I read the “The Dip” a number of years ago. I have a vague memory of reading it in Denver Airport so I think it might have been soon after it was first published in 2007. It created a lasting impression. I reread it again during the holiday period at the end of 2021.

Insight: most projects hit a low point. It could be a temporary setback (a dip), a cul-de-sac (the French phrase for a dead end), or a cliff. They can be represented graphically like this:

1. The dip is a point between starting and mastery. If something is worth doing it has a dip. The dip creates scarcity because not everyone will get through. This in turn creates value for those who make it through.
2. In a cul-de-sac, you can work hard but nothing much changes.
3. In a cliff, the project might seem like it’s going great but suddenly, everything falls apart.

Insight: Strategic quitting is the secret of success for people and organizations. Successes quit fast and commit to beating the right dip for the right reasons. Many people (and teams) quit reactively when a project becomes painful or they stick with a lost cause when they should quit.

Guideline: Godin says if you want to be a "superstar" find a steep dip and quit all the cul-de-sacs that you’re idling in. Persistent people (or organizations) see light when others can't. Smart people are realistic about not imagining a light that isn't there.

Guideline: at the start of a project decide stopping criteria so you can quit at an early stage before getting to the "dip". This can work because you’re still clear headed. At work, at the start of a project, we try to decide “acceptance criteria” so we know when we’re done. We could also define “stopping criteria” so we know if we’re in a dead end.

Guideline: continuously review active projects. The key is to determine if more hard work will lead towards long term goal or a dead end.

Guideline: if it’s a dip, lean in: push harder, change the rules, whittle away at the problems because they won't last as long. Reframe the difficult situation as a gift. Without the obstacle no learning would take place. The dip is the reason you're here. As Godin says:

"never quit something with great long term potential just because you can't deal with the stress of the moment"

Guideline: if it’s a cul-de-sac or a cliff, quit immediately. Godin calls these “the biggest obstacle to success in life”. Reframe quitting as freeing resources for the dips that matter. Quit as early as possible, ideally before you start. You have two choices for every project, quit or be exceptional.

Guideline: before quitting, ask yourself three questions:

• Am I panicking?
• Who am I trying to influence?
• What sort of measurable progress are we making? Be aware of delayed effects.

If you’re trying to influence an individual, it's easy to cross the line and become a pest. It's hard to change someone’s mind when they’ve made it. If you’re trying to influence a market, most of the people probably still haven't heard of you. Later when your product or service get’s better they'll influence each other.

Guideline: view quitting as a positive tool. Write down some positive statements about how would quit. For example, "quitting would enable me to rededicate my time..."

Random bonus insight: Godin says "Selling is about a transference of emotions, not a presentation of facts." The attitude of the sales person is transmitted to the prospect and changes the dynamic. If the seller is committed to selling because there’s a benefit to the prospect then that comes across.

Aside: it’s interesting to see how the examples in the book have aged. At the time Godin wrote the book, Netflix sent DVDs in the mail and the space shuttle was still active.

I have a feeling that Godin’s insights could be extended by connecting them with ideas like the rollercoaster curve of a startup company or cost-of-delay estimations for project value. I hope to return to this in future posts.

For now, thanks for reading…

If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

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Summary

When: you’re struggling with something (big or small), reimagining your temperament can help you overcome it.

How: speak to yourself like you would a friend and remind yourself that obstacles happen and mean you’re making progress. Avoid rumination and self-blame. Reimagine your temperament and identity using labels, teaching and secular rituals.

Why: our thinking style can make a big difference to how we overcome adversity.

Examples & Stories

Towards the end of 2020, I had a lot of late work meetings that often dragged on until midnight. Afterwards, it was hard to switch off and I found myself randomly channel-flicking on TV or thumbing my way through Twitter until the small hours. I’d also been trying (but failing) to get more sleep. At the time I was managing a team of over 50 people and they in turn were feeling the strain of a prolonged period of working-from-home. In the context of Covid-19, this was a relatively small issue compared to the situation other people find themselves in.

