Work

As someone who flies business class on American a few times per year, I am zero percent surprised that [American Airlines CEO Robert Isom] doesn’t know or care about the experience flying American’s competitors.

...I think it comes down to the classic idea of a “businessperson”. That an executive can just have a knack for “business”. That an MBA trains a would-be executive to run any sort of company. That’s probably the sort of executives who run most companies in most industries. But I don’t think it’s how excellent companies are led. Excellent companies, in any industry, seem to be led by executives who live and breathe whatever it is their companies do, and they stay up at night and wake up in the morning thinking about how to lead their industries in quality.

If the CEO’s primary perspective on the company is via spreadsheets — if it’s all just P&L to them — that company is not going to excel at quality. Or if they do excel at quality, they won’t for long.

Weber's German word for a vocation, Beruf, contains two resonances: the gradual accumulation of knowledge and skills and the ever-stronger conviction that one was meant to do this one particular thing in one's life.

An English locution roughly conveys what he meant: your life 'adds up'.

Gather brings the best of in-person collaboration to distributed teams. Communicate, collaborate, and feel more connected in a persistent space that reflects your unique team culture.

So I'd like you to think about when was the last time you thought about something for an entire hour? Like nobody bothered you and you had an idea and you sat for an hour and thought about it. How about for a whole day? Does everybody remember the last time they sat and thought about something for a whole day? How about over a course of a month? You had something you were working on and obviously, not spending all the time every day when you started thinking for a month. Or a year? These are tremendously valuable moments if you get to have them at all. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the ability to think about probably three different things for a year or more.

An archive of artist' homes and studios around the world.

There are many ways of learning and traveling. We found that we navigated towards destinations where we gain insight into our own time by transcending ourselves and experiencing other people’s lives in different times in history.

Whether it’s Georgia O’Keffee’s home and studio in the desert in New Mexico,
the Eames’s modernistic home in the hilly sides of LA,
or Philip Johnson’s the Glasshouse in Connecticut,
we learn from the places we visit.

We are fascinated by their life work, the aesthetics and details of their places, the philosophy they lived by and the conversations we imagined they had with like-minded artists and friends.

In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do—namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”

I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the clearest tone I could assume. But in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, “I would prefer not to.”

“Prefer not to,” echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the room with a stride. “What do you mean? Are you moon-struck? I want you to help me compare this sheet here—take it,” and I thrust it towards him.

“I would prefer not to,” said he.

The labour of two days, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!

No, I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.

One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't matter.

Individuals matter.

When Mr. Jobs came back in 1997, in one of the earliest meetings someone was taking notes, writing down what [Mr. Jobs] was saying about what we’re doing.

He stopped and said "Why are you writing this down? You should be smart enough to remember this. If you’re not smart enough to remember this you shouldn’t be in this meeting."

We all stopped taking notes and learned to just listen and be part of the conversation and remember what we were supposed to do. And that became how we worked.

It was very action-oriented. It was built to be like a small start-up where we all are working together on the same things, and we all know what our plans are and what we’re doing.

Since largely escaping the office, my "work" has been very different...Some of this is a real accomplishment, some of this isn't2, and the jury is still out on a fair whack of it.

But the character of the work itself is very, very different. For one thing, I am earning A$90K less per year (i.e, losing that money in opportunity cost) because I refused to take a five-day-a-week gig last year, and currently receive only about A$1.7K a year for my writing, but I value that little bit of money so much more. It just about pays for all my music classes being forty-five minutes instead of thirty minutes, and I savour every second of them because I feel like I've earned them producing something that brings people joy.

In fact, there are all sorts of stark differences. When I went to an office, I'd have days where I'd drag myself out of bed and wish I could get just a little more sleep in, but the neighbor's dog woke me up at 5AM. Now I wake up and think, "Well, I'd love to sleep a bit more, but I get to make a cup of tea and enjoy working in that beautiful moment before the world is fully awake." I frequently force myself not to roll out of bed and start writing within a minute of waking up in a desperate bid to maintain some semblance of not being a Ritalin-addled Silicon Valley "thought leader". This is a relationship with labour that I never expected to experience, and it really is wonderful.

Most company structures are based on the Roman empire military. CEO Caesar says he wants something, and the lieutenant managers below him on the org chart break it down into smaller tasks for the soldiers to accomplish.

On a development team, programmers are the soldiers of these shitty new armies. They open their Jira issues and add whatever feature it says to add, or fix what it says to fix. If I can save time by adding another dependency, or skip a meeting by implementing a mockup exactly as designed, why should I care?

Derek Thompson, writer of Work in Progress at The Atlantic and host of Plain English, joins Jon to talk about the future of remote work. Is remote work good or bad? Is it here to stay? How can we make it work for all of us? Derek offers up his perspective, makes the case that “quiet quitting” is a fake trend, and talks about why he’s hopeful that, despite America’s “bad vibes,” we’ll be able to figure this all out.

Our current definition of “productivity” is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We’re overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of burnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are these really our only choices?

The “case study?” column was the whole point of the spreadsheet — identifying which projects I still needed to write up for my portfolio — but at this point I looked at the sheet, and thought “This is honestly a better overview of the work I do than any ‘portfolio’ I’ve seen”.

So I tweeted a screenshot, joking/trolling that it WAS my portfolio (I didn’t include any winks or notes that I was still planning a “real” portfolio), but people didn’t respond with the lulz I expected — they got the idea, or took it at face value and said they were going to do their portfolio this way too!

