The problem isn't so much what work looks like, but how to measure it. I'm kind of surprised with the shift to work from home (and in some cases back again) we haven't seen any large companies come out with analytical data about what is more effective and how they measure it. I'm guessing the reason why is because they don't, and any return to office policies are driven soley by pointy haired managers with no real data.
My company measures performance based on the company reaching its sales target, but as a lonely software engineer whose projects can still be months once I've finished them until they reach customers, my impact on that measure (in the short term) is basically nothing. We also do OKRs but somehow my team never get assigned any. Sure as an engineering team you can try to estimate cards and measure your velociy at the end of the sprint, but how do you do the same for a product manager or creative roles like a copywriter?
Well, the joke's on those PHBs, because soon we'll have the data available in the form of aggregate performance data for companies implementing return to office policies versus those that have not. I do not foresee the results favoring the "everybody in the office all the time" model.
Do we then get to lay off large swaths of PHBs and replace them with people whose titles describe the actual value some of them can add and be respected for: clerk, administrator, evangelist, etc?
Software development is creative work. Creative insight can come anywhere, any time. Better ideas can make difficult things easy. And make the impossible– possible.
So the most important thing on a software team (or really any team creating high technology products or services) is an environment where team members feel safe to be themselves– psychologically safe, where they can try out new things, make mistakes, fail, and not be punished or belittled. Say their ideas and have them improved by others, not criticized. It's an environment where team members take care of themselves so they can be creative– sleep enough, exercise enough, be with friends and family enough, play enough.
You have to be at your keyboard or lab bench or whatever enough to make things. But if you are there too much your creativity plummets. This is what I try to get across to my teams.
Just FYI, you're being downvoted because generally on HN you should just upvote if you have a contentless agreement comment to post, AKA a "this"-style post.
It seems that no matter what ideas I come up with for capturing creative moments, it becomes vastly simpler if I just use pencil and paper. But I have started finding ways to capture with tech in a low-friction way.
One of them is using the Voiceliner app during times where it's not convenient to write things down. It also forces me to express my idea in natural language.
That's one of the reasons I think being a founder is probably the most freeing job title one can have. There's no single human making judgements about your performance. Instead, the market is the judge.
That way, you focus on leverage and impact, not on "time on desk".
Also worth noting that sometimes there's no substitute to just sitting down and grinding away.
That’s true, but, in my experience, shareholders are way more likely to judge you for impact rather than “grind time”, especially because they cannot measure “grind time” anyway.
> Most of the time, me writing looks—to the untrained eye—like someone watching ESPN. The truth is if you did a pie chart of the writing process, most of the time is spent thinking. When you’re loaded up and ready to go—when you’ve got that intention and obstacle for the first scene that’s all you need. For me at least, getting started is 90% of the battle. The difference between page zero and page two is all the difference in the world.
For the past 3 years I’ve worked in an almost 100% pair programming environment. It works wonders for a lot of problems, especially around “code ownership”. It’s much harder to get precious with your code, or point fingers at someone else’s code, when the responsibility for every line is shared by at least two people.
But I found that the pressure of pairing shuts down a lot of thought. Long silences are forbidden in pairing; you must vocalize your thought process. I found myself searching for gaps in the conversation where I could think for a second and blurt out my thoughts before it’s too late to turn the train around. I believe pairing can lead to local maxima this way because there’s no room in the conversation for deep thought.
I'm shocked you made it 3 years. I did a stint trying to do what they call "mob programming" and felt borderline suicidal. I couldn't think because I was constantly vocalizing what I was doing. Nothing added up and every ticket felt like it was just a hodge-podge of different ideas with no real flow. Lord help you if someone wanted to disagree. Now you have to completely stop your worker thread and handle that. There was no art to it. Its just one robot and two guys standing behind you ordering you to do this or that. I found it impossible to reach a flow state and produce actual good work. I left every session feeling like I accomplished nothing for myself. I am not attached to my code, but I am attached to my accomplishments. When all your work is atomized between people you are effectively no one. In this case, I believe, it's better off to leave.
Pair programming in moderation can be enlightening. Much like traveling to a different town as an artist to learn from other artists. Too much of it and you lose your identity. It is completely possible to remain detached from your work but still desire to work mostly alone on your own tickets. Code ownership is a silly concept. On one hand everyone suggests being detached from your work. Yet everyone simultaneously realizes having your name in a PR matters. I make a habit of crediting people who worked with me in the PR message. It's pretty simple.
I guess everyone is different and appreciates a different amount of collaboration!
I guess something ideal for me would be roughly 70% pair programming, 30% alone time - but I have not been able to test this guess because I have always worked on teams where pair programming is the exception, not the norm.
Were you required to pair? I'm always curious about this kind of arrangement, and fear that it can often be a sort of crutch, especially for more Jr engineers who don't yet have the experience writing a large amount of code on their own.
Regarding your point though, my spellchecking sense is telling me the author probably meant to type: "...that’s too often our mental image of “working” " .
Well, you can actually think in front of a computer also, whether you are just sitting there or typing outlines or whatever.
As far as collaborative creativity, that's a whole other thing. The challenge is that often everyone has somewhat different goals, assumptions, and knowledge.
That's a reason that solo development can be an advantage. Component-based systems might help to some degree.
IMHO why companies don't push the 'step away and let the problem gestate in your brain' message is that it blurs the lines between 'payable time' and 'free time'. For my creative work, a lot of solutions occur in the evenings after I've clocked out.
Since I'm developing solutions for work do they not owe me money for the hours worked?
I don't think it's that at all. If you're salary the company quite literally owns you, every thought no matter how inconsequential, etc. I can see how that could be a problem for hourly. It's really about control. You give the appearance of work to appease the PHB who signs your paycheck. You know, after plenty of experience, the person who appears to be the hardest worker is often times the least likely to be put on the chopping block. It's a very primal hierarchical reaction to this kind of thing.
If you dont believe it I encourage you to try to start your own company while working somewhere else. You'll be mired in legal nonsense so deep you wont even be able to see clearly. When you become an employee you sign just about every right away you have to anything you do, ever, while working for the company. NDAs, Non-Competes, Invention Agreements, etc.
Sure, the company can't avoid paying you. But in exchange they get 2/3 of your waking life for 30-40 years and 100% of your production. Some companies are better, some are worse. All of them have lawyers that, should you cross them, will make you regret everything. I am at a relatively relaxed company (compared to FAANGs) and even here I had to go through a ton of channels and sign paperwork to even begin work on an open source project.
It is probably different in the US? I can see why starting a company would be hard. But if you had ideas no reason you can’t do stealth stuff, like gain skills, do courses, market research. But when cutting code etc. sound like you would need to be free of the job.
I don’t think with todays developer salaries, there’s any space left for that good old “work is slavery” message you’re sending. The HN crowd is huge so I’m sure there are exceptions, but most people reading your comment can switch jobs whenever they want. Not without stress, but without real risk.
