4 ways to throttle your shallow work commitments
Summary
Our time is a zero-sum game. We don’t want shallow work commitments to steal our deep work time. Shallow work is unavoidable, but we can control it. In this article I explain four ways to do so.
Slowing things down by writing things up.
Investing in documentation and metawork.
Creating admin blocks for similar kinds of shallow work.
Instituting office hours, especially for soloists on our teams.
Cal Newport defines shallow work as a collection of routine activities that accompany our work. Imagine activities like checking and responding to emails, being on IM, and basic coordination and administrative work. Most of us want to do more deep work than shallow work. But I have to admit that it’s easier said than done.
Our colleagues and our company want us to respond to emails and messages on time. If we don’t complete the coordination and admin tasks, our work will often come to a standstill. There’s no escaping shallow work - it’s a fact of life for the average knowledge worker. So instead of avoiding it, I suggest throttling it and bringing it under control. I have four ideas that work for me.
1. Slow down the flow of shallow work
Avoidable meetings are amongst the biggest shallow work time-hogs. Well-intentioned colleagues often reach for meetings as a default method to communicate. You should introduce those colleagues to this site and my book; but before they change their work patterns, you can slow things down.
When people ask for a quick sync, request them to start async. There are a few non-confrontational ways to do this.
Many people set up meetings without an agenda. If they do so, you can say, “I’m trying to figure out if I can add any value to this discussion. If you don’t mind, can you list the agenda items you want to cover in the meeting? That’ll help me in a big way.” Often, I’ve noticed that when people write out an agenda, I can suggest asynchronous alternatives that save everyone time. I can avoid the meeting or at least shorten it. Even if we keep the meeting, it may become clear that to achieve our desired outcome, we must first do some asynchronous preparation. That’s a win too!
Replace quick syncs with async
Follow a similar approach when people set up ad hoc one-on-one or small group meetings.
When you see a meeting that could have been an email, ask; “Thanks for including me! I’m wondering if we could try to solve this over email instead?”
If you notice an avoidable meeting, take the blame on yourself. You could say, “I’ve been in so many meetings lately, so I’m trying to maintain a clean calendar. How about we write up the problem in Google Docs and go from there?”
There’s something magical about writing. When people write up their problem, the act of articulating it for someone else can often highlight the solution to them. Even if they can’t find the solution themselves, they may realise that it doesn’t need a meeting. They also get the added benefit of documentation. If you’re able to solve a problem in a collaborative document, you can share that same document with the rest of your colleagues; so they are up to speed. Write once, share many times!
2. Invest in metawork
Metawork is all the work you do, to make your actual work happen. I’ve written about this in the past as well. Investing in metawork can help you throttle your shallow work considerably. Let me explain through a couple of stories.
Back in the day, my employers used to run a workshop on consulting skills. As part of the prep for the workshop, attendees had to interview experienced consultants to learn about their work experience. As a tenured employee, I too was on the list of interviewees. After doing a few interviews, I realised that the questions in each discussion were similar. So when I got the next invite for an interview, I asked the interviewers about the questions they were asking for responses to. Turned out, they’d received an entire list of questions from the workshop facilitators. I set aside an hour and wrote answers to all the questions in a document. After that, each time I got a similar interview invite, I responded with the link to the document. Sometimes people had follow-up questions. I asked them to throw them into the document through comments and addressed them in a reasonable amount of time. The one hour I invested in writing up the initial document saved me dozens of hours in future months.
Respond with a link - write once, share many times
I’ve applied this investment mindset to many topics that people consider me an expert in. For example, in my company, we conduct workshops called inceptions to start most of our projects. With experience, I became half-decent at it, to where each time someone had to go on an inception, they wanted to “pick my brains” about it. I realised I couldn’t possibly support every inception that was happening in the company, so I created a toolkit that people could use in place of chatting with me. I responded with a link and nine out of ten times, people had no further need to pick my brains!