The biggest source of waste is not low performers or having too many employees.

The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists.

...Skilled pragmatists are too smart to wade into conflicts or political maneuvering. They work within the system. They are under-challenged and bored at work but are resourceful enough to scratch those itches in other ways. They aren't lazy—doing the bare minimum and stopping—but they also don't go "above and beyond" because they are inherently skeptical that it is worth it. They are very reliable, but to the point where they are conveniently (to them) invisible. Occasionally, they show flashes of brilliance to remind people they've got the chops, but not so often that it throws them into the lion's den.

While remote work is fine for plowing through day-to-day work, it has the potential to put a serious damper on collaboration and innovation long-term.

Short-term productivity goes up, long-term creativity goes down.

There seem to be two major clumps of engineers.

There are the engineers who have read 1+ books on a given topic, and sometimes on several topics, and they all come off as extremely competent. These are, for the most part, the people that make up the audience of this blog. Of course, you do not literally need to read a book - a sufficiently high volume of technical blogs or courses are probably the equivalent at varying levels of efficiency - but take it for granted there is some Large Sum of information that someone has studied.

Then there are engineers (and people in every profession) who never try for the entirety of their careers, and this is the majority of every profession. I spoke to a reader who is employed as an extremely high-level engineer...who described the average professional as sleepwalking through their working lives, and this rung true. Of course, they are not literally asleep so something else is going wrong, but the description still seemed apt. There is movement - enough movement to fall down a flight of stairs - but none of the awareness needed to avoid such an outcome.

On preparation, he urged his hearers to study and prepare themselves, relating the instance of the lumberjack who said that if his life depended upon his ability to cut down a tree in five minutes he would spend three minutes sharpening his axe.

When we onboard onto a new company, we are bringing all of the experience and baggage of our past career in tech. A lot of times, we lean on what we’ve seen work well in certain contexts.

...Sometimes this is helfpul, sometimes, it’s not.

Second, at the same time as we are trying to prove ourselves, remind our company and team why they picked us - for our expertise, our history, our skills - we are also trying to fit into our new team, because you have two jobs:

You were hired to write code. Many developers make the mistake and think that their job stops there. That’s not true. In fact, you have two jobs:

Write good code. Be easy to work with.

These two ideas, of trying to both stand out and fit in, are extremely strong, and both work at odds with each other throughout our careers and our lives.

Our efforts to emulate a physical world in digital space is a Sisyphean undertaking that fails to recognize the respective strengths and weaknesses of in person vs remote work.

This is how we end up with digital team lunches with 20+ people where there are no side discussions. Imagine how absurd this would be in person, where you couldn’t talk to the person next to you but had to talk to the entire group anytime you wanted to say something.

...Remote work forces a writing culture. In person work encourages an oral culture. ...Even if you really love meetings, you can only attend about 10h of them per day but a single well written document will continue being read even while you’re sleeping. Oral cultures don’t scale.

A couple years ago I was having dinner with a playwright, Bekah Brunstetter, and her director David Shmidt Chapman. We talked about how rejection is just part of the landscape for all beginning artists, no matter how talented or hardworking they might be or how successful they might appear. David said he’d love to publish his “anti-résumé” someday—a list of all the things he didn’t get.

In software development deadlines are a necessary evil. It is important to understand when they are necessary, and it is important to understand why they are evil.

There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don't use the word "heresy" to describe them, but structurally they're equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done.

We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future. If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.

Is there a market for Michelin-starred web designers? I hope I’m wrong about this, but I think it’s shrinking.

So why animate that header or spend time building a papier-mâché miniature set to photograph for the footer that few will see?

The same thing that drives a Michelin-starred chef to spend 12 hours agonizing over a difficult preparation for a small cube of food that will be devoured in a 2-second bite. The same reason that got me started in this field in the first place.

For fun, and for the art.

If you have to stand somewhere doing tedious work, at least make it interesting.

1. Joseph White says he “used to work from a dozen different spots throughout the day” but at home works at one spot. Has he thought about moving around? Maybe working elsewhere in his house, or going to a coffee shop?
2. Does White think that most workers have the freedom to work from a dozen different spots in their workplace?
3. Or, to put essentially the same question another way: Where are we more likely to be “glued to a desk,” at the office or at home?
4. How has White shaped his home life such that his home afflicts him with “sensory atrophy” and “the end of curiosity”? Maybe he could rearrange his furniture or something.
5. If we have families at home, then the more analog and connected our work lives are, the more virtual and disconnected our family lives will be; and vice versa. But is it obvious that it’s more important for us to be connected to our co-workers than to our families? That might be great for Capitalism, but not so great for Humans.

Getting pigeon-holed as one particular thing often made me uncomfortable because I didn’t feel seen. My skill set is much broader and being called “just” anything felt constricting. Shifting my focus publicly reflected my different personal interests while ensuring an expanding broader audience (and maybe bring some people along for the ride, too).

...I’ve always enjoyed being more of a generalist while having a deep understanding of a number of topics—something I referred to as being U shaped instead of T shaped.

I met her at a party. I liked her hair. She liked my name. I made fun of her career. She gave me her number. Her friend, who was into prophecy, told her I would be her future husband. It still took work, but it helps to have Providence on your side.

It also helped that I was unemployed.