Perhaps the biggest sink on the economy and environment is perfomative
work that David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs". Commuting 100 miles to
sit in an office to be seen to perform is tragic and borne of
insecurity of both manager and worker colluding in a game.
I think what constitutes work exists at a deep, invisible level that
approximates to something like loyalty or duty. It is whether one
holds the task/company in mind. And it happens 24/7.
Some of the most important work I've done for clients happened while
out walking, or shopping. I've cut short social events or vacations to
rush back and test an idea I had.
Problem is, you can't measure that. And even if you could, I
wouldn't let you. It's a private space. The more any "boss" tries to
intrude, observe or manage that process, the faster it evaporates.
That's not to say that structured tools, planning, presentation and
other forms of explicating and evidence aren't part of work. They're
just not the most important parts, and actually play very little role
in the big leaps and "paradigm shifts" in creative work.
By "problem" I mean problem for someone whose only role is to monitor
and report what others do. "I'm still thinking about it" is something
they don't want to hear.
>Perhaps the biggest sink on the economy and environment is perfomative work that David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs". Commuting 100 miles to sit in an office to be seen to perform is tragic and borne of insecurity of both manager and worker colluding in a game.
For years (5+), at my job there's often nothing to do, so after lunch I just go home, and declare 4 hours worked that day (8-12, instead of normal 8) at the end of a month. Of 5 of us employees I am the only one doing that. Never once has my boss confronted me about it, neither subtracted from my full salary. I feel kinda blessed.
In many companies, there are systems into which you enter how many hours you worked each day. (often you also need to break down the work per department/budget, so that you as an expense can be tracked across multiple company budgets).
Man I wish everyone did that. I managed a team of twenty with a layer of managers and it was just impossible to get a pulse on workload. The truth is there is always work to be done. It doesn’t have to be feature work but it could be product health, process health, or pie in the sky thinking work. Some employees were great about utilizing downtime to tackle these but many were not. I loved the ones who were confident to tell me “hey boss I got some time. What do you want me to focus on ?”
I think that's true and it's a shame Graeber's choice of language
basically offends. Who wants to hear that their job is "bullshit"?
And let's face it, sometimes we feel good name-calling all those people
whose work we don't understand.
Unfortunately that over-hyping subtracts from real and serious
questions about why we're burning resources (human and material) doing
perfomative acts.
Even the things you mention, like mobility and development regulation
can be "perfomative", as "acting out" of things we think we ought to
be seen to do but no longer have the courage to examine.
This is down to the cult of "the system" as a Big Other, which must be
appeased - something I'm not sure Graeber articulated well. But it was
a key step in the unravelling of the Soviet system, and I think we are
repeating it now in the West.
Indeed, the core of the book is built on interviews with people who self-report that their jobs are bullshit. Graeber goes on to cover some systemically-bullshit jobs (largely escalating zero-sum games like advertising or the military—"we had to spend more because the other guy spent more, so the status quo is preserved") but all the stuff about ordinary jobs at ordinary companies that are bullshit come from surveys and interviews.
All I can figure is people who bristle at the term or at the notion that there might indeed be a whole lot of bullshit jobs haven't had a very broad set of work experience, and run in a social circle that's very similar to them. It seems impossible not to notice, otherwise.
>Perhaps the biggest sink on the economy and environment is perfomative work
I think nothing illustrates this better, than the productivity output of Japan vs other developed nations[0]. In Japan, there's a lot that you need to do at your job performatively: strict schedules, logging what you do have been doing in small intervals like 30 minutes, checking in and out formally, having to keep up with coworkers outside of work, tons of pressure and appearances, and long hours. And yet, productivity is not great.
I've had more ideas come to me after hiding in my office to take a nap than sitting at my desk. It got to be such a gold mine of solutions that I still to this day allocate 30 minutes of my day to a nap. Non-negotiable. So many hard problems that have been brought to me, or complicated needs for architecture, etc were solved by simply turning my active brain off. When I was in graduate school I'd regularly get stuck on some stupid thing I didn't understand and slamming my head against the paper/book/whatever didn't help. Again, a quick nap and I was good (or at least better than I was).
Performative work is a disaster. I worked in a stuffy IT office of a company before I got my degree and became a software engineer. It took YEARS to deprogram performative work. I still hide when I take a nap. I suspect that if my current company found out I was sleeping on the job they'd still be upset with me. However, my output is so good the results speak for themselves. It would be difficult to fire me for napping.
I'm the same except with guitar. I always keep a guitar next to my desk, and when I start getting frustrated or stuck with work I'll noodle around for 20 minutes. Usually I feel very refreshed after doing this. Working from home has been a godsend for me.
>When I was in graduate school I'd regularly get stuck on some stupid thing I didn't understand and slamming my head against the paper/book/whatever didn't help. Again, a quick nap and I was good (or at least better than I was).
I remember doing this, too. I would often nap 2-3 times a day in crunch time and sleep less during the night, solving many problems.
I think the problem as you say is the performative part of work, and napping really doesn't look good in that sense.
Since COVID WFH I often also nap instead of eating lunch, which is a double power boost, since a big lunch can make you almost comatose.
The three fundamental ideas of my PhD came to while:
1.) Sitting in a park sketching solutions on a notebook.
2.) Laying at the beach on vacation.
3.) Playing Legos with my daughter.
Without these ideas, I doubt there would've even been a PhD, or even a paper publication.
(There was a period of 2 years in my life where I did not have any significant ideas, at all. During that time, I was employed at a company which offered a constant stream of urgent TODO emails and tickets. I worked until exhaustion for 2 years, but did not get any work done.)
I know the castration of ideas in the "Everything-is-an-Emergency" company culture. If you're not careful, it will condition you to delay work because the next "emergency" and shift in priority is imminent.
This is exactly how my working days looked like in the last 12 months before I quit. Sitting in front of the screen waiting for the next emergency ticket. Why even bother to start some deep work? It will be interrupted, possibly for days, in the next hour anyhow. It was corporately-enforced procrastination, non-stop, for 2 years. At the same time, the technical debt grew and grew, until it towered above everything. It felt like torture. A miserable experience. At some point, my partner mentioned something like "I sure hope you will smile again some time"; around the same time I noticed that I took immense risks in traffic, especially as a pedestrian. Getting up in the morning was extremely difficult. 2 weeks after I left, the ideas came flowing again (ironically for problems we struggled with for months and months at the company).
Govts get caught up in the latest emergency in the social/media and completely forget about innovation and long term planning. It's particularly acute in the UK at the moment.
I kept my sanity at one place by working on refactoring every moment there wasn’t an emergency. I was trying to make all the changes easier. But that was after having tried several other solutions, including the dreaded Infinite Configurability, which has to be the absolutely best way to punish most of the team for how clever two or three of them are.
I’m working at a place like that now and it’s been an eye roller. After ten years on the project one of the problem people has finally seen this as a problem (though I haven’t heard him admit that he contributes). He’s looking at code now written by two people who have been copying his code style for years, and suddenly feeling the pain of it. It’s great he’s growing, but he’s over forty and should have learned this years ago. I blame a mix of things including staying at one place for far too long.
