I had an email exchange earllier this week asking what had soured me on the personal productivity space. “Soured” may be a bit too strong a term but I have become skeptical about most advice about personal productivity. It is not for lack of trying or familiarity with the domain.

A little history is in order.

I was a product of the parochial school system. Nuns had their methods for dealing with daydreamers. Getting caught at it bordered on a mortal sin. I mostly avoided getting caught. I was lucky to have one nun who figured out that a major piece of my problem was that I wan’t being challenged enough and channeled me to a private all boys school for middle school and high school. Turns out that Benedictine monks are even better than nuns at keeping you busy and focused.

Their tutelage earned me entry into Princeton. In retrospect, I should have brought one of the monks with me instead of my typewriter. I left behind a support system that was simultaneously invisible and essential for keeping me organized and focused. ADD was not a diagnosis that existed in the early 1970s.

Struggling with deadlines and deliverables was either a moral or a systems failure. I opted for the systems failure hypothesis.

I didn’t articulate it that way but I found my way to the first of many systems promising to provide the structure I needed. That first was contained in Alan Lakein’s classic How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, published midway through my college career. I bought DayTimers and Palm Pilots. I paid for David Allen’s workshops out of my own pocket. I’ve tried just about every piece of productivity and personal management software that’s reached the market. They would work for a while, then collapse.

The moral failure hypothesis was beginning to look more likely. On the other hand, I was getting stuff done even when it felt harder that I thought it should have. I convinced Harvard to give me an MBA and a doctorate in business. I had a series of successes and occasional catastrophic failures. What I was struggling to discern was an underlying pattern that didn’t hinge on my being a bad person (or on everyone else being out to get me).

My doctorate is in how organizations manage to innovate, particularly with technology and systems. I turned that lens into a mirror. I was successful when I was in an environment that compensated for my weaknesses and failed in environments that called for strengths where I was weak.

Part of the answer came when the world put a name to my particular collection of strengths and weaknesses—ADD. More recently, we’ve broadened that notion to the idea of neurodiversity. People’s brains work differently. By and large the world is uncomfortable with diversity. Organizations and markets want to find and address large, average, groups.

This is as true for productivity promoters as concert promoters. Wonderful if you are Taylor Swift and your art matches nicely with millions of fans. Less desirable if your art appeals only to left-handed guitarists.

We all have the same twenty-four hours available to us each day. We are all faced with more options for what we might do than will fit into those twenty-four hours. Productivity advice ought to be universal applicable. The unstated assumption is that we are all neurotypical and that we, therefore, treat hours and options in the same way.

Productivity advice assumes that one size fits all. All you need do is put on this particular productivity outfit and all will be well. Neurodivergence means that nothing fits right off the rack. The question isn’t whether the advice is right or wrong; the question is how to make it fit you.

It is safe to presume that productivity advice will continue to target the average neurotypical brain. If that is not you, then you have extra work. Work to understand and articulate how you diverge. What’s easier for you? What’s harder? Can you find a way to compensate? Adapt the recommendations to something better suited to your unique profile.

It’s nice if off the rack suits you. But you’ll do even better if you learn how to tailor things to minimize your weak spots and flatter your best features. True whether we’re talking fashion or work practices.

 

I was a decent track and field athlete in high school. Not world class, but competitive within my environment. In particular, I was a sprinter. Put a finish line in front of me and I would often be the first to cross it. The promise of a finish off in the distance wasn’t good enough. I needed to see the finish line.

Craft and technique in sprinting is pretty minimal. If you’ve been gifted with the right fast twitch musculature, it mostly boils down to a fast start and a good kick to finish.

That strategy can take you surprisingly far off the track as well. How many all-nighters did you pull in college? String enough sprints back to back and you can get pretty far.

Eventually you reach challenges that won’t yield. You have to work out how to navigate the middle. Once it comes into sight, you can work out a way to get to the finish line. What keeps you moving when you’re somewhere in the middle of the desert or forest and there’s nothing to suggest which direction to move in, much less how far off the destination might lie?

The realm I am focused on right now is writing, although I think this problem crosses multiple forms of knowledge work. What does the middle look like here? As I think about the writing advice and lessons I’ve encountered over the years, this middle feels overlooked. Or, at least, not spoken about in a useful way. Lots of advice to be found about how to defeat the blank page. Anne Lamott is all in for shitty first drafts but says very little about what comes after draft number one. John McPhee acknowledges that Draft No. 4 exists. Maybe Steven Pressfield’s Resistance is his answer to navigating the middle.