...There are investments you can’t make from a structured, nine-to-five, narrowly teleological environment. You have to let your life go fallow sometimes, like a crop rotation giving the land time to bring forth new fertility. This is actually a consequence of a fairly general theorem about how to find treasure in complex search spaces: The best search strategies for complex problems like life generally don’t seek out particular homogeneous objectives, but interesting novelty. The search space is too complicated and unknown for linear objective-chasing to work. Biological evolution, in practice, works through a diversity of niches which it explores in parallel to find unpredictable advances.

The key implication is that while you have not yet found the unique opportunity that will be the engine and purpose of your empire, you have to adjust your sense of value. Value is very legible within a clear plan to reach a clear objective. But you cannot pursue interesting novelty—things that no one else is doing or which you have never seen before, or the little threads of nagging curiosity or doubt—by chasing along known direct value gradients. But that’s where the treasure is. That’s how you will find the place where you need to build. To get the biggest and most interesting payoffs, you have to start by chasing merely interesting novelty in an open-ended way.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

This rental property includes a canonical example of one of my all-time favorite styles of functional architecture: the writing shed.

...Writing sheds don’t make the specific cognitive act of writing easier...but these sheds do seem to improve many of the general factors that surround this act.

...When it comes to cognitive work more generally, psychological factors matter. Whether you’re writing a book, or crafting computer code, or solving a business problem, or analyzing noisy data, you’re attempting to coax sustained abstract focus from a human brain not necessarily evolved for such intensely symbolic processing.

Overworking is an interesting vice because it’s socially acceptable and some view it as a necessary precondition to outsized success. The category of “socially-acceptable professional vices” is an interesting one because these vices will hamper your career progress in non-obvious ways, and this is indeed my segue to the actual topic I want to dig into: individuals who have higher standards for those around them than their organization supports.

It’s a truism that you always want to hire folks with very high standards, but I’ve seen a staggering number of folks fail in an organization primarily because they want to hold others to a higher standard than their organization’s management is willing to enforce.

In his course Being Productive: Simple Steps to Calm Focus, Kourosh Dini emphasises the importance of taking a moment to “be with” the work every day (or however frequently you need to tackle a project). “Being with” your work is to be fully present and intentional about that activity and doing nothing else.

This idea was inspired by Dini’s piano teacher, who encouraged him to sit at his piano and touch the keys every day. Even on the days that he felt he had no time or inclination to practice. Sometimes touching the keys would lead to a good practice session, even when he didn’t feel like it would before he actually gave it a go.

Just like Dini, I find that once I give the task my full attention and be present, the actual doing of it turns out to be much easier and more enjoyable than my mind had been expecting. As usual, the resistance to getting started is far more uncomfortable than actually doing the thing.

You have some wonderful stories of basically getting away with stuff at the studios.

I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes…You say yes, and you never do it.

That’s great advice for life.

It is. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.

Thinking time — the time needed to concentrate without interruptions has always been central to scholarly work. It is essential to designing experiments, compiling data, assessing results, reviewing literature and, of course, writing. Yet, thinking time is often undervalued; it is rarely, if ever, quantified in employment practices.
Newport's thesis raises a much more fundamental question: what is the impact of lost concentration time on science — not just on the structure and process of science, but also on the content and quality of research?

...Felicity Mellor, a science-communication researcher at Imperial College London, is sceptical about giving managers a role in thinking time. In many cases, researchers are already feeling the weight of their institution's monitoring and evaluation systems. Mellor argues that including yet another box in an evaluation form might not go down well. She also thinks that institutions will not accept this. "Can you imagine the response if a scientist filled out a time sheet where it says 'eight hours spent thinking'?" Ultimately, she says, creating a more supportive research culture needs a much more fundamental change. That suggests an even more radical rethink of the current funding model for academic research.

...[Cal] Newport's thesis [in Slow Productivity] raises a much more fundamental question: what is the impact of lost concentration time on science — not just on the structure and process of science, but also on the content and quality of research?

[Frederick] Taylor’s model of workplace productivity depended entirely on deskilling, on the invention of unskilled labor—which, heretofore, had not existed. More than half a century later, long after Taylor died while gripping a watch, Peter Drucker would pick up the baton he left behind and intone about the arrival of “knowledge workers.” But his definition of this new class of workers existed entirely in opposition to Taylor’s stories of their supposedly unknowledgeable peers.

...In other words, Drucker’s now-infamous formulation of knowledge workers only makes sense if you accept the premise that other workers do not themselves truck with knowledge. But that premise was the product of theft—an outcome of Taylor’s extraction rather than a natural or immutable fact of the work.

...Perhaps it’s even better to acknowledge that there never were any knowledge workers. There have only ever been workers.

I have never felt like an “imposter”.
I have always deserved to be here, I’ve worked hard.
I don’t suffer from a “syndrome”.
Identifying the gaps in my knowledge and being aware of what I don’t know is part of my vocation.

In recent years it’s become trendy to discuss how we all apparently suffer from this imposter syndrome - an inability to internalize one's accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. I take two issues with this:

• it minimizes the impact that this experience has on people that really do suffer from it.
• we’re labelling what should be considered positive personality traits - humility, an acceptance that we can’t be right all the time, a desire to know more, as a “syndrome” that we need to “deal with”, “get over” or “get past”.

Lots of people suggested variations of “fight” that were quite aggressive and were sure to cause damaged relationships no matter the resolution of the immediate issue. It was suggestions like these that drew “not the hill to die on” responses from more cautions and/or conflict-averse posters.

I submit that this misses the most powerful response, which we can semi-ironically refer to as “the Bartleby” – refuse without fighting. Simply say, “I am not comfortable with this, and I am not going to do it.” And then let the chips fall where they may.