And I keep telling him this code used to be worse, but I’ve been chipping away at it for some time.
I empathize deeply with you. I have been dealing with a system of "infinite configurability" for the last couple years and it's playing out the same way. The best I've been able to do is slowly codify the most problematic corners and put guard rails as many places as possible.
Sometimes I want to put my hands up in defeat and leave but there is also a satisfaction and growth from simplifying the Rube Goldberg machine.
"Code coverage" and code that does everything and thus nothing are a potent cocktail as well. You can have 90% 'coverage' on a file and still only be covering 5% of the actual code paths (that's unfortunately not hyperbole, but a real number from a real analysis I did. When the numbers disagree that much, people tend to ignore the terrifying one)
> But that was after having tried several other solutions,
I should clarify that I didn't mean concurrent or consecutive here, but across several different projects. Different preconditions can sink a strategy. It's hard to get any signal when you apply multiple unsuccessful strategies to the same 'experiment'.
Slightly off-topic, but as a father of two (toddlers), I can relate to this. I have plenty of ideas but if I have (say) 15min available, my brain won't even start because it "knows" the next emergency / interrupt will probably occur within that time period. A bit sad I confess...
Snap. Whenever I sat down to cast about for ideas on how to develop the initial form of my PhD, nada, zip. Deliberate concentration on one thing was a shortcut to procrastination.
The 'big idea' came when I was on campus, standing outside smoking. Hit me like a bombshell. I literally ran to see my supervisor, blurted out IT'S JUST A F**G MOLECULE, cleared off his whiteboard and spent the next hour sketching out what turned out to be another 5 years of work.
Those eureka moments are where true creativity turns up, I find it impossible to solve problems through dedicated, stare-at-the-screen thought, but I'll get a brainwave at e.g. the gym and nearly drop the weights on my head.
Companies need to promote creative problem-solving spaces, and I'm not talking about a beanbag area with free lattes, but a sit-and-think, light, non-social way of working that promotes this kind of thing. No idea how this could be done in practice, though.
The question is would you be able to still get those spontaneous ideas at a background level without also the staring at the screen and deliberate work?
I also vividly remember the moment I had idea 1 from my list above. It was such a nice warm autumn day in the last months of a very turbulent year: I struggled finding something worth doing a PhD on, and in the 10 weeks before, I got married, my wife got pregnant, was rushed into emergency for a suspected ectopic pregnancy a few days later, which then suddenly turned out to be a completely normal pregnancy. I also had an upcoming conference talk a week later, for which I was completely unprepared. Suddenly the idea was there, and it was like a door to a wide avenue opened, with follow-up ideas left and right all along the way. It turned out quite beautiful in the end, and when we published 6 months later, one of the reviewers found the idea "elegant", which was by far the most positive thing I ever read in a paper review.
>Companies need to promote creative problem-solving spaces,
Unfortunately, there are people that do not understand how this concept works. These are the same employees that stare at screens trying to for a square peg into a round hole, but then see other employees trying it the other way and complain about how so many people are doing nothing when so much is to be done.
These complaints tend to percolate up, and these creative problem solving spaces end up getting removed to be replaced by more work space for the additional head count to solve all of the work to be done
> Companies need to promote creative problem-solving spaces, and I'm not talking about a beanbag area with free lattes, but a sit-and-think, light, non-social way of working that promotes this kind of thing.
Would that really solve the problem? I feel like when you're standing in front of your computer screen searching for a solution, it's because you're switching to some different and unplanned activity that you are able to get an eureka! moment. Creating a specific place where employees can go to think would defeat the whole purpose IMHO, because then people would go there and would do the exact same thing as when they're in front of their computer screen.
What may work is promoting short breaks during which employees can do any activity of their liking, whether it be playing video games, walking, smoking a cigarette... Basically anything that takes their mind off work. That guarantees development in creativity.
This is similar to that ai researcher, Kenneth Stanely, and his talk/book about how planning and having an objective sabotages reaching it. "Greatness cannot be planned" I think was the title.
Yes, this is undervalued. It is called the diffuse mode of thinking (as opposed to the focused mode). Walk around in the park during lunch break is work, too.
I got an Apple Watch in the endgame of my PhD to catch all the thoughts I'd have out and about, particularly on runs. I rarely reviewed them and a lot was adrenaline-induced ranting and raving, but the act of documenting helped cement them better and drastically cut out the anxiety of potentially forgetting something really good.
David Lynch analogizes his sitting-with-cigarettes-and-a-notepad-to-catch-ideas to fishing. You can't chase after them but once in a while a big one will come along.
Many top novelists, scientists, engineers, etc., have come up with ideas doing something other than work. We’ve all had ideas at odd times and contexts. Sometimes good and occasionally outstanding ideas or solutions.
“Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces… Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one — well, at least one and a half,”
More to the point, there is evidence that a 10-20 minute nap at the middle of the day, such that you don't go into deep sleep, improves cognitive function and subjective alertness.
If you were not drinking coffee, perhaps you might as well. I wonder if our cultural addiction with caffeine, an effective sleep inhibitor, is the reason why napping and siestas feels so weird and exotic to our modern minds. "Oh you're from Italy? I heard they take lunchtime naps over there." Sadly only my grandma had such a luxury.
Everybody else chugs coffee and is expected to work 9-18 without pause, like the rest of the Western world.
From what I've seen, Italian coffee consumption is nothing like American coffee consumption. They don't sip at enormous cups of drip coffee while working, but instead quickly drink small amounts of espresso as a break. It seems to me that leads both to less caffeine consumption and more actual enjoyment of the beverage.
Italians drink small cups of espresso or moka (if homemade), and maybe a cappuccino at breakfast. The morning and lunch time ones are mandatory, then maybe one mid afternoon or in the evening.
If you happen to see someone having a cappuccino at lunch, or, yikes! with their dinner, they're probably a tourist.
When I last lived there, Starbucks and the lattes and pumpkin spice big mugs were a "weird American novelty" for teens in major city centres.
I drink plenty of coffee and still take naps. Its hard for people to remember these days but the "lazy nappers" meme started during the industrial revolution. We've only had a 40 hour week, for example, for a (relatively) small amount of time here in America.
A lot of people who are working in precarious situations actually work two or more jobs at less than 30 hours each, because 30 is when you qualify for employer provided health insurance.
> So many hard problems that have been brought to me, or complicated needs for architecture, etc were solved by simply turning my active brain off.
I get it that it works but wonder what could be the logical explanation of this. I remember this method was also mentioned in the movie Turner & Hooch.
Not sure at all, but one thing that strikes me is when you’re purposely “thinking really hard,” you’re probably in a state akin to vigilance. You’re trying to assess ideas quickly and move to the next one. If you’re playing with legos, an idea can just sit there in the back of your mind and tumble about a little bit into different configurations and orientations.
