so i’m trying to understand exactly and maybe historically why managers always seem to be more important than specialists or implementers.
i’ve noticed a trend among friends that managers get a really bad rap. if a friend is being managed poorly, it’s definitely because of bad management (and usually just one bad manager). if the friend is the one in the management position, however, they are often the recipient of those same bad feelings, though for different reasons. statements like “i started doing all these things differently and now everyone hates me,” or “i tried to help improve this thing, but now it just seems like people around me ignore my suggestions because they’re mad that i get paid more than them.”
i definitely understand that there is good and bad management. and still it seems like the situations that managers are put in make it very difficult for them to do their work well. i definitely have a fundamental theory (probably from some psychology class) that people don’t like being coerced (i.e. don’t tell me what to do). and if managers are both higher in the chain of command and telling other people what to do, that seems like a situation destined for failure.
in an industrial system, i can imagine why a manager might be necessary. especially if the manager has done a specific type of work of the team they’re managing, i can see that person adding more value to a team by managing several people doing the same type of work.
however, teams (among my friend set) nowadays are working in very different environments. people are working on multi-skilled and collaborative teams which makes it rare that a manager will have the same types of expertise and experience of their team.
in these types of situations, the role of a manager seems best suited to enable the team to get their work done. you should be removing barriers to progress (technically, interpersonal, political, intra-personal, etc.) and helping your multidisciplinary team improve efficiency over time.
unfortunately, it seems like most managers these days just interrupt people and cause extreme annoyance.
hm. i guess i’m not going anywhere with this, but it’s certainly something to keep an eye on.
i’ve written at least twice about how to best structure a work day, but the afternoon slump (that terrible period of time, usually after lunch, where you “can’t seem to get anything done”) comes up so often when i’m talking to people that i figured it deserved its own piece.
high-level summary: everyone’s energy generally diminishes over the course of day. there are exceptions and it’s not a linear decrease, but everyone finishes with less than they started with. knowing that, the way to maximize your productivity is to do the right type of work at the best time of day for that work.
the strategy: in my observation and experience, doing your most difficult or heaviest-thinking work in the morning and saving meetings and tedious/mechanical tasks for the afternoon is the best overall strategy. and, as always, everyone should test and figure out what works for them because nothing works for everyone, but something will work for you.
ok. here are the bits of theory and experience that build up the above insight:
time management fails knowledge workers
the whole idea of an eight-hour workday came about as a worker protection when people’s work tended to be mechanical during the industrial era (details here). however, at that point, because people made more widgets than think, all hours were basically created equal. however, for knowledge workers (people who are mostly paid to think and then occasionally execute on their thinking), all hours of the day aren’t the same.
so we need to evolve past thinking about productivity as time management. my favorite productivity blog, barking up the wrong tree, often gives the advice that you should manage your mood, not your time. tony schwartz, another productivity guru, believes it’s critical to manage your energy, not your time. i’m sure there are other frames through which to analyze this, but either way, breaking your work up into time blocks irrespective of what the particular hour is good for is working against your body and that’s almost never a good call. so the solution: match the work you have to the type of energy you have at a given moment (note: getting to the perfect world of this takes time, especially if you have a highly collaborative, but rigid work environment. however, the more productive you prove you can be, the ammo you’ll build for your coworkers and boss to let you do what you want).
save your “mechanical” work for the afternoon (i.e. don’t do it in the morning, no matter how strong the temptation)
because of things like cognitive budgets and decision fatigue, i have read (and observed) that it suits many people to do their difficult or heavy-thinking work first thing in the morning. i think every productivity book i’ve ever read discussed this.
it works for three reasons:
you need the most and your best energy to do your most difficult or creativity-intensive work (i wrote about that over here). people often fall into the trap of doing easy or mechanical things in the morning (email, quick tasks, printing things, whatever) because they make us feel productive, but then we waste our good energy in the morning and find ourselves fighting to do the hard stuff in the afternoon which takes much longer (because decision fatigue).
heavy-thinking work is often the most “flow”-like work. interruptions are loath to this type of work. in fact, a single interruption (planned or unplanned) can prevent a heavy-thinking task from being completed (see paul graham’s piece on maker vs manager schedules). doing your heaviest-thinking in the morning, especially between the hours of 6 and 9a, minimizes potential to be distracted. there’s also a good window of low-interruption time in the evening, but if you’ve been up since the morning time, it’s less likely that you’re going to have the right energy by that time of day. it’s not impossible; just less likely.