Right now, I am at the point where I believe that there is leverage to be found in looking more carefully at the middle. I suspect I’ve been there before when the starting point is somewhere behind me and the finish is yet to come into sight. What lessons are waiting for me here?

“You can observe a lot by just watching.” – Yogi Berra

A fundamental problem with today’s knowledge work is that you can’t watch it unfold. On a factory flow you can make very educated inferences about what is happening with a few moments of watching. You can’t say the same in your typical office or your average Starbucks.

You can’t manage what you can’t see. Frederick Taylor created the whole of Scientific Management simply by watching how laborers went about their jobs, recording what he observed, and asking “what if we changed X?”.

Before we have any hope of making knowledge work more productive or more effective, we have to make it visible. The problem is that we’ve spent the last several decades making knowledge work invisible. Not the outputs. The process.

How much of your work and the work around you takes place at a keyboard in front of a screen? When I first started writing, the process involved pen and paper and index cards. Those objects surrounded me as I hammered out drafts and outlines. Then the manuscript (or the hand-sketched slides) went off to a typing pool or the graphics department. Corrections got made in margins and cutting and pasting involved actual scissors and glue. Today, it is all digital.

I have no desire to go back to those days.

What I have learned is that it pays to think about ways to make the thinking that I do to get from germ of an idea to a final deliverable visible and observable. This draft is being written in one window on my laptop screen. To its left is another window containing my notes and what passes for an outline. Below that is a window with a time-stamped log of what I’ve been up to over the course of the day.

Is this the best way to manage my self? I have no idea. But it works well enough for the moment. My practices continue to evolve as new tools become available, new ideas and approaches surface, and my understanding of my own mind improves (we’ll talk about neurodivergence another day). But the starting point is to make it possible to watch so that I can observe.

Forty years ago, I was in charge of a project to set up a data center to support software development for client projects for what is now Accenture. A third of the way into the project, I identified a problem that was going to occur a few months down the road. I went to my boss, Mel, laid out the problem, and argued that we needed to notify folks up the line about the problem and the solution,

Mel told me to sit on the analysis and the solution. I did not understand. But I was smart enough to hold my tongue and listen. When the issue did start to reveal itself a few months later, we had a complete analysis and an instant solution in hand. That play bought us credibility and future resources we would never have gotten otherwise. And I learned a critical lesson in managing innovation.

We’re conditioned to be productive and to make good use of our time and talents. Admirable goals. But the language of productivity is built on a metaphor of factory work. Factories are for robots and robotic behavior.

The producing economy is about making copies of stuff—cars, clothing, iPhones. The knowledge economy is about creating the originals. Thinking about copies rather than originals leads you to ask the wrong questions and wrong questions never yield right answers

If your work is to create originals, how do we get at questions that might lead us to better answers? There are three short phrases I keep in mind;

• make work observable
• navigate the middle
• solve for pattern

I’m going to leave those as a tease for now. We’ll come back to them over the next few days.

The Magic of Theatre

One of the many hats I’ve worn over the years is that of “Production Stage Manager”. Backstage is a wonderful vantage point to learn how what happens behind the scenes connects to what the audience sees and feels.

If an element of a set is out of the audience’s sight lines, it more than likely will remain unpainted. During rehearsals I will sit in the auditorium with the set designers to verify what can and cannot be seen.

By the same token, we will spend hours working out the colors and intensity of the lighting changes on a single singer in a three minute number. I might be responsible for coordinating dozens of lighting cues during that number to ensure that we enable the singer to deliver the director’s intent.

It is meaningless to discuss (or even think about) what it would mean to be more productive at executing those lighting cues.

Knowledge work is more theater than factory

The work that distinguishes success from failure in today’s economy is knowledge work. We make a mistake when we think the important word here is “work” and look to the factory for insight. Yet this is where most of the thinking I see about the doing of knowledge work starts.

The lesson from the theater points in a better direction. One choice could be to embrace the arts metaphor fully and displace the factory for a stage. But that would likely create its own limitations.

Let’s go a layer deeper.

What makes the analogy between knowledge work and theater interesting is that effort and outcome aren’t correlated. No one asks or cares what effort went into delivering an art experience. They judge based on the experience not the effort.

I want to explore this shift in perspective. No one switched to a Macintosh computer based on how hard the development team worked. They switched because they sensed an opportunity to somehow be more effective at accomplishing their goals.

I’ve been nursing what Steve Johnson calls a “slow hunch” for a while now that “effectiveness” is the right organizing metric for knowledge work. Over the next month I’ll be digging deeper into that hunch to see where it takes me.