I think another commonality is physical activity: walking, playing, washing. There may be some chemical thing going on with muscle activity but also subjectively I have a suspicion that these sorts of activities are essentially pumping noise into your cognitive processes, helping divergent thinking, while also keeping your attention sufficiently occupied to achieve the “non-vigilant” posture toward those ideas.
My working hypothesis is that the conscious and subconscious mind cannot access the same part of the brain at the same time (sort of like bus conflicts). So, counterintuitively, to let your subconscious mind churn on a problem, you have to actively focus elsewhere. This, at least, seems to be how it works for me.
When you are focused on a problem your left side of the brain take over (thinking in worlds and steps)
When you relax, draw, daydream or sleep your left brain can take over and think in parallel, images, abstractions.
When you dream the constraint on your consciousness (simulation) are lifted to allow more divergent scenario. That’s why dreams can be a bit crazy.
It’s a bit like brainstorming on steroid, letting loose of more constraints.
> I've had more ideas come to me after hiding in my office to take a nap than sitting at my desk. It got to be such a gold mine of solutions that I still to this day allocate 30 minutes of my day to a nap.
Many of the hard problems in my career have been solved while having a long warm shower in the middle of the work day.
In general, my own productivity trick is understanding and leveraging the Eureka effect. Your subconscious is still working on the problem when your conscious mind is doing something else. Often, if pointed focus doesn't work, just leave it in the back burner to stew. Then wait for the proverbial light bulb to show you the way, out of nowhere. It never fails, yet I have never heard anyone mention this phenomenon.
My empirical explanation is hard problems benefit from unrelated stimuli, so they're able to be approached from an oblique direction. In other words, to think out of the box, stop thinking and do something else.
Benjamin Franklin had this amazing idea of having ball bearings in his hand while solving and thinking about hard problems. The thinking would eventually make him fall asleep and as he fell into a slumber, the ball bearings would roll off his hands startling him up. It is at this precipice, the fine line between awake and asleep states that most of his ideas came to life. He would start penning down his ideas in this state.
So it worked then, it works now. A 20 to 30 minute nap during the work day has a ton of benefits, including stress reduction. I don't know why it is frowned upon. I have fallen asleep many times at my desk and have been made fun of, but who gives a damn. I would rather be stress free and have some good ideas come about.
It’s pandemic popular as “non sleep deep rest” if you want to try it by following a YouTube guide. Great nap replacement for when you’re too wired to fully fall asleep.
During my PhD, I had a friend famous for having a pillow on his desk.
He would take a nap everyday and went on to finish his PhD 6 months earlier than all prognostications and with some great ideas.
Hammock Driven Development by Rich Hickey [1] is a presentation that dives into why taking a step back from the immediacy of a problem often leads to clarity.
This! The human mind never fails to amaze me, so often the solution to a work problem pops into my head right after waking up, without even remembering what I was dreaming about.
At the grad school that I went to, senior grad students were offered a chance to move out of the lab and into a private "dissertating office" as they became available. With a couch I could nap on, an incredible window view to gaze out from, and a door I could shut for focus work, it was amazingly productive for finishing my dissertation. Those few months were the only time that I've ever had a private office and to this day I still rather miss it.
(And most of my favorite papers came about from ideas that I'd had while on vacation.)
So, recent R&D into sleep tech has come along ways in the past 20 years. Basically research has shown that during nap/sleep cycles our brain moves around memories (from short-term to long-term and prioitization) and connections between memories. Also, this process optimizes information in the brain to make the access faster and more efficient thus providing opportunity for neuralogical advanced thought sessions given the datasets after a nap/sleep session.
Some basic take aways include +20% memory capacity per 8-hour sleep cycle and longer un-interrupted access to memory collections. It's also been shown that it's possible to tag the day's memories and then prioritize them during the next nap/sleep session. Significant results have shown that groups that take 30-minutes nap have stronger memory capacity versus groups with no naps.
The face of the R&D seems to be Matt Walker - PhD Brit with intense accent - you've been warned!
TL:DR - The brains basically recharges AND rewires during nap/sleep sessions.
Work: going for a 2 hour run over the weekend, thinking about some problem between the 60th and 80 minute, spending the next week implementing it. (typing it in, telling others about it on meetings, whatever)
Also: this is why hourly billing is pointless. You bill for the low value activity and can't bill for the high value activity.
The interesting part is that most companies don’t want to keep learning even through this pandemic.
I see most of them as dinosaurs by now. Unexpected to be the case by many but soon to be extinct and replaced by smarter collectives, working towards their respective common goals.
The world desperately needs this kind of change on all decks.
We can’t stubbornly brute force ourselves out of this mess with the same kind of thinking that created it.
I agree with the message overall: impactful work might not 'look' like work, but I'm not sure what the author's deal is with conflating 'collaboration' with 'meaningless meetings'.
I guess I've just had different experiences, but for me, 'collaboration' means 'understanding that this project/task does not exist in isolation and looping in those relevant stakeholders early to make sure they decide with you as opposed to discovering roadblocks too late'. I can't imagine how someone can be against that.
From context, I feel like the author is using that word to mean 'gather people in a room and pretend to work'... is that how it's used normally?
I was thinking his point was how there is a lot of collaboration that isn’t actually useful, just as there is a lot of sitting at your desk “working” that isn’t useful.
It doesn’t mean you never sit at your desk and work, just that sitting at your desk doesn’t mean you’re working. Likewise for collaboration.
There is a good MOOC on coursera on the topic of learning and creative working: Learning How To Learn by Barbara Oakley (there is also a book).
She talks about focused and diffused mode of thinking. The main idea is that to create new neuron connections (memory or understanding) you've to work hard on a topic - the focused mode - and then take a break - the diffused mode.
By switching modes you help your brain. Of course, you can't just go do something else without working hard first ... :)
I was hoping someone would mention "Learning How To Learn" as I was immediately reminded of this as well. The process described in this article aligns completely with portions of Barbara's research and teaching.
I kind of see collaboration as a way to ensure you don't go off on some idea that doesn't align with the rest of the team. In the blog post he mentions that he presents his idea with the team in step 4, isn't that when it becomes collaboration and his idea is potentially scaled back or enhanced?
I've seen brainstorming variants where the team thinks for themselves first in silence in the same room and then present their ideas in form of post-it notes. In the end though, people tend to select the safest ideas, but I feel it also depends on how many "radical thinkers" are really on the team.
Because humans are social beings, we need to signal to the others that we belong to the group and are doing our part. Our loyalty is prized more than our effectiveness or efficiency. It doesn't matter how productive you are, the feelings of the group are more important.
You can see this in many places in our society. The security theater in airports don't make air travel that much safer, but it does send a signal to the group "look, we're doing something about it!". Same goes for the war on drugs, notoriously ineffective and seemingly only makes things worse. The hunt for benefits fraud is often not quite effective, hurts the ones that actually need the benefits, but the fear of the freeloader is big enough one must be seen to be tough on fraudsters. Or school, where doing what you're told is much more important than any learning you might do along the way. Or the way China is now burying itself with Xi's everlasting reign.
If you think humans are meant to be effective and efficient, you are very much mistaken. Everything we manage do, we do in spite of it.