What this does is it reverses the dynamic, and asksthem if this is the hill that they want to die on. How important is this to them? What even is the purpose of the company? Are they prepared to actually fire a valuable employee just because they won’t put pronouns in an email signature?

When I polled my community about their attitudes toward busywork — a ruse to figure out what some of my nearest and dearests actually do for work — most at least saw value, if not joy, in occasional busywork. A web designer told me busywork serves as “productive procrastination” when she’s avoiding more complex tasks. A woman in sales and marketing said she values the solitude of rote tasks, and retreats into spreadsheets “when everybody’s annoying and I’m peopled out and my bullshit meter is filled.” A senior research program manager at a nonprofit explained that she values how data cleaning — combing through a dataset for errors, duplicates, and other issues — creates an intimacy with the information she’s processing. Cleaning data manually makes the phenomena she studies less abstract: “It connects you to a different way of working or being, or creates opportunities to see things in a different way.”

Apprenticeships are a path to a thick skilfulness in a craft and a real solve for the problems of training and helping the next generation of young workers become productive members of the workforce, but they are also more than this.

The reason that in early modern Europe an apprentice was called a freeman or journeyman at the end of their tenure was that they were qualified to be a 'free' citizen or to ‘journey’ out into the world. They were prepared to live and work in a city without restriction. The apprenticeship had liberated them not just economically but socially.

...Like the army or the monastery apprenticeships are a sacrifice. The apprentice sacrifices many of the best years of their youth and the multiplicity of career options that they could see before them to undergo a specific course of training. Yet, just like the army or the monastery apprenticeship also represents a gift of freedom. At the end of their tenure the apprentice has been given an identity and a chance to navigate society as they see fit.

In our noble drives to democratize access to the liberal arts and our cultural valourization of the dropout entrepreneur we have inadvertently looked down on the creative capacity, economic windfall, and social liberation that can come from apprenticeships. As we seek as individuals and as a society to find new avenues for building capability we would be wise to rediscover this form.

A few months ago, David Kellam told me that you've only got principles if you suffer for them sometimes, and a local CTO named Alan Perkins regaled me with a story of walking out into the worst job market of his life after being told to do something illegal. At what point do funny blog rants go from just that, some funny posts, to someone complaining about a self-inflicted situation?

...The next time that someone says I've "spoken truth to power", I hope that I'll be able to look at my tower of responsibilities and the empty pits that used to contain my savings and think "I earned it this time".

Interestingly, just as software people were talking about how we need to kind of follow this very Taylorist notion as the future of software development, the manufacturing world was moving away from it. The whole notion of what was going on in a lot in manufacturing places was the people doing the work need to have much more of a say in this because they actually see what's happening.

Despite the furor over their aggressive unmanliness, clerks, and with them the office, crept silently into the world of nineteenth-century America. Moral philosophers were mostly preoccupied with the clang of industrialization and its satanic mills, and most regarded as negligible the barely audible scratch of pens across ledgers and receipts that characterized the new world of clerical work. It was only a “dry, husky business,” as the narrator of Bartleby had it.

Many of us have come to expect work to involve no slack time because of the negative way we perceive it. In a world of manic efficiency, slack often comes across as laziness or a lack of initiative. Without slack time, however, we know we won’t be able to get through new tasks straight away, and if someone insists we should, we have to drop whatever we were previously doing. One way or another, something gets delayed. The increase in busyness may well be futile.

Leaving behind something that worked in order to pursue something new takes courage. We should celebrate more people who do it. It's not even quitting. It's called being done with something. And that's a good thing.

Heath has described the project as an exercise in “slow curiosity”…

“So my challenge would be: Ask someone a craft question. Show interest in the way they do their work. Not "How's your job going?" or "What's going on at work?" More like: (barista) "How do you get those cool swirly hearts on the latte foam?" or (nurse) "When you can tell someone's afraid to have their blood drawn, what do you do?" I think you'll be surprised by how much those craft questions can energize your conversation.”

How do you work?

When I get home, I have two desks in my office — one’s “analog” and one’s “digital.” The analog desk has nothing but markers, pens, pencils, paper, and newspaper. Nothing electronic is allowed on the desk — this is how I keep myself off Twitter, etc. This is where most of my work is born. The digital desk has my laptop, my monitor, my scanner, my Wacom tablet, and a MIDI keyboard controller for if I want to record any music. (Like a lot of writers, I’m a wannabe musician.) This is where I edit, publish, etc.

This concept [of radical candor] extends to more than just direct employee feedback. It can also seep into other forms of communication, policies, and ultimately the entire culture. At 37signals, we've labeled this broader problem being "overly precious".

...In fact, I've come to believe that this type of language and expectation setting actually makes people more fragile.

...That doesn't mean scrubbing out caring. It doesn't mean turning into a hard ass. The opposite of precious is not being cruel, but being clear.

...Being too precious is the same as being fragile. That's not a goal to aspire to. We should all be chasing higher resilience instead.

Someone recently told me that "difficult to work with" often really means "difficult to take advantage of" in creative industries, and I haven’t stopped thinking about that for weeks.

You’re supposed to like your job, which is horrific. Not only do you have to work for somebody, you have to like it...And so you did it five days a week. You signed off at five and you forgot about your work and at the weekend you didn’t think about it. Now you have to go to work, and as I say, you have to wear their t-shirt, have to go on their retreats and have to smile all the time. It’s like, not only are you alienated, you have to deny that you’re alienated, which causes symptoms.

