Post-industrial era at work
Lately, I’ve been popping on mentions about knowledge workers and Taylorism references in books, like Deep Work, Mind Management, and Enlightenment now, as well as articles that triggered me into writing this post.
The TL;DR version of this piece is, we’ve been considering shallow work as the norm for quite some time now that inertia and comfort keep dragging us back both in our personal and company careers. Finally, will be sharing some common tips on how to start making the shift to deep work.
Industrial era work
Talking about “work environment” these days we usually mean an office environment where people interact with each other to produce an amount of work, either via a computer or not. Also “these days” has quite a broad definition, mainly referring to the current century, as well as the last 20–30 years of the previous century.
That definition has shifted from the past where “work environment” usually meant physical labor. People using their hands to produce stuff and pass it down a production or assembly line. That work environment used to be factories or fields where people joined to start their work, mainly shifting, mounting, bending, screwing, and passing things to the next person in the line to do their work.
This is what we call industrial era work, where throughput and time are important. Being more efficient in this type of work is related to the number of processed goods delivered, aka. how fast can I process A to become B so by the end of my shift more Bs are produced than yesterday.
This direction and methods have been thoroughly explored over 200 years of the industrial era, with a big boost after 1900 with machines entering the game and more sophisticated methods of management were developed to improve efficiency. Nowadays production efficiency is documented and measured as “Efficiency = Output Rate÷Standard Output Rate×100”, defined in Investopedia.
The office as a work environment
Despite me being already critical using the image above, one can define office work with these abstract characteristics:
- An 8hours work day or 40h work week, where an office worker shows up (or is available) to start her “work shift”. Having defined working hours has the benefit of availability for collaboration with your colleagues. So you can produce more demanding work than a single person can handle.
- A set of tasks/to-dos/items to deliver, which reflect your “part of the work” to a bigger “line of work”. The references and analogies to industrial work are already visible.
- Periodic efficiency evaluation leading to your promotion or not, where your manager and your colleagues reflect on your performance so that you get more responsibilities, flexibilities, and usually a bigger wage 👍!
I’m sure I’ve missed tons of stuff with just 3 bullets, but the jist is already there! People working in an office are mostly considered knowledge workers, where their main work is to use their minds into solving problems.
As mentioned already the analogy between office and industrial work is too big to neglect! And that’s where the problem starts, as Cal Newport shares in his book Deep Work: “In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back towards an industrial indicator of productivity; doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.”
In my country, Greece, military service is mandatory for all males. Usually, this mandatory service is considered a wasted time or at best some paid time-off. One of the tips shared to people joining the army for mandatory service is: “Always hold an envelope when walking in the military camp. You’ll look like running an errand for someone else and no one will ping you to do their stuff”. This fits in our discussion as office workers or knowledge workers choose to look busy by doing lots of stuff instead of trying to produce value. In absence of methods to be better than that, office managers tend to adopt the same “lots of stuff” principle of efficiency to evaluate colleagues, and… yeah!
Going meta to describe the “norm”
During the last few years, we have seen the mindset shift to a more sustainable and “modern” way to describe knowledge work. As the title suggests, it’s like trying to go meta in our description of the office work simply to state something that should be obvious and the focus of our work.
I won’t be adding any new value to this discussion, I simply share a few references on great material that’s already out there along with a brief explanation:
- Output vs. Outcome, how the focus needs to shift from delivering goods to actual results that people do use.
- Hours of work vs. quality of work, in a similar analogy achieving higher outcome does not necessarily mean working more hours, just working smart hours. I recommend reading Mind Management by David Khadavy on that.
- Growth and expanding knowledge, on the importance of learning as well as a dawning company’s shift towards learning, being open and expanding your horizons even years in the work. This is the oldest “trend” of them all but it still stands strong! That’s what I’m trying to do with this post along with everyone else writing & reading: share and advance knowledge in a field.
As you might have seen all points above focus on being smart and efficient with your mind while still being human at the core.
Just received a copy of that book!! Thank you for your amazing graphics & inspiration LizandMollie!
Any tangible examples here?
It would be a shame staying on the theoretical without sharing some actual successes of this mindset. Of course, we can think big and share all the inspirational stories of the kinds of the Elons and Jeffs or Steves but one could argue that these are exceptional individuals doing exceptional work, aka. “not for my case”, but will try to leave these aside:
- Fewer work hours per week, in Microsoft Japan and Unilever New Zeland. The experiment in Microsoft showed a 40% increase in productivity. Basecamp is also employing a 32-hour workweek during summer, with Spain considering doing the same. As Cal Newport states again in Deep work, working fewer hours you automatically focus on the important stuff.
- David Khadavy’s devotion to writing Mind Management. Really that book contains tons of knowledge and experiment on what you can achieve by working smart. In a nutshell, the book describes how those mindblowing 30-minute sessions that have produced 4–5 hours of work we all have experienced, are actually reproducible.
- A think week or think days session like Bill Gates does. If you had such an experience I’m pretty sure that you can clearly recall the benefits! I’ve experienced the benefits of think days myself and I can testify that they truly work! In the past two years, I’ve solo-retreated to think about my personal life as well as my career and I’ve taken some decisions that keep improving my daily life in and out of work. More on my journey in this post.
Making the shift to knowledge work
To conclude this post I would like to share some suggestions on removing “just work” from your schedule. These suggestions are mostly from other sources so I wouldn’t like to take the credits for them, that’s why you will find a link on each:
- Reclaim your time at work, by choosing to go async over a doc or email, or simply declining meetings that you don’t find useful.
- Set personal OKRs or midterm personal goals, to be more mindful of your focus and time spent! We’ve been trying that at Transifex for 3 years now and it mostly works.
- Self-reflect, to check your own status even. Noone else knows yourself better! I have set a loose schedule of self-reflection once a month, where I recall past actions and decisions I’ve made and try to be mindful of getting better with 2–3 action items or daily reminders that I reference.
- Saying more No’s, this is time-creep hidden in plain sight! Recently I’ve started experimenting with a No/Yes daily ratio just to keep myself aware of what’s going on. If that ratio is above 1, meaning more No than Yes, then I’ve secured some of my time and mind that day. Please try to be mindful of the “No”s you say and don’t fall victim to output vs. outcome to keep the ratio above 1!!
- Value cooldown and relax time, as mindfulness hides there too. Again I’ll reference Mind Management that explains WHY cooldown and relaxation are important.
Since the first step is always the hardest, I would urge you to focus on one thing to make things easier. That would be reclaiming your time. Simply by reclaiming your time you will be able to focus more and identify your priorities!
Thank you for reaching the end! If you find this article interesting or care for a discussion please leave a comment below!