Many decades ago I was a pretty fair track and field athlete. Not world class, but competitive within my environment. Put a finish line in front of me and I would often be the first to cross it.

I was a sprinter. The promise of a finish off in the distance wasn’t good enough. I needed to see the finish line.

There was craft and technique to learn and to practice. I can still remember my father’s lessons in how to make sure my energy was focused and directed on moving forward rather than wasted in extraneous movement. And coaches helped break down the components of a race, from getting out of the blocks to running through not to the finish line. But the essence was to attack the goal in front of my eyes.

This simplicity took me a long way on the track and much of my professional life as well. As long as I could see a finish line, everything else was easy. As the world and my life got more complex, I was able to find suitable finish lines to focus on. And to seek out environments and coaches to help with craft and technique.

That simple strategy has run out of track. I’ve always hated the adage “it’s a marathon not a sprint.” I still long for sprints but it’s long past time to take a deeper and broader look at how to run the races that I now face. Starting with the recognition that race is the wrong metaphor to build on. It’s too thin a slice of all that is going on.

Rhythm and cadence are the words I’m thinking about now. What can or should I be doing to establish a cadence of doing the things that will more consistently lead to outputs and results that please me? Over the next several weeks, I’ll be placing myself in an environment to help me work through these questions.

The goal is not simply to cross the finish line of this particular race. It’s to engage in the first few iterations of what I hope will become a sustainable rhythm.

A clean sheet of paper is an oft-invoked image during design efforts of various stripes. Ignore what is happening now and imagine that there are no constraints on what you seek to create. Sometimes this strategy is explicit; often, however, it is hidden in the press to unveil the latest new, new thing.

If I’ve got a product or service that solves a real problem, I want to emphasize how good it’s going to be once you’ve put it into practice. If I spend any time at all on what you’re doing now, it’s only to highlight your pain and persuade you to get a move on to the promised land. If i’m fair to middling honest, I might acknowledge that you’ll have to put in some work to realize the benefits I’m promising.

For all that this is a default sales and marketing strategy, I think it is misleading, and possibly dangerous, in the realm of knowledge work. People with something to sell want you to start from a clean slate because it makes their job easier, not yours.

If you are turning out knowledge work on some consistent basis, then you already have some form of system or practice in place. You likely are all too well aware of your system’s warts and blemishes. The temptation to wipe everything clear and start over can be strong.

What is it, however, that you would be wiping clear? What you have now is a collection of practices and a body of work. Both contribute to your capacity for producing new work. Together they constitute a complex system that works.

This is a time to proceed with caution. Consider the following piece of advice that I encountered in Jerry Weinberg’s excellent Weinberg on Writing

“It is always easier to destroy a complex system than to selectively alter it”
R. James

Both the practices and the body of work you have now evolved over time; they constitute a complex system. You are engaged in craft. Much of that craft may have been acquired by osmosis through multiple apprenticeships.

However acquired, you aren’t starting from a clean sheet of paper. However appealing new practices and techniques may sound, they have to be evaluated within the context of your existing practice and environment. Which means you need to invest in understanding your practices and your environment in some detail.

The question is never “am I doing X (building a second brain, linking my thinking, creating a Zettelkasten) the right way?”. The question has to be “how can I adapt this idea to my circumstances?”

You cannot function as a consumer here; you must accept your responsibility as a designer.

You can observe a lot by just watching.

Yogi Berra

I’ve long argued that invisibility constitutes a major impediment to improving the practice of knowledge work. What we need is to see more practice.

So, I’m setting out to collect and develop stories and case studies of knowledge workers doing their work. Right now, this is exploratory research to discover categories and concepts that might prove useful. My conjecture is there’s an underlying set of skills and practices common across multiple instances of knowledge work.

Further, I suspect these commonalities aren’t immediately evident or obvious. They are “hidden” within the craft elements of different knowledge work jobs (e.g. reporter, consultant, systems analyst, programmer, data scientist, media planner, teacher). The initial goal is to figure out productive questions.

A starting point is to examine accounts of knowledge workers who have shared their journeys in ways that we can extract insights about their methods and practices. For example, Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain presents his solution for a personal knowledge management environment. He does so by sharing a good bit of how he got to his answers. Regardless of whether you find his destination suitable to your needs, you can learn from his journey. Supplement the book with the materials he has shared elsewhere online and we can craft a useful case study.

There’s a decent collection of knowledge workers (authors, scientists, entrepreneurs, etc.) who have shared enough about their methods and practices to form an initial sample from which we can develop the outlines of a theory of knowledge work. Once that exists, we can reach out to other knowledge workers to explore their practices and elaborate a richer model.