Because what is a symptom? A symptom tells the truth that you cannot tell yourself. So if you have to pretend that everything’s great, the symptom explodes. And of course we’re seeing the explosion of all these…I mean, fatigue is a very interesting modern symptom that you could say is a type of protest precisely against this weaving of everything into productivity. There’s no space for gift.

The bane of large interests is that, just by dint of communication complexity alone (leaving aside politics/fiefdoms, "compliance" process and associated mandatory trainings, etc), they are extremely wasteful machines that largely squander human creativity and wisdom all while generating massive revenue due to small but effective groups within.

Think the Pareto Principle: 80% of the value from 20% of the people—except it's likely worse than 80-20.

The beauty of self-employment lies in the courage to build something, from the bottom up, that can stand on its own. The beauty of self-employment is seeing your capacity to be functional. You're taking risks. You have skin in the game. Be proud if you're building some sort of artistic, cultural, or entrepreneurial project. Even though you're not rich. You're entitled to be a tad arrogant.

Most people think that "X does whatever he wants because he's free." The reality is vice versa. He's free because he does whatever he wants.

In doing creative work, do not start your day with addictive time-vampires such as The New York Times, email, and Twitter. All scatter the eye, and mind, produce diverting vague anxiety, clutter short-term memory. Instead, begin with your work. Many creative workers have independently discovered this principle.

Standardised metrics might not be suitable for the diverse contexts and challenges of different places. Applying the same metrics across different communities can lead to overlooking local needs and priorities, hindering effective place-based solutions.

Metrics often encourage a focus on short-term goals and quick wins to demonstrate immediate progress. However, place-based work often requires long-term commitment and sustained efforts to address complex issues and achieve meaningful change. Some things will take years, even decades, to move the dial on.

And, from my perspective, the most damaging effect can be found in discouraging innovation. Strict adherence to metrics can stifle creativity and experimentation, which are essential for place-based approaches that need to adapt to unique local circumstances and evolve over time.

I am tired of the premise that creation means productivity––especially in the laborious sense...Creation has become mangled with labor in a world that demands man to monetize all of their hobbies and pursuits. In return, it seems empty, almost sad, really––to be the designer spending weekends again on the screen.

To tell you what I like to do in the weekends, I like to do the sad thing...The ‘good’ people tell you to detach your life from your workspace, but this summer, I think I’ve just realized how much I adore what I have the luxury of working on everyday.

In the weekend, I make. I make not because it’s the only thing I have ever known, but because it’s the most certain way forward.

+10x engineers may be mythical, but -10x engineers exist.

To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week.

Yesterday I worked on the widget.
Today I will work on the widget.
I have no blockers.

Are you asleep yet? The developers are. You promise them an intellectually stimulating work environment and what they end up with is drudgery.

What value can be had from these meetings anyway? Using “alignment” for justification is so nebulous that it is essentially meaningless. Engineers align themselves. They talk. Especially if you hire good ones (which, you know, you’ll struggle to if you have a culture of coercing them into this kind of busywork). Where does the real discussion happen? It’s written down.

3: The best way to improve software UX is regular direct observation, by everybody on the team, of the work done.
20: Have some personality.
27: Minimalism is garbage.
35: Metaphors are fantastic.
36: Naming things is fantastic.
41: Try to write HTML that would make sense and be usable without the CSS.
69: The buyer is quite often wrong. That fact never changes their mind.
70: Working on a functioning app’s codebase does more to increase its quality than adding features.
72: A good manager will debate you, and that’s awesome.
83: The term ‘project’ is a poor metaphor for the horticultural activity that is software development.

It's the lack of ambition that fuels the malaise of a bullshit job. Work so aspirationally underwhelming that it's possible to coast and imagine how the world wouldn't be an iota different if the work wasn't done. A perfect recipe for existential dread and despair.

But while the stereotype of ambition is indeed someone like Elon Musk (or Steve Jobs, before that), I don't think you literally need to aim for Mars to stir the heart of sailors. Nor do I think you need to be as abrasive or demanding, as the stereotype implies. That's the balance we've been trying to find at 37signals since its inception: The vision of a calm company compatible with ambition.

...In the lore of Steve Jobs, you'll find plenty of anecdotes from people who really didn't care for how he treated them or their colleagues at times, but who still credit the projects they worked on for him at Apple as the most meaningful ones of their career. I'm sure the same is true with Musk. These encapsulate the paradox that, psychologically speaking, I don't think most people know what makes them fulfilled at work. (But it isn't the ping pong or the free massage.)

More than making money… more than that feeling of launching a new product, feature, website, or app… the idea I am coming to value most in my professional life is the feeling of “play”. Sometimes play is being on my own with high autonomy and low consequences, sometimes it’s getting to choose new and fun technologies, but where play is most valuable is when it involves other people.

...If there’s a downside to the Hot Potato process it’s that there’s a lot of re-building mid-flight as new requirements trickle in or you discover new constraints. When you build frequent iteration and circling back into the process, it can lead to a feeling of never being “done”. That is a tax on cognitive load, like open browser tabs, that may not neurologically suit everyone. Others might even prefer a more linear assembly line process.

If I had to choose which process I prefer, I’d pick reworking a component over-and-over in a Hot Potato process versus other alternatives.

