Discover more from Abe Murray | AlleyCorp / Deep Tech
I wrote this for my product teams at Alphabet, and shared on Medium a few years ago. Re-posting it here for my new friends in robotics and startup land!
I was re-reading some articles I’d saved away over the break, and felt this one (“Knowledge workers are bad at working”) was worth sharing highlighting the challenge of accomplishing “deep work” in the face of distractions, a manager schedule, and so on.
Discussing the article with a few engineering and product directors, we found we do similar things to solve for this problem — some offensive, some defensive, and all supported by a GTD type approach. I thought I’d share those here.
Offensive solutions
Block chunks of make-time[1] on your calendar
(I start every week by figuring out the ~3 deep-work tasks I need to accomplish, and then schedule 1.5+ hour blocks to actually do them)Identify your top 5 hard problems — have a list
(If you list them, you may background process on them!)Exercise as thinking time
(Not necessarily exercise — but the point is to find some regular distraction free period and use it explicitly for thinking)Create an empty work product
(When deep work needed but scary, just stub it out with rough or empty bullets, then when you’re in the right mood to dig in — the activation energy required is lower)
Defensive solutions
Build a reputation for being unresponsive[2]
(This one is tricky — two thirds of our discussion group did this — but at the same time, our job is to be available. My personal take is that my email SLA is 24 hours at best, perhaps longer. I assume if it’s urgent people will IM me. This allows me to ignore email until evening when I’m burnt out, and focus morning / freshness time for doing stuff)Use your inefficient times efficiently!
(Don’t do busy work when you’re ‘fresh’)Be on the clock, or off the clock
(Delineate work and not work / focus accordingly)Protect your time
(Don’t take on every AI, think about comparative advantage & best owner)
Get Stuff Done
Find a system that helps you execute w/out dropping balls
(We all have variations on a standing TODO list — urgent at top, important in middle, long tail at bottom — we work urgent daily, and only clean up the long tail periodically.)
Anyhow, this is a totally fun topic to geek out on — if anyone has better approaches, let me know! And thanks for reading :-)
2023 coda — copy Sam Corcos!
I'm reposting this here after loving Tim Ferriss's recent podcast with Sam Corcos - one of the best episodes for productivity dorks.
If you liked this article - you'll love the episode - jump in over here.
[1] If you haven’t bumped into the concept of Maker’s schedule vs. Manager’s Schedule — I recommend you read this Paul Graham essay
[2] I personally love Napolean’s method of not reading mail until it was 10 days old… at which point many problems had fixed themselves or become irrelevant, and things that were urgent found him otherwise
Image via Diffusion Bee via GPT4 prompt after feeding this article text and requesting an illustration ala The Economist :D