when you deploy your cognitive budget on the right things at the right time, you optimize your whole day. almost everyone has creative work (planning, making, producing long and/or complex documents or content) and tedious work (research, email, printing, meetings, prep for other things, phone calls) to do everyday. doing the right work at the right time allows you to get it all done in the least amount of time possible, and then be free to everything else in your life (including love).
holy shit i just wrote for 30 minutes. that has never happened before. this piece is 3x longer than most of my others. yikes! sorry! #flowiguess
not really sure where this post is going, so here’s to just starting!
one of my favorite inspirational quotes is by ira glass. it’s been made into many videos, posters, etc., but my favorite is this one:
it’s what made me decide to develop my graphic design abilities more consistently. my big takeaway was that the only way to “close the gap” was to do more and more work.
one of the interviewees said that, of course, anybody who has good taste and skills to bring that taste to life is amazing. i think he used the phrase “mega designer.” but that’s not the only pathway out there to being a designer. it’s also possible to have good taste and then be a curator of things in line with your taste.
this allows you to use your curation to solve maybe the same design problems that a mega designer could. some people sketch, refine details and perfect their own ideas; others curate and recreate and produce clever rearrangements of other ideas. there’s space for both types of designer.*
my old colleague, curtis, wrote earlier this year about the different roles of network leadership and curation was one of them. as the world becomes increasingly connected and content-rich, the world will need more and more curators to help people sift and sort through it all. access to things humans have created in the past is increasing and we are creating more and more content every second.
* Â in fact, some people might even say that there isn’t much of difference between those two types of designer because all creativity is is the recombination of disparate elements to solve a problem in a different context.Â
in february 2013, one of my best friends (ambroise) and i started a practice we call imagining our futures. every six months, we sit together (in person or virtually) and ask each other where we are now in life and then where we want to be in six months, one year, five years, and ten years. we record it in a running google doc and make sure we don’t look at the last round when doing the current round. at the end of the current round, we look at the previous round.Â
tbh, i can’t remember exactly what sparked the idea. i know it had something to do with him getting ready to leave academia because he was finishing his masters.
august 2016 was our eighth round of doing the practice. it’s been four years. i’ve learned some pretty surprising things. ambroise may or may not agree with how i verbalize these lessons (so i will try not to speak for his learning here), but most or all of these lessons have come from our collective processing.
the three areas to cover at each time marker are location, romantic relationship, and work. other things can be added, but covering at least those three is key.
the more vague you are with your descriptions of where you are in the future, the easier it is to stay within them.
the more specific we are with our projections, the faster it becomes obvious how quickly what we want changes.
what we want changes WAY more than either of us expected.
it’s much easier to predict where you’ll want to be from some phases of life (graduate school, for example). other phases of life (two years after grad school) are more difficult to predict from.
sometimes, it’s really difficult to say more than “i don’t know” about where you want to be in five or ten years.
doing this over time has made the idea of long-term planning for the future seem absurd. yes, i know the rate of change slows over time, but given that many people in their 20s and 30s are making decisions that will set the course for the rest of their lives, it seems odd (suboptimal) to make those decisions when you’re changing the fastest.
in her interview on on being, elizabeth gilbert shared a theory that really resonated with me. here’s a paraphrase:
“i’m developing a new theory: everything interesting is 90% boring. marriage, raising kids, even doing your dream work… it’s all mostly boring. there are the moments when things are exciting and attention garnering and great. but those moments are few and far between. for the most part, it’s putting in all the unglamorous time and work that makes awesome moments possible.
this reality is a pitfall of people who follow their passions for career. they leave their boring, tedious day job only to realize with a shock that their passion work too is tedious and boring most of the time.”
this makes a shitton of sense to me.
many a friend and acquaintance has mocked me for going to bed so early and getting up early. i often respond with, “hey, boring people get shit done,” and have been doing so for years. i think this is true because boring people understand how to push through the slog to the success point. “boring people” understand that meaningful, important is not all glamour and accolades.
i was even talking to my friend, ross, the other day about my allergy to being everywhere all the time. people who are everywhere all the time can’t possibly have the time to put in the hard work to do anything really meaningful.
anyway, now for some quotes and anecdotes:
“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” — Warren Buffett
ryder carroll, the creator of the now wildly popular bullet journal says he perfected the journal over 20 years before launching the concept officially three years ago. - wall street journal article (ht @rchanowski)
“it takes at least ten years to become an overnight success.”