Somewhere in the mists of time I got the impression the brain was just another muscle that can get tired and willpower can run out. Eyal Nir had the same impression and after a long day’s work, used it to self-justify hours eating ice cream and watching Netflix. It turns out this is an assumption that has leaked into our mental models like carbon monoxide. This is at the core of what Indistractible is all about - believing a thought can actually make it true for us - and therefore thoughts and assumptions need scrutiny.

Eyal discovered the generally accepted theory of ego (willpower) depletion was subject to “publication bias”. Carol Dweck discovered cause and effect were mixed up and ego depletion only occurred in people who believed willpower is limited. The theory provides an excuse to quit when we should persist. New theories believe, willpower is more like an emotion that ebbs and flows. A lack of willpower is temporary.

Another example Eyal mentions is addiction, specifically nicotine, alcohol and meth addiction. Those who believe they have no control over their urges or addiction, are more likely to relapse when they try to quit. Mindset seems to matter as much as physical dependence.

In a later chapter (25: Prevent Distraction with Identity Pacts) Eyal suggests that if we can alter how we see ourselves, this can affect future actions. For example, in a scientific study on “priming”, subjects were asked if they were “voters” or if they were “planning to vote”. Those asked if they were “voters” were much more likely to vote because it was an “expression of self” rather than a behaviour.

Insight: our perception of who we are, changes what we do in both positive and negative ways.

A good friend has a relatively negative view of themselves. I don’t know what to say or how to advise them. I’m hoping what I can learn from my struggles, can help me help others with bigger obstacles.

When?

If you’re struggling with some issue and you find yourself starting to spiral. You might have a self-limiting belief, “I can’t do X”, “I’m useless”.

How?

Nir suggests:

We can change how we talk to ourselves to harness the power of self-compassion.

Notice and question negative self labels. If we notice these thought patterns, we can remember to cut ourselves some slack, treat ourselves with compassion.

Remind yourself that the current struggle is just an obstacle along the way and it’s natural to feel this way as you make progress. Eyal suggests we tell ourselves the following:

• “This is what it’s like to get better at something”
• “You’re on your way”

Imagine a friend in a similar situation. What advice would you offer to them? Take the advice yourself.

If you are feeling a lack of motivation or willpower, remind yourself it’s temporary.

Insight: we often assume our identity is fixed but in fact it can be shaped. We can change our identity by labelling, teaching or rituals.

In Eyal’s specific case he recommends labelling ourselves as “indistractable” rather than feeling powerless to distraction. He has gone so far as to make “indistractible” t-shirts. We can “become a noun”. This reminds me of the book which helped me stop smoking many years ago. I realise now that Alan Carr’s “Easy Way to Stop Smoking” refactored my identity into being a non-smoker.

Teaching others provides more motivation for the teacher to change their own behaviour especially if we admit to our own struggles. In my own experience, it was only when I started teaching agile development practices a few years ago that I really started to understand them properly. A year or two ago, I was invited to deliver a guest lecture in UCD and prepared over 100 lessons-learned from my 30+ years of experience as an engineer & manager. Maybe I’ll convert them into blog posts in the future (and learn by teaching).

Secular rituals can help us build personal discipline. Elsewhere in the book Eyal explains scheduling rituals to help us become Indistractible. I’ll probably summarize these in a future post.

Eyal also recites collected short mantras before he starts work every day because these help reinforce his identity. For example:

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook” - William James

I also gather quotes. Here’s a great one I found recently:

                    I may live on
              until I long for this time
                  as I remember now
              unhappy times in the past
                    with fondness
            — Fujiwara Ujiwara No Kiyosuke

Recently I found an app called Bright Notes that can deliver quotes/notes randomly during the day.

In summary, Eyal recommends:

“Rather than telling ourselves we failed because we’re somehow deficient, we should offer self compassion by speaking to ourselves with kindness when we experience setbacks.”

Why?

Eyal provides links to a number of academic papers and articles.

In short, people who can speak to themselves with self compassion are happier. Reducing self-blame and rumination can “almost completely mitigate” anxiety and depression.