The central goal of Slow Productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level. A natural fear is that by reducing the amount of work each employee tackles at any given time, it might reduce the total amount of work an organization is able to complete, making it less competitive. This fear is unfounded. As argued, when an individual’s work volume increases, so does the accompanying overhead and stress, reducing both the time remaining to actually execute the tasks and the quality of the results. If you instead enable the individual to work more sequentially, focussing on a small number of things at a time, waiting until she is done before bringing on new obligations, the rate at which she completes tasks might actually increase.

I think it’s interesting to dig a bit into why executives themselves choose to stay in challenging roles. The profit/people/prestige/learning/pace model from “a forty-year career” remains relevant in explaining behaviors of executives who are optimizing for their career, but there are a small but meaningful number of executives who are beyond career optimization.

Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names. The term was first used in the magazine New Scientist in 1994, after the magazine's humorous "Feedback" column noted several studies carried out by researchers with remarkably fitting surnames. These included a book on polar explorations by Daniel Snowman and an article on urology by researchers named Splatt and Weedon. These and other examples led to light-hearted speculation that some sort of psychological effect was at work.

Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work and helps
make something of the world.

To arouse the aspiration for quality and make good on it, the organization itself has to be well crafted in form. It needs, like Nokia, open information networks; it has to be willing to wait, as Apple is, to bring its products to market until they are really good.

The fact that a small number of educated leftists still think their jobs (or most jobs) are pointless drudgery invented by a malevolent capitalist system seems more like a function of elite overproduction than of any inherent deficiency in said system.

What do we have that they should want?
We have a wall to work upon
We have work and they have none
And our work is never done
And the war is never won
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

Professionalism is a lie, build what you love, explore everything. In today’s age of creation, anyone who attempts to tell you otherwise is lying. You’ll end up seeking what you traded for the rest of your life.

Universities are often too large, dulling the student-educator relationship. Internships are often transitory and involve large volumes of work without context or learning: building web pages or presentations from pre-built components to meet a deadline, for example. It’s work that people need to do, but it doesn’t require learning or understanding the client or the project. Thankfully, there is a middle ground that we seem to have forgotten about in tech: the apprenticeship.

Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for job retraining. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers don't often see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor.

A couple of months back, Craig mentioned in a video that he has a doc filled to the brim with snippets of text—nice words, compliments, and thanks that had been sent his way for his work. Whenever someone says something nice he just copy/pastes it into that doc.

It sounds silly at first and perhaps a little egotistical. Behold! I have a document that proves how great I am!

But I started doing it just to see what it feels like and…hey…actually? It’s so great! When I’m feeling low (often) or whenever the world feels unstable (extremely often) it’s so very nice to return to a few kind words about my work. It reminds me just how much these words of praise mean, it reminds me that I ought to pass that favor along.

My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.

The modern computer, with its generic styling and overloaded activity, creates a cognitive environment defined by urgent, bland, Sisyphean widget cranking — work as endless Slack and email and Zoom and “jumping on” calls, in which there is always too much to do, but no real sense of much of importance actually being accomplished.

In McNamara’s construction we find an alternative understanding of work, built now on beauty, craftsmanship, and focus. Replacing everyone’s MacBook with custom-carved hardwood, of course, is not enough on its own to transform how we think about out jobs, as these issues have deeper roots. But the Mythic is a useful reminder that the rhythms of our professional lives are not pre-ordained. We craft the world in which we work, even if we don’t realize it.

The problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day they already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth of their former size; you find yourself unable to recreate the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity.

Most websites have a link that says “about”. It goes to a page that tells you something about the background of this person or business. For short, people just call it an “about page”.

Most websites have a link that says “contact”. It goes to a page that tells you how to contact this person or business. For short, people just call it a “contact page”.

So a website with a link that says “now” goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a “now page”.

Problem

The artificial separation of houses and work creates intolerable rifts in people’s inner lives.

Solution

Use zoning laws, neighborhood planning, tax incentives, and any other means available to scatter workplaces throughout the city. Prohibit large concentrations of work without family life around them. Prohibit large concentrations of family life without workplaces around them.

It is difficult to get people to understand something, when their salary depends on not understanding it.

I was getting drinks with one of the saner engineer organizations in Melbourne last week...It turns out that both of them actively cultivate cultures where disagreement is viewed as a good thing because that is an indicator that you're moving closer to the truth. And if you've hired adults, disagreement is actually quite pleasant. You learn a lot, it keeps you engaged, your work turns out better, and this in turn leads to more happiness down the line. And yes, you still get to clock out at 5PM.

If you haven't hired adults, then trying to improve anything is like pushing a boulder up a hill. You push, and push, and push, and then finally give up and it rolls back down the hill. It is very tiring and utterly pointless.

When introducing myself, I am always clear that, most of the time, I am either busy, or trying to be busy. Everything to me is work, everything that makes me proud of myself is work, everything in my future will, hopefully, be more work. The entire concept of retiring to me is madness. I never want to stop working.

This is often mistaken as an unhealthy obsession with work, which is not entirely true. I am not torturing myself every day for 10 hours just so I can prove myself, I’m doing exactly what I want to do.

If you are to do important work then you must work on the right problem at the right time and in the right way. Without any one of the three, you may do good work but you will almost certainly miss real greatness.

The characteristic of 3M that enabled it to attain such diversity in its product line is a policy of what has generally come to be called "intrapreneurship". The basic idea is to allow employees of large corporations to behave within the company as they would as individual entrepreneurs in the outside world.