Documenting what I know frees up my time to find a new challenge
If you’re good at something, you probably want to move to a fresh challenge. If so, consider documenting your expertise. That documentation may seem daunting but the reward is in the time you free up in the weeks, months and years that follow.
3. Create admin blocks on your calendar
Meetings aren’t our only shallow work commitments. We also have coordination and administrative work to do, which includes but isn’t just email and IM. The mistake many of us make is to spread out these tasks, all over our day. It’s unsurprising that in my research I’ve found people face 18 interruptions to deep work, each day.
If you’ve agreed on your channels and response times within the team, you’ve probably arrived at the sensible conclusion that email and IM are not “urgent” mediums of communication. And if so, you needn’t address such messages as soon as you get them. You can batch them and address them at a specific time each day. I usually have three slots in my day, when I look at such transactional messages.
0900-0930
1300-1330
1700-1730
I rarely use all the time available in these slots, but outside of these slots, the Freedom app blocks my access to email and IM. That creates a natural throttle for these sources of interruption.
For other administrative tasks, create admin blocks on your calendar. This goes hand-in-glove with the time-blocking and multi-scale planning approach that I’ve described earlier on this website. Just like you block focus time for deep work, block admin time for similar kinds of shallow work. You’ll notice that when you watch similar types of tasks, you’ll get through them faster than otherwise. By relegating them to a predetermined part of your day or week, you’ll also reduce your anxiety about any of this pending work. You won’t forget about it, because it’s on your schedule. You’ll also finish the work on time because you’ve chucked it into an appropriate calendar slot.
Use admin blocks to batch similar kinds of shallow work
4. Institute “office” hours for your soloists
On several software development teams, only one person plays a certain role. Such roles typically include test engineers, product managers, designers and sometimes infrastructure and DevOps engineers. Since they are the only people in their roles, they spend a lot of time helping their teammates and answering their questions. This reduces the time these soloists have to do their deep work. You could shrug it off as the cost of teamwork and collaboration, but walk a mile in the shoes of people in such roles, and you’ll know where the shoes pinch. Everyone deserves some time to themselves for deep work and no one should pay a disproportionate share of the collaboration tax.
“Office hours” are a great way to help the soloists in the team protect their deep work capacity. The idea is simple. Institute a recurring time when a particular soloist is always available to help anyone who needs their time. They’ll be in their “office”. E.g. from 1500 to 1630 IST, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, the product manager is available to answer questions or problem-solve with anyone who needs their time.
Remote work makes it easy to simulate such an “office”. You can create a recurring Zoom meeting with a waiting room. When someone joins the meeting, they go to the waiting room. They can finish some low-intensity work while they wait their turn. When the soloist is ready, they can admit the next person into the Zoom meeting. If the soloist knows the discussion topics in advance, they can use this information to sequence the people they engage with.
I understand if the idea of office hours seems bureaucratic at first blush. But the alternative is to interrupt the soloists with ad hoc requests throughout the week. And that’s a worse option for sure. The practice of office hours doesn't just help the soloists batch their shallow work commitments, it also helps everyone else think through their requests carefully. Sometimes they’ll find asynchronous alternatives to the real-time discussion. And that’s a win too!
So those are my four tricks to keep shallow work in check - slow things down, invest in metawork, create admin blocks and institute office hours for soloists in your team. 2023 is ending soon and many teams will pause and reflect about how they work, as we get close to the holiday season. I encourage you to consider these ideas along with the many other ideas I’ve shared on this site, to upgrade the way you collaborate. When you make a fresh start in 2024, I expect many of the ideas to come in handy.
Speaking of upgrading the way you collaborate, I recently did a talk about team collaboration. Since I never want to repeat a talk I’ve already done, I’ve recorded it for posterity’s sake. It’s a smidge under 13 minutes; so if you have some time, I encourage you to watch it.
Oh! And in other news, InfoQ published my guide to adopting asynchronous collaboration with your team. It’s a long-form article and will take about 15 minutes to read. I’m sure you’ll find it useful though; so grab your favourite beverage and read on!