Knowledge work is still young, we can find ways to do it better
Hi!
Last newsletter I mentioned my trip to Hangzhou. This week, I am writing this newsletter from a hotel in Bangalore where I am spending the week for a bunch of meetings.
"5 hour workdays? 4-day workweeks? Yes Please!" This article by Cal Newport in the New York Times revived my motivation to challenge existing working norms and find better ways to conduct knowledge work.
He highlights several examples of companies who have taken a plunge to try a different work structures, and observes that such experiments should not be seen as "radical". Rather, knowledge work is at such an infant stage that we should be experimenting to find the best way to get work done, and not assume the current structure is the most efficient. If anything, what is common now is likely inefficient, and developed this way out of convenience. He draws an analogy to car production, where cars were produced using a "craft-method" for many years until Ford developed the "Assembly-line" model of production. Ford's approach was complicated, but once implemented, efficiency skyrocketed.
I myself have been feeling fatigued by the way work moves around me. Work is rarely done at the right time and pace, attention spans are too short, instant messaging is abused to demand instant responses, meetings are convened and cancelled at whim, and systems are rarely set up to scale up simple tasks or focus on important ones. It becomes difficult to deliver really good quality work without throwing many hours at the problem. Those who are in positions to influence change find this convenient and thus resist any change, or worse, create the expectation that this is "high-performance" work.
Reading Newport's article gave back some hope. First, that I am not fully to blame for this, and i feel a dissonance because this work culture is still trying to mature, rather than solely due to weakness on my part. Second, that there is an opportunity here to innovate, be different, and seize an advantage before anyone else does so.
I thought back to my first temp job where I proofread financial statements in PWC. All reports were done by a typing pool then. This was only 12 years ago and the iphone had only just been announced that same year. Less than a decade ago, in 2011, Alcina and I had a month long europe holiday, with no smartphones. We had to take pictures on a digital camera (I barely even remember those), and we did that trip without on-demand GPS or Google. When I started work in 2014, my law firm was still using blackberries. As technology is increasingly integrated into our lives, it feels hard to remember a time without features like whatsapp group chats (quite a key part of my social life now), though this was only a few years ago.
Still at an early stage of my career, I have little power to make sweeping changes to how work is done. For now I can improve my own productivity, observe current practices to think about how I would change things, and look out for leaders with similar beliefs who are willing to conduct similar productivity experiments.
What do you think is good and bad about the way you work today? What do you wish could be changed so you could work better? Love to hear your ideas about this.
Have a great week!
James
About Ideothetic Flow
Ideothetic Flow is a small passion project following my own attempt try and live life better. Every 2 weeks I share something I find interesting, usually related to mental models which challenge common expectations or ideas.