...It is 3M's policy (and that of other enlightened companies) to allow its engineers to spend a certain percentage of their work time on projects of their own choosing, a practice known as "bootlegging".

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.

Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.

...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.

Should we really demand that the guy who checks ticket stubs at the movie theater hones his craft?

Well, yes. No job is too low to not warrant care, because no job exists in isolation. Carelessness ripples. It adds friction to the working of the world. To phone it in or run out the clock, regardless of how alone and impotent you might feel in your work, is to commit an especially tragic—for being so preventable—brand of public sin.

---

Bob [the driving instructor] oozes concern; he wants to infect the state of New Jersey with good driving habits. He respects his public role, the fact that the minute he's done with these kids they head straight for their parents' car keys and out onto the roads we share. When I asked him what he likes to do outside of work, he laughed: "This is my life."

His reward is the pleasure of depth itself.

The labile tastes of certain decision-makers in a company are often a great burden for designers. Too many feel themselves qualified to pass judgment. And how insensitive, how superficial these judgments often are.

Taste, believes Rams, is something that needs to be trained, since the aesthetic decisions at this level in product design are intrinsically bound to the entire form and function of the object. It would be unimaginable, for example, that the management of an aerospace company would ask the designers of a new plane to shorten the wings because they think it would make it look prettier.

The first task for growing designers, as opposed to managers, is to craft a proper career path for them, one whose compensation and sociological status reflect their true value to the creative enterprise. This is commonly called the dual ladder. It it easy to give corresponding salaries to corresponding rungs, but it requires strong proactive measures to give them equal prestige: equal offices, equal staff support, reverse-biased raises when duties change.

Why does the dual ladder need special attention? Perhaps because managers, being human, are inherently inclined to consider their own tasks more difficult and important than design and need to deliberately assess what makes creativity and innovation happen.

Placing work and commerce near residences, but buffering it off, in the tradition set by Garden City theory, is fully as matriarchal an arrangement as if the residences were miles away from work and from men. Men are not an abstraction. They are either around, in person, or they are not. Working places and commerce must be mingled right in with residences if men, like the men who work on or near Hudson Street, for example, are to be around city children in daily life—men who are part of normal daily life, as opposed to men who put in an occasional playground appearance while they substitute for women or imitate the occupations of women.

Until the nineteenth century, virtually all cities were “all use” environments. Craft-scale production was typically carried out in a workshop below the home of the craftsperson, which often also served as the site of exchange.

The thing that you’re talking about though, which I’ve never seen a mature company really have a sustainable space for, is the “senior craftsperson.” They’re not pivoting at some point in their career to saying “I’m going to take what I know and leverage it through other people.” They’re saying “I want to get better infinitely at the thing that I do.” I believe that that’s possible.

You see it more in pure-art kind of careers. Like “I’m an illustrator” or “I’m a concept artist” or something, and there’s a need for that person being really fucking good at that one thing, and continuing to do that one thing. I think a lot of people can intuitively understand why that would be really satisfying for someone as a career path.

A site dedicated solely to canvas of the Desk.

A Desk is where we work. Symbolic. Physical. Present. A second and third home. A Desk is a platform. A hearth. Roots are planted. It’s a place, a sanctuary, where hours upon hours pass.

The long-term popularity of any given tool for software development is proportional to how much labour arbitrage it enables.

The more effective it is at enabling labour arbitrage, the more funding and adoption it gets from management.

...React and the component model standardises the software developer and reduces their individual bargaining power excluding them from a proportional share in the gains. Its popularity among executives and management is entirely down to the fact that it helps them erase the various specialities – CSS, accessibility, standard JavaScript in the browser, to name a few – from the job market. Those specialities might still exist in practice – as ad hoc and informal requirements during teamwork – but, as far as employment is concerned, they’re such a small part of the overall developer job market that they might as well be extinct.

The component model itself is another layer of arbitrage, especially when coupled with CSS-in-JS approaches or libraries such as Tailwind. Instead of building teams around cross-functional specialities, you can build your software around interchangeable components.

But stay on I didn’t. I don’t know exactly why I up and quit. Didn’t even have any clear goals or prospects of what to do after quitting.

I think LinkedIn has a unique opportunity - a cultural moment around work, coupled with a unique proposition: real networks and real utility.

What if LinkedIn positioned itself not as a professional network or social network but as a learning network. A personal learning network for every user - centered on their personal development.

There is one very clear parallel between the digital spreadsheet and generative AI: both are computer apps that collapse time. A task that might have taken hours or days can suddenly be completed in seconds. So accept for a moment the premise that the digital spreadsheet has something to teach us about generative AI. What lessons should we absorb?

First, the right technology in the right place can take over very quickly indeed. In the time it takes to qualify as a chartered accountant, digital spreadsheets laid waste to a substantial industry of cognitive labour, of filling in rows and columns, pulling out electronic calculators and punching in the numbers. Accounting clerks became surplus to requirements, and the ability of a single worker to perform arithmetic was multiplied a thousandfold — and soon a millionfold — almost overnight.

The second lesson is that the effect on the labour market was not what we might have expected. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that there were 339,000 accountants and accounting clerks working in the US in 1980, around the time VisiCalc started to take off. By 2022, the bureau tallied 1.4mn accountants and auditors. These two numbers aren’t directly comparable, but it is hard to argue that accountancy was decimated by the spreadsheet. Instead, there are more accountants than ever; they are merely outsourcing the arithmetic to the machine.

Propinquity, the state of being close to someone or something; proximity.