FriedrichN? Is that an allusion to Nietzsche? It would certainly be fitting the sharpness of your observation. Wouldn’t be surprised to find the thought you expressed here in “Human, All Too Human”.
I guess this would comport with his concept of slave morality that states that the collective is more important than the individual and tends to trend towards the lowest common denominator.
While I agree with the overall point, that view of airport security and drug control being ineffective shows the power of Hollywood propaganda than valid points supporting the issue of the human condition.
One only has to look at places that value such measures to see they DO work.
Israeli airports for example or Singapore's drug policies. Both of which employ draconians measures to ensure effectiveness but they do boast success rates.
I'll say policies lose effectiveness when the populace don't value it or when the neighborhood has powerful bad actors that oppose it, like trying to reinforce gun laws in Canada.
The thing is, Israel legitimately has to fear terrorism. Western countries only keep that ridiculous security theatre because it's politically very hard to get rid of something that got introduced for "safety" even if it has proven to be pointless.
This puts the independent operator (lone contractor, entrepreneur...) in an interesting position. For him , effectiveness matters more than loyalty displays. His world is different from that of the "solid tribe member".
Back when I started as a freelancer, I initially copied the 9-to-5 rhythm of „working“. That, despite having viewed this forced window of work as one of the biggest annoyances that come with a job.
Over time, I could overcome this „weird“ feeling of not sitting at my desk while working. It went quite a bit like the author describes:
- Load up on context and information.
- Start outlining the problem.
- When stuck, try for a while. If no progress is to be made, go for a walk, do laundry, buy groceries. Stuff _away_ from the computer.
- When potential solution inevitably form in my mind, write them down wherever I am.
I often find that when I arrive at potential
solutions this way, I’m usually a lot more motivated as opposed to banging my head against the wall. It’s not only more productive, it’s better for your mental and physical health, it keeps you engaged and satisfied with your work. Many times I simply cannot wait to return to the desk to try the ideas out.
It’s also important to know when to stop. Occasionally there are days where I can get nothing creative done. I have learned the hard way that when I force myself through, more often than not I mess something up so terribly that I need at least half a productive day following up, rectifying what I broke. It may feel like cheating yourself at first but sometimes it’s better to just stop for the day entirely.
However, while employed, have you tried to go out for an extended walk or do something else away from your computer, outside of the building you are required to work in? Deciding to do so without permission can get you a citation and asking for permission leads to blank stares from your co-workers and managers. For many, that’s apparently akin to asking for paid time off whenever you feel like it. The conclusion here can only be that many employers are more interested in owning your time than results, whether they realize this or not. Which brings us to a larger point about work culture and insistence on presence at all times but that’s a huge, separate discussion.
> However, while employed, have you tried to go out for an extended walk or do something else away from your computer, outside of the building you are required to work in?
I'm 2 decades into my career amongst multiple different employers in different industries (including traditional stuffy ones), and I've never had anyone even raise an eyebrow at people wandering off for a few hours unannounced
if you're billing the client by the minute then maybe I can see why they'd get upset, but otherwise, as long as you're delivering, who cares?
I had a gig in a tiny company where the ritual was always to have a cup of tea/coffee at hand. People took it in turns to brew up. Which meant, with 3-4 people in the office, an enforced tea round every 45-60 minutes. If you were doing something, tough. TEA ROUND!! They'd literally come over and tap you on the shoulder. I spent more time at the kettle than I did working. I had the solace of daily pay, but when the time came to renew the contract, noped right out of there.
The company I worked for complained I was away for two hours during lunch. That's including, you know, driving somewhere to sit in a restaurant and wait for food. I quit after a month.
I started working from home four years ago and I have less ability to step away from my desk now than I ever had working from the office. It got even worse in 2020 after most of the office started working from home. Not to mention that teams snitches on me if I am away from my computer for five minutes.
> "...Not to mention that teams snitches on me if I am away from my computer for five minutes..."
When you said "teams", did you mean the Microsoft Teams app, or like your actual co-workers? Because if its your co-workers; damn, sorry to state it, but that's pretty toxic environment.
And, er, um...If your workplace does not lock down the computer too much, you may want to look up "mouse jiggler" or mouse mover" to help keep the Teams snitch at bay. ;-)
I was very lucky at a previous company to be able to do this - I had weekly or fortnightly meetings with the CTA, Snr Dev Manager and a few others where we would meet to agree strategies and issues.
Due to limited office space, very quickly these turned into 30mins to 1 hour walks - so each week I'd get 5 really impactful conversations with my peers, through the medium of a walk.
Sometimes the focus would be on connecting as two humans (which helped our working life massively) other times it would be totally work/problem focused. But the space away from the office, and with the privacy that came from being away from everyone else, we got loads done.
Really valued that way of working, I've tried to get it going in my current role, and had some success with Teams 'remote' walks with my last manager (each of us took our phone for a walk in our local areas) but for various reasons this didn't work out well for us.
I don't think so. It's basically just the tragedy of the commons. Most workers are responsible and a 20-30 minute nap/walk break would make them more productive. 20% will abuse it endlessly.
I think some would think they are abusing it and discover they benefit from it.
Someone who doesn’t nap at work gets home to find Season 3 of Ted Lasso has landed, stays up to watch it because they can just nap at work if six hours of sleep turns out to be a bad idea. But then they have a good afternoon because of the nap and decide to try it again.
I hear this argument repeatedly. What’s missing is the question _why_ said people do this. I feel it’s not sufficient to lump them together under “some people are leeches” and be done with it. I’d argue that if they had a meaningful responsibility, they wouldn’t bug off.
Concerns like this are a big part of why you need to charge double your normal rate when contracting. You might not get paid for travel to and between job sites. You also aren’t working performatively so there’s little or negative value to padding your hours to match a 40 hour schedule every single week. Work 30 hours except during crunch time. Sharpen your saw.
These people going for walks, taking showers, napping and solving problems: I don’t have this experience. Instead for me it is using pen and paper that does it for me. And it seems more efficient to have a computer nearby to browse code or docs while I do it. Breaks are helpful for maintaining energy but not for eurekas. But I agree that if walks make you more productive and you are thinking about work then that is actual work.
I think the key is being able to genuinely relax from focusing on the problem to help your thinking. To allow an opportunity for those competing thoughts that aren't making it to your awareness because they are beaten by whatever train of thought you are stuck on. Little rituals like taking a shower (or sitting on the toilet is a popular one) distract you so you can relax. Or they should. If it isn't working for you maybe you are too good as staying focused and aren't getting the benefit from relaxing. Thinking about work while walking would defeat the purpose.
For me it is the reverse. My best creative time is the sauna, followed by the shower, and lying in bed in third position. Pen and paper work great for fleshing out stuff, but not for the original insights. Once we get to the keyboard and screen that is the implementation of ideas already formed elsewhere.
This is not a straight cascade, but different phases influencing each other. I also want to point out that its not a value statement. All phases have their own merit, and all of them pose their own challenges.
