Dad was an engineer by training and temperament. His handwriting was as neat and precise as mine is not. He worked hard to express his thoughts clearly.Â
My processes look and are much messier than his ever were. One trait I did inherit, however, was to worry about using language precisely. And, I was fortunate to have mentors who cared equally about precision. It isn’t something that seems a high priority in many current settings.Â
There’s a question form guaranteed to set me off; “what is the best way to…?” I’ll grant that such questions are generally well-intentioned but are weighted down with so many unidentified and unarticulated assumptions as to be devoid of meaning.Â
While such questions come from a good place, pushing back on their fuzziness won’t win you many friends. I’ve learned to be very cautious and selective about raising them in public. What I have tried to do is become more aware of when I am asking those forms of questions for myself. With that comes more effort to be more precise about the question I am trying to answer and to search for those assumptions.Â
This is the underlying driver for my skepticism about exploring productivity in the context of knowledge work. Productivity is anchored in comparisons of “better” and “best” and I’m not sure those terms carry as much meaning as we might think. Instead, I’ve been working to shift my thinking toward the notion of “effectiveness.” It’s still too slippery a term but it does encourage me to widen my perspective to find those assumptions, understand the context, and be more precise about what I am hoping to accomplish.Â