Why Work Doesn’t Look Like Work

Or, why availability and responsiveness aren’t proxies for work

Oct 25, 2020

👋 Hey, Abhishek here! Welcome to The Sunday Wisdom. Each week I tackle fundamental questions about decision making, clear thinking, and anything else that’s stressing you out in the business of life.

Q: What do most people not get about office productivity?

If you are a knowledge worker, your biggest job is thinking. But if all day all night you are busy being busy, ‘thinking’ takes a backseat, and you end up doing a lot of things without getting anything done. You don’t waste the hours, but you waste the years.

When was the last time you took the time to ponder upon something for an entire day, or perhaps an entire week? If you are like most people, your days are spent in standup meetings, urgent calls, and brainstorming sessions. The grind is same for both founders and employees.

If your work involves strategy, analysis, creativity, management, non-structured decision-making, your primary job is to think. Unlike jobs that involve doing repetitive tasks, this job requires quiet time to think through problems.

But we’re stuck in an old world where we are expected be available and responsive throughout the day. It doesn’t matter whether you are a founder or an employee, availability in office is replaced by the “Available” status on Slack. “I am available”—to be pinged, disturbed, and distracted.

We’re set on the theme that a typical work day should be 8–10 uninterrupted hours seated at your desk—be it at home or at office. But thinking doesn’t happen at work. Thinking happens when you are wandering around being curious. Therefore people with thinking jobs are more productive taking evening strolls beside a lake than attending boardroom meetings.

To get good ideas, you need to give yourself the opportunity to stumble upon ideas. This can only happen when you are chilling on your own, free from worries or distractions. When you are in the shower, on a walk, on or while you are cooking. Not when you are hyperreactive, clocking 100% responsiveness at work.

This is the reason why businesses fail. Founders prioritise moving faster at the expense of thinking better. When you are executing without thinking, you are copying, and not innovating. Is it surprising that most businesses end up either a copycat or broken?

A society is judged by how it treats the less fortunate. A company is judged by how it treats the thinkers. If you don’t care where your colleagues are—whether they are working, or sleeping, or doing yoga, or dropping off their kids to school, or playing tennis, you work in an environment built on trust—that fosters stumbling upon good ideas serendipitously.

If you expect your friends and colleagues to remain constantly online, you are part of an ASAP culture where a lot of things happen, but nothing gets done. All businesses that prioritise visibility, availability, and responsiveness as proxies for diligence, have an ASAP culture.

By now it’s fairly obvious that ASAP cultures are at a great disadvantage. Despite that, it’s the norm. Therefore businesses that prioritise thinking better over moving faster have an unfair advantage over others. They don’t visibly seem to be doing a tonne of things, but they get the most done.

Work shouldn’t look like work. Steve Jobs took evening strolls to have serious conversations. Bill Gates used to take weeks off to spend time alone reading and thinking about where the world is going, and the future of Microsoft. Jack Dorsey famously wanders about to get some thinking done. Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet’s primary job is to sit and read all day so that they have enough time to think. Thinking gets work done. It’s the invisible force that keeps the ball rolling.

Decisions should never be judged by their outcomes. But work is the opposite. Judge people’s work by their outcomes, not by the visibility of the process. Thinking jobs remains hidden from plain sight. It happens inside their heads.

What You Don’t See

Human beings are excellent at working around a problem instead of solving it. Paul Graham calls this schlep blindness.

Schlep blindness prevents us from taking on big challenges, and solve bigger problems—because we are subconsciously blinded by it. Graham gives the example of the payments problem that Stripe solved.

Whoever had to process payments before Stripe knew how big of a pain it was, but they found a workaround rather than solve the actual problem. Schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.

But there’s immense value is taking up bigger challenges that others have ignored. If you pick an ambitious idea, you’ll have less competition, because everyone else would have been frightened off by the challenges involved.

Ignorance is a good antidote to schlep blindness. Since you don’t know how big of a problem it is, you might be open to taking it up. As most founders say, had they known in advance how big of a challenge it is to build a particular business, probably they would have never tried it.

The other approach is to take yourself out of the equation. Instead of asking, “What problem should I solve?” ask, “What problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?”

If someone who had to process payments before Stripe had asked that, Stripe would have been the first thing they wished for. It’s too late to be Stripe now, but there are tonnes of schleps out there waiting to be solved. Link

Negative Capability

According to the great Romantic poet John Keats, life is about living the questions—the unknown is what drives science, and the most beautiful experience we can have is the ‘mysterious’.

Negative Capability is the willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity.

Several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Keats wrote these lines in one of his letters to his brothers, just 4 years before his death from tuberculosis. Link

3 Ideas from Roald Dahl

Some techniques Roald Dahl employed to find inspiration and get ideas flowing. We can apply them to become just a bit more creative.

Next time don’t just think of an idea, write it down, and forget about it. Collect more than just vague ideas.

I also find it useful to jot down interesting facts that I come across and that might be useful for my future work. On the inside of the back cover of my notebooks there is a chart listing the number of breaths per minute and heartbeats per minute of various animals.

Dahl had the habit of collecting photos of people to use as inspiration for his characters. He would collate random facts and names, and kept a list of made-up words to use in his stories.

The fact giants don’t exist only makes The BFG more enjoyable. Don’t rely just on ordinary facts to make a story enjoyable.

The wilder the better. You must always go a bit further than you initially meant to go.

Try to be in interesting surroundings to take inspiration from them. Dahl had the experience of a fighter pilot, diplomat, and intelligence officer to draw ideas from. Diversifying your experiences lets your creations breathe new air.

It’s hard to pick apart an idea, but that’s how you produce great work. Rewrite your draft—over and over again if necessary.

You’ll find when you rewrite, you pick out the best material from what you have written.

Dahl completely rewrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory several times because his nephew didn’t like it the first time. Link

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Talk to Me

It’s not always you who wants to be perfect. As a kid, your parents and teachers want you to be perfect. As an adult, your partner, your society, your circumstances, and your friends want you to be perfect.

The signals aren’t explicit, especially if you are an adult. But you feel the pressure. People look upto you. They don’t want to see you fail. That’s why you push yourself harder. But at the expense of what?

In pursuit of perfection, we lose our priorities. Our priority is to worry less and enjoy more; not to win badges or hoard wealth at the expense freedom and peace of mind.

Send me tips, comments, questions, and your favouorite office stories: abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com. 🤜🤛

Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