At least for me, doing without any of them will grind creative productivity to a halt.
> I think Business with a capital B loves “collaboration” because of the seeming evidence of the feat: the potential for innovation is visible, even palpable when people are in a room — “I can see people meeting and talking and there are sticky notes all over the wall!”
I live in a consensus culture (Sweden) and have a slightly more cynical take on this: I think the main reason Business loves collaboration is that it legitimizes a system where the Business (and Business people) capture most of the value from innovation.
People vary greatly in their capacity for creative innovative thinking. Those that don’t have that capacity benefit from making innovation a “team sport” where they can play a leading role without exposing their ineptitude.
One data point that has convinced me of this hypothesis is how emotional people het around the counter examples. Talk about some fantastic mathematician (e.g. Galois) or “lone genius” scientist and many people go ballistic. Why would this be so sensitive if it wasn’t perceived as a threat to the ego?
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadMy company measures performance based on the company reaching its sales target, but as a lonely software engineer whose projects can still be months once I've finished them until they reach customers, my impact on that measure (in the short term) is basically nothing. We also do OKRs but somehow my team never get assigned any. Sure as an engineering team you can try to estimate cards and measure your velociy at the end of the sprint, but how do you do the same for a product manager or creative roles like a copywriter?
So the most important thing on a software team (or really any team creating high technology products or services) is an environment where team members feel safe to be themselves– psychologically safe, where they can try out new things, make mistakes, fail, and not be punished or belittled. Say their ideas and have them improved by others, not criticized. It's an environment where team members take care of themselves so they can be creative– sleep enough, exercise enough, be with friends and family enough, play enough.
You have to be at your keyboard or lab bench or whatever enough to make things. But if you are there too much your creativity plummets. This is what I try to get across to my teams.
I agree, one of the ideas that I started applying from the book "steal like an artist" involved having an analog and a digital desk for work.
You have creative ideas and brainstorm at the analog desk, then document, iterate, and refine your ideas at the digital desk.
One of them is using the Voiceliner app during times where it's not convenient to write things down. It also forces me to express my idea in natural language.
That way, you focus on leverage and impact, not on "time on desk".
Also worth noting that sometimes there's no substitute to just sitting down and grinding away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
Aaron Sorkin has also touched on this:
> Most of the time, me writing looks—to the untrained eye—like someone watching ESPN. The truth is if you did a pie chart of the writing process, most of the time is spent thinking. When you’re loaded up and ready to go—when you’ve got that intention and obstacle for the first scene that’s all you need. For me at least, getting started is 90% of the battle. The difference between page zero and page two is all the difference in the world.
But I found that the pressure of pairing shuts down a lot of thought. Long silences are forbidden in pairing; you must vocalize your thought process. I found myself searching for gaps in the conversation where I could think for a second and blurt out my thoughts before it’s too late to turn the train around. I believe pairing can lead to local maxima this way because there’s no room in the conversation for deep thought.
Pair programming in moderation can be enlightening. Much like traveling to a different town as an artist to learn from other artists. Too much of it and you lose your identity. It is completely possible to remain detached from your work but still desire to work mostly alone on your own tickets. Code ownership is a silly concept. On one hand everyone suggests being detached from your work. Yet everyone simultaneously realizes having your name in a PR matters. I make a habit of crediting people who worked with me in the PR message. It's pretty simple.
I guess something ideal for me would be roughly 70% pair programming, 30% alone time - but I have not been able to test this guess because I have always worked on teams where pair programming is the exception, not the norm.
Regarding your point though, my spellchecking sense is telling me the author probably meant to type: "...that’s too often our mental image of “working” " .
As far as collaborative creativity, that's a whole other thing. The challenge is that often everyone has somewhat different goals, assumptions, and knowledge.
That's a reason that solo development can be an advantage. Component-based systems might help to some degree.
Sure, the company can't avoid paying you. But in exchange they get 2/3 of your waking life for 30-40 years and 100% of your production. Some companies are better, some are worse. All of them have lawyers that, should you cross them, will make you regret everything. I am at a relatively relaxed company (compared to FAANGs) and even here I had to go through a ton of channels and sign paperwork to even begin work on an open source project.
I don’t think with todays developer salaries, there’s any space left for that good old “work is slavery” message you’re sending. The HN crowd is huge so I’m sure there are exceptions, but most people reading your comment can switch jobs whenever they want. Not without stress, but without real risk.
Bill: "There's nothing to do."
Boss: "Well, you pretend like you're working."
Perhaps the biggest sink on the economy and environment is perfomative work that David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs". Commuting 100 miles to sit in an office to be seen to perform is tragic and borne of insecurity of both manager and worker colluding in a game.
I think what constitutes work exists at a deep, invisible level that approximates to something like loyalty or duty. It is whether one holds the task/company in mind. And it happens 24/7.
Some of the most important work I've done for clients happened while out walking, or shopping. I've cut short social events or vacations to rush back and test an idea I had.
Problem is, you can't measure that. And even if you could, I wouldn't let you. It's a private space. The more any "boss" tries to intrude, observe or manage that process, the faster it evaporates.
That's not to say that structured tools, planning, presentation and other forms of explicating and evidence aren't part of work. They're just not the most important parts, and actually play very little role in the big leaps and "paradigm shifts" in creative work.
By "problem" I mean problem for someone whose only role is to monitor and report what others do. "I'm still thinking about it" is something they don't want to hear.
For years (5+), at my job there's often nothing to do, so after lunch I just go home, and declare 4 hours worked that day (8-12, instead of normal 8) at the end of a month. Of 5 of us employees I am the only one doing that. Never once has my boss confronted me about it, neither subtracted from my full salary. I feel kinda blessed.
Thankfully I now have a job that autoreports 8 hours. I never even opened the software to edit hours.
Btw, even if they are a problem, their impact on the economy pales in comparison with restrictions on migration and construction.
I think that's true and it's a shame Graeber's choice of language basically offends. Who wants to hear that their job is "bullshit"? And let's face it, sometimes we feel good name-calling all those people whose work we don't understand.
Unfortunately that over-hyping subtracts from real and serious questions about why we're burning resources (human and material) doing perfomative acts.
Even the things you mention, like mobility and development regulation can be "perfomative", as "acting out" of things we think we ought to be seen to do but no longer have the courage to examine.
This is down to the cult of "the system" as a Big Other, which must be appeased - something I'm not sure Graeber articulated well. But it was a key step in the unravelling of the Soviet system, and I think we are repeating it now in the West.
A very large number of people who already believe that about their job.
All I can figure is people who bristle at the term or at the notion that there might indeed be a whole lot of bullshit jobs haven't had a very broad set of work experience, and run in a social circle that's very similar to them. It seems impossible not to notice, otherwise.
There probably exist jobs that are entirely bullshit or entirely not-bullshit, but if they exist, they are extremely rare.
I think nothing illustrates this better, than the productivity output of Japan vs other developed nations[0]. In Japan, there's a lot that you need to do at your job performatively: strict schedules, logging what you do have been doing in small intervals like 30 minutes, checking in and out formally, having to keep up with coworkers outside of work, tons of pressure and appearances, and long hours. And yet, productivity is not great.
