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Comment by Glench | Hacker News Reader

For more context, Cal Newport discusses this article a little bit on his blog: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/11/17/when-did-producti...

> My latest article for The New Yorker, published on Tuesday, is titled “The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” It’s not, however, really about David Allen’s productivity system, which longtime readers (and listeners) know I really admire. It’s instead about a deeper question that I hadn’t heard discussed much before: Why do we leave office workers to figure out on their own how to get things done?

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When I was a manager and onboarding a lot of graduates this was something I noticed. We would have explicit training on how git worked or how the build system worked or how the messaging system worked.

But there was never any explicit training on things like "you need to accept or reject meeting invites" or "this is how to correctly use Slack/wiki/email ... And all three are different."

I think a lot of it goes back to the current trend of companies not investing in employees and expecting someone else to have done that for them.

> expecting someone else to have done that for them.

And then... when someone else did do that investment - as in, you come in to an org with actual real experience - you somehow are "doing it wrong" or "don't get our culture" or whatever the pushback may be.

Well, can't have it both ways…

The problem stems from not having it either way.

There's a lot of soft-ish or meta skills that don't get taught, mainly because most orgs don't place much value on them (as you have noticed), but also because it's not a well-studied field. I'm different enough from those I work with at the day job that I don't feel a one size fits all approach will work for everyone. I don't want to be a square peg shoved into a round hole.

I do take a very eclectic approach to productivity systems, and tend to pick what works for me while leaving behind anything I consider fluff. I've built almost, but not quite, TDD teams this way (organically from the ground up), and it helps us stay lean and agile.

> Why do we leave office workers to figure out on their own how to get things done?

Maybe I'm dense, or oversimplifying, but the answer seems obvious to me: because there's no one size fits all solution. Sure, people can be lost and confused, but being told there is one and only one way to things feels like a straitjacket to me. It's the same reason I despise the term "best practice" as if some arbiter of "best" determined that every other way of doing something sucks.

I'm very much of the eclectic school. I don't follow GTD strictly, but I pulled what I found useful from it and went from there. Honestly, it's been so long since I reviewed the method, it's probably time to go back and review it again. You can't just rest on your laurels; as another good (but often overpraised) productivity book put it, you need to sharpen the saw every once and a while, and this includes always questioning "best" practice.

There are many ways to write software but there some ways that are objectively bad and some ways that are objectively better, if not perfect or even good. Guidelines and trade-off discussions on these are taught in schools/colleges/universities.

The same type of guidelines and trade-off discussions could be taught in e.g. high school. I'm pretty sure just getting people to reflect on this stuff would bring huge improvements.

> The same type of guidelines and trade-off discussions could be taught in e.g. high school. I'm pretty sure just getting people to reflect on this stuff would bring huge improvements.

On this I agree. And even just putting out a single, simple, effective method, while mentioning there are other ways would be fine. Those that are curious should be able to ask after lecture as to what those ways are.

I do resent I was never formally taught any sort of study skills in high school, and I feel this falls under that same banner. But I still stand by my assertion that people shouldn't be punished for deviating from a "one true way", unless those deviations are objectively harmful.

> Why do we leave office workers to figure out on their own how to get things done?

Because we respect their self-sovereignty? The solution isn't more management as he proposes but for the worker to speak up and say what it is they need from others.

Just tell your co-workers that this is how your mind works best and not to disturb if these conditions are in place. Or that they shouldn't expect to be answered immediately if these times, this activity, etc.

I don't think that's the case and, as is often true with sweeping claims, it doesn't really stand up to a global survey.

Do societies that have less respect for self-sovereignty do a better job of getting office workers figure these things out?

No, definitely not. I live in an authoritarian country in Asia and I can assure you that isn't the case. So your claim seems to founder immediately when put to the test and there is almost certainly another explanation at work.

You're agreeing with me. If societies with less respect for the self-sovereignty of their knowledge workers can't improve their productivity the solution indeed isn't more management and never was.

My interpretation of GPs point is that even in cultures with less respect for self-sovereignty that have more management in general this particular brand of management is not happening and that is why the problems are the same in both settings.

I doubt it respects self-sovereignty anymore than holocracy managed to. Instead expectations are implicit and participants learn about them or fail. Going against the grain in that sort of environment will be seen negatively.

I believe the technical term is 'alienation' ?

Agree. Always seems odd that organizations say they want people to be productive and then pepper them with email, messages, and meetings. Some of the better teams I've been on developed unwritten rules about when/how to communicate and the importance of time for deep work, but all to often it was just a free for all of chat pings. I think when people talk about culture this is a large part of it - how do you keep people working effectively together without swamping communication bandwidth?

bit of a clickbait title then, bc he knew that would trigger the GTD fans

So what is the takeaway? The insight that mankind can be divided into leaders and those who want to be led? And that leaders have to take over (again) this role of leading?

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