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Decreasing focus over time may not mean decreasing productivity:
Suppose you want to double your productivity by doubling your work hours from 30 to 60 per week. Standard advice will say this is silly, since focus decreases over time. You may still increase your productivity but it will scale slower than your work hours.
But this assumes all assigned work is equally important. In reality, many jobs have peripheral tasks that must be done before your core tasks (or your "real work"). Civil servants have reporting requirements, academic researchers have teaching obligations, and individual contributors everywhere have to attend meetings so managers can coordinate direction.
Suppose the non-core tasks takes 20 hours per week. Then going from a 30-hour to 60-hour workweek isn't just doubling your core task hours; it's quadrupling your core task hours from 10 to 40! And that quadrupling of core task hours can outweigh the diminishing focus over time. It can even mean that the last 20 hours are more productive than the first 20 hours.
Now 20 hours of peripheral tasks is admittedly an extreme example. But it may not be that far off for modeling career advancement. Promotions are based partly on stretch assignments (or "performing above your level") and you won't get to work on stretch assignments all the time. Managers may split your time between your current job and the job you want to promote into.
Once you get to a certain level of seniority and organizational maturity, then more of your hours become core task hours. So diminishing focus more directly translates into diminishing productivity. But I think the earlier you are in your career, the more exploration you're doing, and the further you are from your target job, the more likely you'll want those extra hours.
At face value, what you've written makes sense. It depends massively on the structure of the job of course. But if you have a flat amount of non-core tasks and a much larger number of core tasks, then... yeah, you are right.
I think that one of the challenges is that many of the non-core tasks require a lot of context, so you can't just outsource them or hire an administrative assistant to handle them. They tend to be tightly tied to other tasks, or at least to your thinking and knowledge (such as a civil servant that has to write a report on what work she has accomplished this week). And I imagine there are some scenarios where it would be feasible to outsource the task but organizational rules and culture don't allow it (such as a academic researcher delegating all teaching responsibilities to someone else). And if I need to communicate information verbally to several people, could they all send their assistants to attend the meeting instead of coming themselves? I suppose they could, but that means that when we make a decision the assistant needs to be empowered with decision-making authority, and the assistant's judgement and context might be inferior to the manager's.
My reaction to this line of thinking is basically that there are lots of challenges and impracticalities and aspects of various situations that make it not very feasible. But for situations that don't have much of those barriers: yeah, you are right. 👍
Strong agree. By no means am I suggesting organizations outsource or cancel more of their non-core work. It’s hard for organizations to define those, non-core work needs a lot of context, and a lot of grunt work is genuinely “real work” that people don’t appreciate.
But from an individual POV, I wanted to make sense of the feeling that extra hours could sometimes be increasing in value even when I was very tired. And I think it’s this dynamic with some tasks or career goals where the last N% is where most of the rewards are. So spending more time once you get there is a big deal.
I believe Claudia Goldin calls these “greedy jobs”.
Project-based learning seems to be a underappreciated bottleneck for building career capital in public policy and non-profits. By projects, I mean subjective problems like writing policy briefs, delivering research insights, lobbying for political change, or running community events. These have subtle domain-specific tradeoffs without a clean answer. (See the Project Work section in On-Ramps Into Biosecurity)
Thus the lessons can't be easily generalized or made legible the way a math problem can be. With projects, even the very first step of identifying a good problem is tough. Without access to a formal network, you can spend weeks on a dead end only realizing your mistakes months or years after the fact.
This constraint seems well-known for professionals in the network, as organizers for research fellowships like SERI Mats describe their program as valuable, highly in-demand, yet constrained in how many people they can train.
I think operations best shows the surprising importance of domain-specific knowledge. The skill set looks similar across fields. So that would imply some exchange-ability between private sector and social sector. But in practice, organizations want you to know their specific mission very well and they're willing (correctly or incorrectly) to hire a young Research Assistant over, say, someone with 10 years of experience in a Fortune 500 company. That domain knowledge helps you internalize the organization's trade-offs and prioritize without using too much senior management time.
Emphasizing this supervised project-based learning mechanism of getting domain-specific career capital would clarify a few points.