[0] https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01196/
Performative work is a disaster. I worked in a stuffy IT office of a company before I got my degree and became a software engineer. It took YEARS to deprogram performative work. I still hide when I take a nap. I suspect that if my current company found out I was sleeping on the job they'd still be upset with me. However, my output is so good the results speak for themselves. It would be difficult to fire me for napping.
I remember doing this, too. I would often nap 2-3 times a day in crunch time and sleep less during the night, solving many problems.
I think the problem as you say is the performative part of work, and napping really doesn't look good in that sense.
Since COVID WFH I often also nap instead of eating lunch, which is a double power boost, since a big lunch can make you almost comatose.
1.) Sitting in a park sketching solutions on a notebook.
2.) Laying at the beach on vacation.
3.) Playing Legos with my daughter.
Without these ideas, I doubt there would've even been a PhD, or even a paper publication.
(There was a period of 2 years in my life where I did not have any significant ideas, at all. During that time, I was employed at a company which offered a constant stream of urgent TODO emails and tickets. I worked until exhaustion for 2 years, but did not get any work done.)
Govts get caught up in the latest emergency in the social/media and completely forget about innovation and long term planning. It's particularly acute in the UK at the moment.
I’m working at a place like that now and it’s been an eye roller. After ten years on the project one of the problem people has finally seen this as a problem (though I haven’t heard him admit that he contributes). He’s looking at code now written by two people who have been copying his code style for years, and suddenly feeling the pain of it. It’s great he’s growing, but he’s over forty and should have learned this years ago. I blame a mix of things including staying at one place for far too long.
And I keep telling him this code used to be worse, but I’ve been chipping away at it for some time.
Sometimes I want to put my hands up in defeat and leave but there is also a satisfaction and growth from simplifying the Rube Goldberg machine.
It still sucks though.
I should clarify that I didn't mean concurrent or consecutive here, but across several different projects. Different preconditions can sink a strategy. It's hard to get any signal when you apply multiple unsuccessful strategies to the same 'experiment'.
The 'big idea' came when I was on campus, standing outside smoking. Hit me like a bombshell. I literally ran to see my supervisor, blurted out IT'S JUST A F**G MOLECULE, cleared off his whiteboard and spent the next hour sketching out what turned out to be another 5 years of work.
Those eureka moments are where true creativity turns up, I find it impossible to solve problems through dedicated, stare-at-the-screen thought, but I'll get a brainwave at e.g. the gym and nearly drop the weights on my head.
Companies need to promote creative problem-solving spaces, and I'm not talking about a beanbag area with free lattes, but a sit-and-think, light, non-social way of working that promotes this kind of thing. No idea how this could be done in practice, though.
Unfortunately, there are people that do not understand how this concept works. These are the same employees that stare at screens trying to for a square peg into a round hole, but then see other employees trying it the other way and complain about how so many people are doing nothing when so much is to be done.
These complaints tend to percolate up, and these creative problem solving spaces end up getting removed to be replaced by more work space for the additional head count to solve all of the work to be done
Would that really solve the problem? I feel like when you're standing in front of your computer screen searching for a solution, it's because you're switching to some different and unplanned activity that you are able to get an eureka! moment. Creating a specific place where employees can go to think would defeat the whole purpose IMHO, because then people would go there and would do the exact same thing as when they're in front of their computer screen.
What may work is promoting short breaks during which employees can do any activity of their liking, whether it be playing video games, walking, smoking a cigarette... Basically anything that takes their mind off work. That guarantees development in creativity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI
David Lynch analogizes his sitting-with-cigarettes-and-a-notepad-to-catch-ideas to fishing. You can't chase after them but once in a while a big one will come along.
“Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces… Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one — well, at least one and a half,”
-- The Gathering Storm
Everybody else chugs coffee and is expected to work 9-18 without pause, like the rest of the Western world.
> Individually, an American coffee drinker consumes about three cups of coffee per day.
> Italians drink an average of 3 coffees a day
It seems that the averages are roughly equal. Of course there are outliers everywhere.
If you happen to see someone having a cappuccino at lunch, or, yikes! with their dinner, they're probably a tourist.
When I last lived there, Starbucks and the lattes and pumpkin spice big mugs were a "weird American novelty" for teens in major city centres.
A lot of people who are working in precarious situations actually work two or more jobs at less than 30 hours each, because 30 is when you qualify for employer provided health insurance.
Churchill: "Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it.”
Somehow that doesn't make me feel much better
I get it that it works but wonder what could be the logical explanation of this. I remember this method was also mentioned in the movie Turner & Hooch.
I think another commonality is physical activity: walking, playing, washing. There may be some chemical thing going on with muscle activity but also subjectively I have a suspicion that these sorts of activities are essentially pumping noise into your cognitive processes, helping divergent thinking, while also keeping your attention sufficiently occupied to achieve the “non-vigilant” posture toward those ideas.
When you dream the constraint on your consciousness (simulation) are lifted to allow more divergent scenario. That’s why dreams can be a bit crazy.
It’s a bit like brainstorming on steroid, letting loose of more constraints.
Many of the hard problems in my career have been solved while having a long warm shower in the middle of the work day.
In general, my own productivity trick is understanding and leveraging the Eureka effect. Your subconscious is still working on the problem when your conscious mind is doing something else. Often, if pointed focus doesn't work, just leave it in the back burner to stew. Then wait for the proverbial light bulb to show you the way, out of nowhere. It never fails, yet I have never heard anyone mention this phenomenon.
My empirical explanation is hard problems benefit from unrelated stimuli, so they're able to be approached from an oblique direction. In other words, to think out of the box, stop thinking and do something else.
So it worked then, it works now. A 20 to 30 minute nap during the work day has a ton of benefits, including stress reduction. I don't know why it is frowned upon. I have fallen asleep many times at my desk and have been made fun of, but who gives a damn. I would rather be stress free and have some good ideas come about.
If anyone is interested, the yoga tradition has extensively developed this technique – it’s called Yoga Nidra.
The latter is associated with aging and physical decline.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
(And most of my favorite papers came about from ideas that I'd had while on vacation.)
John Cleese on creativity
So, recent R&D into sleep tech has come along ways in the past 20 years. Basically research has shown that during nap/sleep cycles our brain moves around memories (from short-term to long-term and prioitization) and connections between memories. Also, this process optimizes information in the brain to make the access faster and more efficient thus providing opportunity for neuralogical advanced thought sessions given the datasets after a nap/sleep session.
Some basic take aways include +20% memory capacity per 8-hour sleep cycle and longer un-interrupted access to memory collections. It's also been shown that it's possible to tag the day's memories and then prioritize them during the next nap/sleep session. Significant results have shown that groups that take 30-minutes nap have stronger memory capacity versus groups with no naps.
The face of the R&D seems to be Matt Walker - PhD Brit with intense accent - you've been warned!
