
Knowledge workers are bad at working – and what to do about it - michaelochurch
http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/11/21/knowledge-workers-are-bad-at-working-and-heres-what-to-do-about-it/
======
charlieflowers
As a programmer, one of the most effective forms of deliberate practice I've
ever experienced is to write a complicated piece of software, and then
_completely re-write it from scratch with a different approach (and then do it
again)_.

Of course, that almost never flies in the business world. They'll ask you why
on Earth the company should pay to build something _again_ before they make
money from it. However, it truly is a powerful engineering process for many
types of problems.

The point is not to merely rebuild it for arbitrary reasons. Rather, to take
stock of the benefits and the pain that arises from the current design, and to
try completely different approaches. You do it because there's a nagging voice
in the back of your head that tells you that you've left some "goodness" on
the table ... that even though your current implementation "works", the
problem could be solved better.

You've already "loaded the problem into your head," because you've solved it
once. The second solution will improve in some ways and possibly regress in
some ways. Often, the 3rd or 4th solution will be "right" -- which means, not
perfect, but significantly better than your earlier approaches.

It seems kind of like learning the card game of Bridge by playing the same
hand over and over to see if you can get it better. Or learning chess by
starting from the same canned starting position and seeing if you can play it
to completion better.

~~~
groby_b
That's actually a fairly well-known thing. Look for "Second System Effect"
(See "Mythical Man Month").

Basically, v1 sort of gets the features working, but has lots of work-arounds.
v2 is trying to solve all the issues you got wrong in v1, and wants to be the
most beautifully architected solution.

As a result, it's almost always completely over-engineered and in danger of
collapsing under its own feature weight.

v3 is the one that gets it right.

~~~
charlieflowers
I have heard of that (and also, unfortunately, experienced it), but that is
not what I was talking about.

The second-system effect is a product of naiveté. I've made that mistake more
than once, but I believe I know better than it now.

But this practice of rebuilding from scratch I'm describing is not that. It is
more a matter of practicing craftsmanship.

It's like a sculptor who sculpts a wolf, sees its good and bad, then gets the
exact same size block of wood and sculpts it again -- but differently. And
again. Not out of naiveté, but out of a patient determination to get better.

~~~
SatvikBeri
I used to do the exact same thing in Math classes. Iterate on proofs, until I
got the perfect one. It vastly enhanced my understanding _and_ gave me these
really pretty proofs to look at!

In one class where I was especially obsessed, my (rather famous in the field)
professor told me I understood the subject better than he did. That was pretty
awesome.

~~~
charlieflowers
That is what I am talking about. Thank you for supplying another example that
helps articulate it.

------
plinkplonk
Some context: Here Cal Newport is extending some of the ideas presented in his
latest book "So Good They Can't Ignore You".

In the book he says (among other things) that _how_ you become 'so good
that...' etc is by what he calls 'deliberate practice' - which in turn has two
components -

(1) 'deep work', the doing of which actively stretches you while you are doing
it (in term of guitar playing, this would be acquiring new rhythmic abilities,
vs just playing/performing songs you already know). The 'practice' in
deliberate practice should maximise 'deep work' (as per Newport)

(2) fast feedback loops - either by other (and ideally better than you)
people, or built in (if you play a note wrong, you know instantly)

This blog entry and its neighbors seem to explore how he applies this
philosophy to his chosen activity (research in CS). It is not entirely clear
how to apply it to programming.

------
radarsat1
> _In order to achieve consistent deep work, I usually need to first immerse
> myself in the relevant research literature, seeking a problem that it is
> recognized as important, unanswered, but probably answerable with my skill
> set. This is not easy._

I want to run out and repeat this to every PhD student I've met in the last 2
years.

------
languagehacker
The claim that knowledge workers spend all day answering email and do nothing
to focus on self-improvement is just plain bullshit. The fact that we're
presently using a website that essentially serves as a crowdsourced, real-time
trade journal counters that argument. The existence and wild success of
engineering-focused conferences counters that argument. The proliferation of
easy-to-access information for professional growth allows for a self-selecting
group of people to improve their lot in life just by picking up some new
skills and getting some experience with them. You can learn a new skill
literally by browsing the Internet these days. As such, I don't really view
the knowledge worker as a person at risk of stagnation without actually making
an effort to be lazy.

There are some people who feel that they already know everything they need to
know, and don't want to better themselves. It is entirely attitudinal, and in
no way unique to the "knowledge worker" classification. I would argue the
problem is far more significant in other industries, such as manufacturing and
other heavy industry. When a specific kind of job replaced by a machine, or an
entire industry gets outsourced to another country, the individuals previously
responsible for that kind of work are likely not to have been trained for any
other function. That would probably be a better audience for this kind of
thing, compared to people who spend their free time reading about new
technologies and playing with them on the weekends for fun.

~~~
Afton
> You can learn a new skill literally by browsing the Internet these days

Nope, you can learn _of_ a new skill by browsing. And that's quintessentially
shallow work.

I'd also point out that HN ( like the original reddit) was full of "hard"
articles, that would take me hours to really understand and work through.
While this kind of article still pops up occasionally here, its more common to
just see easily digested blog posts now. I assume this is a normal consequence
of HN's increased readership and regression to the mean.

The problem that this blog post addresses may be more generally applicable
than the author thinks, but the existence of HN is hardly a counterexample.

------
pacaro
On a related note, there is a very real risk in larger, more bureaucratic,
organizations that it becomes easier to be recognized for shallow work than
for deep work, managers like metrics and the shallow work is typically very
much easier to quantify - leading to the Dilbert "I'm gonna right me a new
mini-van" scenario - or whatever the social media equivalent is.