The law of propinquity states that the greater physical (or psychological) proximity between people, the greater the chance that they will form friendships or romantic relationships.

...It seems almost old fashioned to be talking about office design in 2024, but it would negligent to not consider these studies when we talk about team dynamics and communication.

The binary nature of the Remote Working Vs Return To The Office debate often dodges the issue about the vital role of communication when it comes to the spread of ideas and innovation.

...If you are doing solid repeatable work, or work that requires intense solo concentration, you can work from pretty much anywhere.

If you are in a discovery phase of work, and trying to fuse ideas together from multiple viewpoints remote working might be a hindrance.

It’s 3am and I can’t sleep. There’s no can of mosquito spray next to me and I’m not cursed by that mean Spanish star but my mind is sizzling with ideas and opportunities and feelings of guilt and loss and unbearable shame. Total and absolute frazzle-dazzle.

I wonder if I get this from my dad? As if it’s genetic, just part of my inheritance somehow. Like I’m never really here, I’m always somewhere else. There is some argument to be had, some deadline looming. Some stupid design to be figured out. Some manager to argue with. Some book to be less than half written. Someone out there left to disappoint in some new, small way.

He never really slept either. Throughout my childhood I just assumed that all men were anxious, all men stressed. Men simply do not sleep, I thought.

A calm company's purpose is to provide exceptional service to customers while simultaneously improving the lives of the people who work there.

By default, a calm company is profitable. Those profits give a calm company its resilience: there's no last-minute scramble to meet payroll or earn a last-minute sale to keep the business afloat. The company has enough financial margin to weather economic storms.

Moreover, calm companies are fun to work for. The work is usually interesting and enjoyable. The team has been carefully selected, and there's a good vibe in meetings.

Calm companies provide meaningful work, healthy interactions, and flexibility for people's lives. If your kid is home sick, you can set work aside and take care of them. If it's a beautiful day, you can go for a run on the beach.

There has always been the type of person who is performative of their own interests or pursues their work because of the kind of attention it will get them. There’s always been the pressure to act upon the desires of one’s own ego. But this mode feels much more pervasive as time goes on. Environments are emotionally contagious, and if the environment you spend a lot of time in is hyper-competitive and performative, you’re going to feel pressure to act competitive and performative as well. The dominant model of social media codifies and enhances that pressure.

...I know this isn’t quite the same thing as one’s interests being strategic, but it is a mode we live in where you have to think of content or information as a resource. And doing so means that in some ways you’re producing or consuming in order to cultivate a position, rather than treating content as something out there to be curious about, to be fascinated by, or to love.

The distinction between the two modes I’m trying to define is that one side takes the position that being fascinated with something or someone in the world has a benefit that is self-evident. Being able to feel love towards something or someone is a gift in and of itself. The other side (the side that annoys me) orients fascination or association or effort towards a direction with the primary goal of having some kind of quantifiable reward. But if you’re really focusing on the moment, on something you love, on something in the world that feels like it’s made for you, you can’t be thinking about how it will benefit you, or how it will reflect back on you. These two modes are at odds with each other. True attention requires that you don’t view something in the world through the lens of “what can this thing do for me?”

“Fleming's method involved isolating himself in a mundane hotel room, in a location offering no distractions, forcing him to focus solely on his writing. This environment, devoid of alluring alternatives, left Fleming with two choices: write or do nothing.”

The tech info-sphere is currently awash in talk of real vs. fake, best vs. rest, do this vs. that, tech utopianism vs. AI hysteria, top-tier vs. mid-tier, use AI or be used, and founders vs. workers vs. managers vs. VPs. People are processing that the companies they joined are, well, companies with factions, investors, confirmation bias, and competing needs.

...It's all a self-reinforcing loop—a doom loop that's dividing people. We need to find ways to rekindle and amplify the excitement, fun, challenge, and joy—for our well-being and the well-being of others. We need to lift people without being so serious.

Whoever has the power and influence to create bastions of challenging fun where teams can experience how rewarding it can be to make stuff and have an impact together—I think that's what we need now. It is also what will jumpstart teams and kickstart hiring because teams having fun will be much more impactful, and real teams will be less divisive.

Productivity? Efficiency?

I’ll take “Having fun building stuff that has impact” any day.

One of my greatest pleasures at work is trying to find that point where everything feels just right. Nothing more, nothing less, but right there in the pocket.

It's almost fractal. It's there in every component, in every feature, in every flow, in every sequence, in every product, in every decision, inside everything across the company.

How do you know when it's just right? It's the same feeling you get when you try to balance something physical.

You know it. You put something on something else and try to find that center of gravity... A bit to the right, oops too much. Lean back to the left... Steady... Steady... Ugh, too much push. Stack it up again, find that center... Wobble, bobble, almost... And then it locks in. Da! There it is.

All the sudden the pushing and pulling forces disappear and it's just there, on its own. Still, in harmony and equanimity. That's what just right feels like.

Just as most jobs are harder than people think, most things in life are nowhere near as generic as people think. I feel it a lot at work. Why would we build “another” data management system when Excel and Airtable exist? Why would someone write “another” novel when so many have been written? We keep making stuff because we want to contextualize and internalize what’s happened. If AI changes everything, then we’ll end up making more stuff as humans in order to figure out what AI means. Rich likes to say “software is an op-ed” and I think that’s right—we make stuff because we have opinions and we want to share them. So: News of your obsolescence is greatly exaggerated. Keep doing that last 20%. We need it!