TL:DR - The brains basically recharges AND rewires during nap/sleep sessions.
Here's the links:
podcast: The Matt Walker Podcast
book: https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
Also: this is why hourly billing is pointless. You bill for the low value activity and can't bill for the high value activity.
The interesting part is that most companies don’t want to keep learning even through this pandemic.
I see most of them as dinosaurs by now. Unexpected to be the case by many but soon to be extinct and replaced by smarter collectives, working towards their respective common goals.
The world desperately needs this kind of change on all decks.
We can’t stubbornly brute force ourselves out of this mess with the same kind of thinking that created it.
I guess I've just had different experiences, but for me, 'collaboration' means 'understanding that this project/task does not exist in isolation and looping in those relevant stakeholders early to make sure they decide with you as opposed to discovering roadblocks too late'. I can't imagine how someone can be against that.
From context, I feel like the author is using that word to mean 'gather people in a room and pretend to work'... is that how it's used normally?
It doesn’t mean you never sit at your desk and work, just that sitting at your desk doesn’t mean you’re working. Likewise for collaboration.
She talks about focused and diffused mode of thinking. The main idea is that to create new neuron connections (memory or understanding) you've to work hard on a topic - the focused mode - and then take a break - the diffused mode.
By switching modes you help your brain. Of course, you can't just go do something else without working hard first ... :)
I've seen brainstorming variants where the team thinks for themselves first in silence in the same room and then present their ideas in form of post-it notes. In the end though, people tend to select the safest ideas, but I feel it also depends on how many "radical thinkers" are really on the team.
When I’m confident in myself I can do this and be effective. Go think about a problem not sitting at my desk.
When I’m not confident in myself, I act like an impostor and try to look like I’m doing work.
The hard part is remaining confident in myself, when myself has not always given me reason to be confident in it.
You can see this in many places in our society. The security theater in airports don't make air travel that much safer, but it does send a signal to the group "look, we're doing something about it!". Same goes for the war on drugs, notoriously ineffective and seemingly only makes things worse. The hunt for benefits fraud is often not quite effective, hurts the ones that actually need the benefits, but the fear of the freeloader is big enough one must be seen to be tough on fraudsters. Or school, where doing what you're told is much more important than any learning you might do along the way. Or the way China is now burying itself with Xi's everlasting reign.
If you think humans are meant to be effective and efficient, you are very much mistaken. Everything we manage do, we do in spite of it.
One only has to look at places that value such measures to see they DO work.
Israeli airports for example or Singapore's drug policies. Both of which employ draconians measures to ensure effectiveness but they do boast success rates.
I'll say policies lose effectiveness when the populace don't value it or when the neighborhood has powerful bad actors that oppose it, like trying to reinforce gun laws in Canada.
In Design Thinking, team members diverge and ideate privately. Later the team converges by discussing ideas as a group to refine or combine ideas.
Over time, I could overcome this „weird“ feeling of not sitting at my desk while working. It went quite a bit like the author describes:
- Load up on context and information.
- Start outlining the problem.
- When stuck, try for a while. If no progress is to be made, go for a walk, do laundry, buy groceries. Stuff _away_ from the computer.
- When potential solution inevitably form in my mind, write them down wherever I am.
I often find that when I arrive at potential solutions this way, I’m usually a lot more motivated as opposed to banging my head against the wall. It’s not only more productive, it’s better for your mental and physical health, it keeps you engaged and satisfied with your work. Many times I simply cannot wait to return to the desk to try the ideas out.
It’s also important to know when to stop. Occasionally there are days where I can get nothing creative done. I have learned the hard way that when I force myself through, more often than not I mess something up so terribly that I need at least half a productive day following up, rectifying what I broke. It may feel like cheating yourself at first but sometimes it’s better to just stop for the day entirely.
However, while employed, have you tried to go out for an extended walk or do something else away from your computer, outside of the building you are required to work in? Deciding to do so without permission can get you a citation and asking for permission leads to blank stares from your co-workers and managers. For many, that’s apparently akin to asking for paid time off whenever you feel like it. The conclusion here can only be that many employers are more interested in owning your time than results, whether they realize this or not. Which brings us to a larger point about work culture and insistence on presence at all times but that’s a huge, separate discussion.
I'm 2 decades into my career amongst multiple different employers in different industries (including traditional stuffy ones), and I've never had anyone even raise an eyebrow at people wandering off for a few hours unannounced
if you're billing the client by the minute then maybe I can see why they'd get upset, but otherwise, as long as you're delivering, who cares?
I had a gig in a tiny company where the ritual was always to have a cup of tea/coffee at hand. People took it in turns to brew up. Which meant, with 3-4 people in the office, an enforced tea round every 45-60 minutes. If you were doing something, tough. TEA ROUND!! They'd literally come over and tap you on the shoulder. I spent more time at the kettle than I did working. I had the solace of daily pay, but when the time came to renew the contract, noped right out of there.
When you said "teams", did you mean the Microsoft Teams app, or like your actual co-workers? Because if its your co-workers; damn, sorry to state it, but that's pretty toxic environment.
And, er, um...If your workplace does not lock down the computer too much, you may want to look up "mouse jiggler" or mouse mover" to help keep the Teams snitch at bay. ;-)
wandering off for *a few hours* he said ...
Wow, you must be one lucky sir.
Due to limited office space, very quickly these turned into 30mins to 1 hour walks - so each week I'd get 5 really impactful conversations with my peers, through the medium of a walk.
Sometimes the focus would be on connecting as two humans (which helped our working life massively) other times it would be totally work/problem focused. But the space away from the office, and with the privacy that came from being away from everyone else, we got loads done.
Really valued that way of working, I've tried to get it going in my current role, and had some success with Teams 'remote' walks with my last manager (each of us took our phone for a walk in our local areas) but for various reasons this didn't work out well for us.
I don't think so. It's basically just the tragedy of the commons. Most workers are responsible and a 20-30 minute nap/walk break would make them more productive. 20% will abuse it endlessly.
Someone who doesn’t nap at work gets home to find Season 3 of Ted Lasso has landed, stays up to watch it because they can just nap at work if six hours of sleep turns out to be a bad idea. But then they have a good afternoon because of the nap and decide to try it again.
This is not a straight cascade, but different phases influencing each other. I also want to point out that its not a value statement. All phases have their own merit, and all of them pose their own challenges.
At least for me, doing without any of them will grind creative productivity to a halt.
I live in a consensus culture (Sweden) and have a slightly more cynical take on this: I think the main reason Business loves collaboration is that it legitimizes a system where the Business (and Business people) capture most of the value from innovation.
People vary greatly in their capacity for creative innovative thinking. Those that don’t have that capacity benefit from making innovation a “team sport” where they can play a leading role without exposing their ineptitude.
One data point that has convinced me of this hypothesis is how emotional people het around the counter examples. Talk about some fantastic mathematician (e.g. Galois) or “lone genius” scientist and many people go ballistic. Why would this be so sensitive if it wasn’t perceived as a threat to the ego?