~~~
marshray
I get the sense that a lot of organizations go out of their way to make sure
individuals are recognized for shallow work, because we know by experience
it's less self-fulfilling for most of us (if not outright boring).

I still proudly keep the multimeter I won for "Tech of the Month" (I was the
tech who accounted for the highest percentage of time in the time tracking
system that month.)

------
adriano_f
I like the idea of making sure your tasks have a certain amount of "stretch"
(i.e. push yourself a little with every task you give yourself).

We focus so much on our skill level that we forget that the "flow" state
requires challenging yourself:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Conditions_f...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_\(psychology\)#Conditions_for_flow)

------
Yhippa
I agree with the OP. My day job is somewhat interesting but I have a feeling
once I've figured out how it works that I'll be back in the same boat of doing
less of my craft and more process. I am very lucky that in software
engineering the body of knowledge is wide and always changing and that I
genuinely like it.

At night I've become more accustomed to reading tech books on the newest
technology instead of whatever book for book club. Our profession almost
forces us to keep up or get left behind. I love it. Always gets me motivated
to think and expand my knowledge.

------
shaydoc
This is a great article, I can totally relate. I have been doing work that had
not involved deep work for maybe a year, I kinda had plateaued my learning as
a result of an unchallenging and demotivating work environment, I realised
this is not what 'I' wanted to do, so I got out. I have hacker news to thank
for this partly too.

4 months later I feel like a kid again my mind is like a sponge for knowledge,
and because I have cleared my desk of non beneficial work, and as a result I
have been learning at a fantastic rate.

Things I have been spending my team on include, functional programming
techniques, JavaScript client architecture, pure REST api design, algorithms,
visualisations in the browser (d3), geojson, node, mongo, redis, to name but a
few

------
alecdibble
I think this article is a great summary on how to improve your skills as a
knowledge worker. I see people that believe their mental capabilities will
never improve. It really comes down to step #3: the stretch. Many people skip
over "the stretch" in all areas of life and reach "steady state" relatively
early on.

------
ghc
Please spare us this trite bullshit. I see people trying to justify their
inability to improve themselves all the time. "If I'm having trouble, everyone
else must be too!", they think, instead of considering the obvious: maybe they
just suck.

There will _always_ be time-wasters and people who get off on bureaucracy. But
I'm willing to bet many of us, especially here on HN, routinely get admonished
for "forgetting" to do menial, time wasting tasks in favor of doing what we
love. If you're wasting your time instead of taking every opportunity to learn
you'll get no sympathy from me.

~~~
michaelochurch
_Please spare us this trite bullshit._

I posted it not because I agree with his assertion (I'm not sure I buy
everything he's saying) but because I thought it would spark interesting
discussion. Since "knowledge worker" is roughly synonymous with "white-collar
office worker" (not necessarily programmer) I am inclined to agree with him.

 _I'm willing to bet many of us, especially here on HN, routinely get
admonished for "forgetting" to do menial, time wasting tasks in favor of doing
what we love._

Sure, we do. Most programmers and especially most white-collar workers don't.
They waste their time instead because it's the more _comfortable_ way of
dealing with management, which means they never improve and we have to clean
up their messes and deal with their shitty code. It becomes everyone's
problem.

~~~
ghc
I did not mean to direct that at you, but at the author. I agree that there
are some interesting points in the article, but the pervading attitude in this
article and others on the site is that you can use these methods as a
substitute for real passion about what you do. I submit that going through
such motions mechanically won't be easy because, after all, it's still "work."
If you'd rather be doing email or browsing reddit, a disciplined method of
self-study isn't going to help. Only if you're already passionate about what
you do will you be able to consistently engage in the "deep thinking" the
author talks about.

~~~
michaelochurch
One thing OP discusses in his self-help literature (which I haven't read, but
I've heard it's pretty legit) is that rather than trying to rearrange their
lives around finding some "passion", people should try to bring passion to
their work. It's a counterbalance against the "do what you love and the money
will follow" bullshit that has wrecked thousands, if not millions, of lives.

There's some sense in this. For example, when I was a teenager, I thought
being a novelist or poet was what I wanted to do, and I had no idea that I'd
ever find things like "machine learning" and "functional programming"
interesting because I didn't even know what they were. I realized that the
market signals were probably right in steering me along the mathematical
direction, because (at least for this point in my life) I'm a better fit for
the high-end CS and mathematics than I would be for the literary world.

All that said, there are definite limits to that approach. He's right that
people need to be more flexible regarding what to be passionate about, but for
a lot of jobs, there just is no way to become passionate without also becoming
unemployable and insubordinate. What most self-help writers fail to grasp
fully is that most people face inflexible, life-wrecking constraints and
limitations that they're powerless to change.

~~~
SatvikBeri
_For a lot of jobs, there just is no way to become passionate without also
becoming unemployable and insubordinate._

FYI, Cal actually covers this in his book-he has a very specific framework for
figuring out if a career has a reasonable possibility of giving you the
autonomy, competence, and freedom you need down the line.

