The Hagakure #79: Do Fewer Things

I just read Cal Newport’s new book, Slow Productivity.

If you haven’t read his other books, it’s a pretty good read. If, like me, you have read Deep Work and A World Without Email, this one will probably feel like more of the same.

Nevertheless, one of the things he argues is that in knowledge work doing less does not mean achieving less. In fact, it’s most often the opposite. Such an assumption is, however, still prevalent and deeply ingrained in how work happens, in most places, to this day.

Part of the reason is that productivity is extremely hard to define and measure in knowledge work¹. In such situations, we often end up resorting to poor proxy metrics simply because they are easy to measure (# of lines of code, anyone?). In this case, as Newport points out, using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity was the simple alternative that emerged.

Hence the “cult of busyness.”

Photo by Anna Dziubinska on Unsplash

As a counter approach, Newport sought inspiration in things like the “slow food movement” and coined the term “slow productivity” which he defines as:

A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:

1. Do fewer things.

2. Work at a natural pace.

3. Obsess over quality.

A more extensive review of the insights I found in the book will have to wait for another post. But the first principle there again caught my attention as it’s something I think a lot about: do fewer things.

It occured to me that this type of “common sense advice” is given at all levels: individual, team, and organization.

At the individual level is where Slow Productivity provides a number of practices. These include limiting missions (top-level personal goals), limiting projects that advance missions, and limiting daily goals that advance those projects. All in service of allowing one to concentrate on what’s most valuable and impactful.

At the team level, many teams struggle with delivery in part because they start a lot of work and finish little. The malaise is a lot of stress, and few accomplishments. Reducing work-in-progress is the prescription needed, unintuitive as it may feel.

And at the company level, the same phenomenon happens—but worse, and harder to trace and measure. It is a well known piece of Apple lore that when Steve Jobs went back as CEO in 1997, the company was almost bankrupt in large part due to its sprawling product lineup. Jobs made the executive decision to slash it to only 4 products: one laptop and one desktop each for consumer and business.

The rest is history.

Yet, for all the sense doing fewer things makes, why is it so rarely true in practice?

A few reasons come to mind:

1. It’s difficult to say no.

2. It’s difficult to define value.²

3. It’s difficult to predict what’s going to be valuable.

4. It’s difficult to avoid FOMO — the fear of missing out.

5. It’s difficult to be accountable for hard decisions cutting things.

That’s a lot of stuff conspiring to make us do the wrong thing. There may be more.

I believe at the root of these are two tacit and unexamined beliefs.

One is that we can get away with doing many things at once. We cannot. When the costs are hidden, overlooking them is easy. Even if it’s a “friction tax” you keep paying.³ When things go south something (or someone) else is blamed—often people judged as “not working hard enough” or being “too junior”. Sad.

The other is that the manager’s main job is to control and coerce. It’s not. It’s to create the conditions for great work to be done. If you don’t buy in to this idea, it’s unlikely you’ll take steps to consciously and intentionally make explicit how work happens, where bottlenecks form, and how much waste there really is—let alone do something about it.

One last bit.

A grizzled industry veteran I recently met told me that when in a job interview “you talk about learning, they hear slow down.” I can imagine.

What I can also imagine is that if you learn little or nothing from what you ship, it’s no wonder that working on few things is scary. After all, how will you refine your sense of what works and what doesn’t?

So, spray and pray it is.

1. Something management thinker Peter Drucker had already pointed out back in 1999.

2. Donald Reinertsen devoted the entire Chapter 2 of his canonical book The Principles of Product Development Flow to this topic. I suspect significantly less than 1% of people in tech companies read this book.

3. I go into more detail on this secret hiding in plain sight here.