid-sized tech companies) that fail to get away from this 'throw people at the problem' mentality and spend the time and resources to explicitly define what the business' core processes are and how they work.
I know not everyone thinks about problems in terms of process flows, but it still drives me crazy!
Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
#4"And if any individual tries to opt out and focus on one thing for an entire day, they’re throwing a wrench in the ‘hyperactive hive mind’, which explains why calls for individual discipline have done so little to fix the problem."
Another HN thread recently linked the essay "Meditations on Moloch," which among other things talks about multi-polar traps, things like the prisoner's dilemma in which the players are incentivized to defect. I never thought of the email problem this way, but it definitely feels right now that I think about it.
I'm privileged to work somewhere where my bosses specifically tell me to turn off my email and just pair program with someone, but honestly I still leave my chats up and allow myself to be constantly diverted. I've clearly internalized this way of working and the fear of being "rude" or whatever by not instantaneously responding to the point where it's the natural way I work. This is in spite of the fact that it's something I work to break out of.
Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
#5I’m a longtime Thomas Sowell fan but I only just recently started reading his most celebrated work, Knowledge and Decisions, first published in 1980. In one of the early chapters there is a reference to the old physical mailbox systems of pre-networked offices, and how the cost of distracted attention from hundreds of employees never seems to deter managers from dumping all manner of low-value correspondence into said boxes.
Email and Slack may have kicked this problem into overdrive, but managers’ inability to efficiently organize knowledge work appears to be a long-standing open problem.
Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
#6> By contrast, most knowledge work today operates with no deliberate structure at all. Instead of carefully constructed processes to get the most out of each person, we just hand out tasks and leave people to organise themselves organically in whatever way feels easiest to them. I've very much felt this pain in a few of my roles. I understand the need for this sort of many-hats-wearing, elbow-greased approach to solv…
I think The Phoenix Project does a pretty good job of diagnosing the problem: in knowledge work, the WIP is generally not visible. Not only that, the WIP often consists of simply entries in a database or files on a hard drive, so there is effectively an infinite capacity for creating and storing more WIP.
Even with well-defined processes, poor instrumentation for revealing the true scale of the backlog at each stage can lead to this “always firefighting” mode of operation.
Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
#7> Fixing the hive-mind is going to be a billion dollar industry
Cal Newport was one of the inspirations for https://inboxwhenready.org. At this point, people have paid me over $100K to make it harder for them to read their email.
I've made some effort to persuade the Gmail and Superhuman teams to take this issue seriously, but to no avail, yet. If anyone here is building an email client or popular Gmail extension, I'm happy to talk about this stuff whenever.
Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
#8I think asynchronous communication (https://blog.doist.com/asynchronous-communication/) moves in the right direction on this.
99% of things are not urgent, and people should not be expected to be available instantaneously. But implementing that requires discipline on the part of the person sending the message.
Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
#9> Cal Newport: But this had a huge impact on the ability of those frontline workers to produce the work that actually was measured, the work that actually brings profit into the organization, because now they had to wrangle with word processors and they had to wrangle with email and they had to wrangle, later on, with these intranet forums where they’re trying to enter in their travel reimbursement, and they’re trying to do their conflict of interest declaration in some sort of weird format that makes life really easy for the HR department, but takes up the whole afternoon. And you ended up having to hire more of the frontline workers to get the same amount of work done. Their salaries were more expensive than the support staff. You actually ended up worse off. [emphasis added]
This is one of the big ones. My previous office took a 10-year break from having real support staff. They tallied the numbers (because time entry was detailed enough) and realized that with 1200 or so engineers and scientists each having to do their own training reports, HR paperwork, travel planning and financial reporting, they were costing themselves a huge amount of money. They ended up hiring small support teams for some of this work at a fraction of the previous cost (numbers not coming to mind so I'm not including them, but the support teams totaled to under 20 people, I just can't remember if it was closer to 10 or 20). The savings showed up within the first couple of months as the new staff quickly become experts (from doing it constantly) in the work and people handed off the non-core work to them.
Specialists in mundane "administrivia" (essential but not necessarily interesting) work don't cost a lot, but can save a company a ton of time and money in the end.
> I actually think, and this is a provocative claim, a lot of economists don’t agree with me here, but I think actually in the non-industrial sector, so in knowledge work, productivity has actually been going down. The only reason why it looks stagnant is that we have added a lot of off-the-book hours in the early morning and the evening.
My present team is definitely guilty of this. I, personally, refuse. At 1630, my work day is done. The most I'll respond to (because we support multiple sites) is a text asking if I can be at some specific location the next day. I will not write up a report (official on my work computer or unofficial as an answer to a question over text, if it's actually important I'll have already sent an email during the work day). The rest of the team is not as effective at quitting at the end of the day (as evidenced by the 50 messages I just saw on that muted text thread they have going). They aren't getting paid for this time spent thinking and communicating about work, they're all salaried (by my contract I'm paid by the hour, I'll accept the 1 minute or so every week for the "where can you be" question, but nothing more).
Re: Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
#10I think asynchronous communication ( https://blog.doist.com/asynchronous-communication/ ) moves in the right direction on this. 99% of things are not urgent, and people should not be expected to be available instantaneously. But implementing that requires discipline on the part of the person sending the message.
I get the sense that the real problem isn't so much synchronous communication but the need to get information or reconcile state with a specific person. If any team member was equally capable of providing input, each individual would only have to poll 1/n as often