171–180 of 227 posts
I had a pretty strong negative reaction when reading this and had to sit with it a while to figure out why. I kept coming back to the idea that something about this seems childish to me without initially being able to articulate what, exactly, it was that seemed immature. After I'd had some time to thing on it it occurred to me that the underlying idea is that people are somehow responsible for the author's emotional…
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Maybe so, but unrelated to the book and its message. The author referencing the book in this context is in complete bad faith.
I dunno, I can see it both ways. The front-loaded email style or eschewing social media certainly make life easier for others. But on the other hand, many of his examples of Monastic deep workers (Einstein, Darwin) absolutely relied on those around them to function. I think mentioning the book in this context is valid; the book has very little to say about the consequences of deep work behaviours on others, and that…
Every one of us relies on those around us to function. Walking into a grocery store and buying food that’s ready to eat just scratches the surface of this reliance.
Humans are fundamentally a cooperative species, which has enabled collective outcomes that would be impossible if we reduced our reliance on others.
This becomes a problem when people are treated poorly in the process. Slavery is the obvious extreme, and various kinds of discrimination and power plays are some of the bad behaviors that emerge from this social reliance.
But reliance is not in itself a problem. It’s at the core of being human.
I would reiterate that the existence of bad behavior that enables focus for one person at the expense of others with no fair exchange of value is not an intrinsic consequence of the ideas in Deep Work.
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I can appreciate that, but let me share my experience at a position I had as I've dealt with this a lot and the work became untenable. The team I lead is pretty good, not perfect of course, but we tend to get the desired results and even more for the most important clients/issues, and we do pretty well with clients on the soft-skills side, so clients typically like the team I work with. While this seems like we'd be…
set aside 10% of your team's time to do these unwanted jobs. Say yes to the bulk of them but explain that it will take a long time to complete the task. Ignore all complaints that these tasks are taking too long. If they complain to senior management then give senior management the choice, you either do your main task or you do these unwanted tasks - their choice.
The EFT here creeped in and more or less turned a team that always succeeded on the goals they were actually hired and trained to accomplish and now is being held responsible for the success/failure of so many other teams, including those that have nothing to do with any of our specialties. We lost members who went on to better things, and to this day I still am only happy for them that they were able to make that change when they did.
It's not about whether or not we _can_ accomplish the load, and that's not what the article is about. It's about others pushing their items they don't want to deal with onto others, and how much effort goes into that from the others instead of just doing their work, and how EFT is toxic once it becomes accepted for persons to engage in EFT.
Just like irreducible complexity, "shallow work" or more generally "admin" cannot be eliminated. It can only be moved elsewhere.
It can be reduced, like by cancelling most meetings that could have been an e-mail.
Newport recommends entirely stopping or poorly performing that work; I read this as encouraging readers to commit EFT against others around them. When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When writing a jeremiad, anything becomes weighty evidence.
That's pretty unfair. They never said it was evidence let alone weighty evidence, they offered examples of where they see this phenomenon in their life and in our culture. This is clearly a subjective interpretation/critique of another text ("I read this as"). That's perfectly reasonable to include in a blog post primarily about personal experience.
In the examples of Newport and Ferriss, the author ironically cites the cure for EFT as the problem. At a high level, net value of any task is gross value - effort value. Newport’s point isn’t to not do small tasks but make time for big ones, and if less important tasks fall by the wayside, then better those than significant work. Ferriss’ point is that of Ricardoian economics at a micro level: not all tasks can be done with equal efficiency by different people, thus route tasks to where they are most efficiently performed.
Irony aside, the essay could be categorized as reverse-CBT. Read more about Lukianoff’s idea at the link below:
https://heterodoxacademy.org/resources/the-coddling-of-the-a...
"Is their decision-making ability wholly captured in those tasks while the other person is getting to relax or to plan a project?" It sounds like they think projects are fun or something. Just one more thing in a long list of other chores and projects that have to get done. Of course a large project is composed of many smaller decisions. This plus the rampant gender stereotyping and bias (no mention of stereotypical…
It does seem a bit odd. 'home repairs' could easily be more then half of all real work done in a household per annum, if they don't hire contractors, depending on the age and size of the home.
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I don't either Cal or the author would have a problem with exec assistants - they're being paid for that. Where it can be a problem is when there are "attentive" people on a team and "inattentive" people who are ostensibly equals. Team members with higher conscientiousness tend to get lumped with an outsized share of undesirable, low impact busywork because others won't do it. This dynamic can cause problems in all s…
Exactly. Conscientiousness is a personality trait and those who are lucky enough (yes it is highly correlated with positive life outcomes) to have it in abundance would do well to calibrate their expectations of others accordingly.
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I think the author found the reason pretty clearly; this is the issue I run into all the time when a shit-task is thrown at my team. There are simply too many people bringing tasks that need to be done, but not necessarily by our team. I am comfortable telling people "no, this is not our team's responsibility, we don't have the time right now with our current bandwidth", but many people on my team are not. Worse, whe…
That is clearly dereliction of duty by the management team. Particularly by the manager of the lying salesdroids.
But my personal frustration with scenarios that I've dealt with isn't about specific groups, it's that I imagine myself in like a kids TV show and we're all having to participate while some person in the company learns the value of being honest and taking responsibility for their mistakes.
except unlike a TV show, the stuff isn't resolved in 22 minutes, it takes months, if we ever resolve it, and it creates a lot of stress, frustration, anger, and costs a lot money.
and the person(s) who caused all of this don't learn anything except how to make someone else deal with the fallout of their bad decisions :))))
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set aside 10% of your team's time to do these unwanted jobs. Say yes to the bulk of them but explain that it will take a long time to complete the task. Ignore all complaints that these tasks are taking too long. If they complain to senior management then give senior management the choice, you either do your main task or you do these unwanted tasks - their choice.
While I understand what you're saying, I think the part maybe I didn't express well is that there isn't a 10% of the team time to give anymore. The items that our team was always most successful on now compete with all these other tasks and the team has more or less shifted into a very generalized and vague team without any specific goal, reason, or projects that best utilize our skills and interests. The EFT here cr…