With school, it would
emphasize that textbook-knowledge is both necessary yet insufficient for contributing to social sector work
show the benefits of STEM electives and liberal arts fields, where the material is easier from a technical standpoint but you work on open-ended problems
illustrate how research-based Master degrees in Europe tend to be better training than purely coursework-based ones in the US (IMHO, true in Economics)
With young professionals, it would
highlight the "Hollywood big break" element of getting a social sector job, where it's easier to develop your career capital after you get your target job and get feedback on what to work on (and probably not as important before that)
formalize the intuition some people have about "assistant roles in effective organizations" being very valuable even though you're not developing many hard skills
With discussions on elitism and privilege, it would
give a reason for the two-tier system many social sectors seem to have, where the stable jobs require years of low-paid experience and financially unstable training opportunities require significant sacrifice to even access
Decreasing focus over time may not mean decreasing productivity:
Suppose you want to double your productivity by doubling your work hours from 30 to 60 per week. Standard advice will say this is silly, since focus decreases over time. You may still increase your productivity but it will scale slower than your work hours.
But this assumes all assigned work is equally important. In reality, many jobs have peripheral tasks that must be done before your core tasks (or your "real work"). Civil servants have reporting requirements, academic researchers have teaching obligations, and individual contributors everywhere have to attend meetings so managers can coordinate direction.
Suppose the non-core tasks takes 20 hours per week. Then going from a 30-hour to 60-hour workweek isn't just doubling your core task hours; it's quadrupling your core task hours from 10 to 40! And that quadrupling of core task hours can outweigh the diminishing focus over time. It can even mean that the last 20 hours are more productive than the first 20 hours.
Now 20 hours of peripheral tasks is admittedly an extreme example. But it may not be that far off for modeling career advancement. Promotions are based partly on stretch assignments (or "performing above your level") and you won't get to work on stretch assignments all the time. Managers may split your time between your current job and the job you want to promote into.
Once you get to a certain level of seniority and organizational maturity, then more of your hours become core task hours. So diminishing focus more directly translates into diminishing productivity. But I think the earlier you are in your career, the more exploration you're doing, and the further you are from your target job, the more likely you'll want those extra hours.
At face value, what you've written makes sense. It depends massively on the structure of the job of course. But if you have a flat amount of non-core tasks and a much larger number of core tasks, then... yeah, you are right.
I think that one of the challenges is that many of the non-core tasks require a lot of context, so you can't just outsource them or hire an administrative assistant to handle them. They tend to be tightly tied to other tasks, or at least to your thinking and knowledge (such as a civil servant that has to write a report on what work she has accomplished this week). And I imagine there are some scenarios where it would be feasible to outsource the task but organizational rules and culture don't allow it (such as a academic researcher delegating all teaching responsibilities to someone else). And if I need to communicate information verbally to several people, could they all send their assistants to attend the meeting instead of coming themselves? I suppose they could, but that means that when we make a decision the assistant needs to be empowered with decision-making authority, and the assistant's judgement and context might be inferior to the manager's.
My reaction to this line of thinking is basically that there are lots of challenges and impracticalities and aspects of various situations that make it not very feasible. But for situations that don't have much of those barriers: yeah, you are right. 👍
Strong agree. By no means am I suggesting organizations outsource or cancel more of their non-core work. It’s hard for organizations to define those, non-core work needs a lot of context, and a lot of grunt work is genuinely “real work” that people don’t appreciate.
But from an individual POV, I wanted to make sense of the feeling that extra hours could sometimes be increasing in value even when I was very tired. And I think it’s this dynamic with some tasks or career goals where the last N% is where most of the rewards are. So spending more time once you get there is a big deal.
I believe Claudia Goldin calls these “greedy jobs”.
Project-based learning seems to be a underappreciated bottleneck for building career capital in public policy and non-profits. By projects, I mean subjective problems like writing policy briefs, delivering research insights, lobbying for political change, or running community events. These have subtle domain-specific tradeoffs without a clean answer. (See the Project Work section in On-Ramps Into Biosecurity)
Thus the lessons can't be easily generalized or made legible the way a math problem can be. With projects, even the very first step of identifying a good problem is tough. Without access to a formal network, you can spend weeks on a dead end only realizing your mistakes months or years after the fact.
This constraint seems well-known for professionals in the network, as organizers for research fellowships like SERI Mats describe their program as valuable, highly in-demand, yet constrained in how many people they can train.
I think operations best shows the surprising importance of domain-specific knowledge. The skill set looks similar across fields. So that would imply some exchange-ability between private sector and social sector. But in practice, organizations want you to know their specific mission very well and they're willing (correctly or incorrectly) to hire a young Research Assistant over, say, someone with 10 years of experience in a Fortune 500 company. That domain knowledge helps you internalize the organization's trade-offs and prioritize without using too much senior management time.
Emphasizing this supervised project-based learning mechanism of getting domain-specific career capital would clarify a few points.