To be honest I went down a bit of a rabbit hole reading the papers, articles and the others they referenced. Some seemed to contradict Eyal’s points and each other. I’ll return in future posts when I’ve had time to read, understand and summarize them.

The bigger picture

This is an example of a guideline that we use in this blog/publication. Guidelines are also known as:

• best-practices
• patterns
• principles
• tips
• hacks
• mental models
• directives

In future posts we’ll curate individual guidelines or glean collections of them from articles, books and other content. We’re planning posts on:

• Productivity
• Starting a business
• Managing cash flow in a growing business

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Thanks for reading! If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

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In post 1 and post 2 of this series, I outlined earlier sections of this book Deep Work by Cal Newport. In this post, I complete the series by outlining Newport’s Rules 2-4:

• Embrace Boredom
• Quit Social Media
• Drain the Shallows

As before, I have organized these insights, examples and guidelines within the framework and headings of the book. In a way, these are my detailed notes from the book.

Rule #2: Embrace Boredom

Example: Orthodox Jews spend time every weekday studying the religious texts such as the Talmud. Some read alone. Others discuss the text in pairs or bigger groups.

Insight: concentration is something that must be trained.

Insight: Clifford Nass a behavior and communications researcher, discovered attention switching has negative effects on the brain. People who multitask find it hard to filter irrelevance.

While Rule #1 (Work Deeply) helps one reach the peak of concentration, this rule helps extend that peak or limit.

Guideline: take breaks from focus rather than breaks from distraction. Taking a whole day, an Internet or technology “sabbath” won’t help. Schedule your breaks in advance and deep work until then. As I write this, my iPad is disconnected from the internet. I’ll take a short break in 19 minutes. I usually work in pomodoros, but that’s another story for another post.

Guideline: work intensely like Teddy Roosevelt. Identify a difficult but important task and give yourself less time to do it than you’d normally take. Set a countdown timer. I now have 15 minutes to my next break and I hope to have this section finished by then.

Insight: artificial deadlines are like interval training for the attention centers of your brain.

Guideline: meditate productively. Focus on a problem you’re trying to solve while doing something else physically (walking, driving, showering). When your attention wanders, gently bring it back to the problem you’re trying to solve. This requires practice.

Example: Daniel Kilov is a memory athlete. He wasn’t born with a strong memory but he worked on it and over time this training helped his general abilities.

Insight: memory researchers discovered the elite memorizers direct their attention. They don’t use rote memorization. They’ll use techniques like representing a card as a person then imagining that person in a place in their house.

Guideline: practice focusing your attention. Memorization, meditation, playing music and reading the Talmud are all examples of attention training.

I finished this section with 90 seconds to spare so I’m going to go back and check spelling before a 5 minute break when I’ll stretch my left achilles and make a cup of tea.

Rule #3: Quit Social Media

Right, I’m back for another 25 minutes.

Insight: electronic communication and social media, fragment our attention and erode our ability to concentrate. Social media is designed to keep our attention and get us to consume things.

Guideline: accept social media can be useful but set a threshold for using them.

Insight: throughout history, craft workers carefully selected the tools they worked with.

Guideline: use a structured process to identify the communication tools you’ll use.

• Identify your top level goals
• List 2-3 activities that help you achieve each goal
• Assess each network tool for it’s positive and negative impacts

Example: Newton mentions Twitter and the author Michael Lewis.

Guideline: assess whether the tool’s benefits outweigh it’s drag on your attention.

Insight: the “law of the vital few” (or Pareto principle), 80% of an effect is due to 20% of the possible causes.

Insight: social media services are products from private companies that have massive funding & revenues. They employ talented people who capture and sell your attention (and personal details) to advertisers.

Guideline: be deliberate in selecting your entertainment. Modern humans have access to so much good content. Don’t use social media or the auto suggestions of an algorithm to decide what to consume in the moment. Create lists of quality alternatives in advance.

Insight: Newton quotes Arnold Bennett discussing structured relaxation:

“the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.”

My 25-minute timer just went off. Time to take a break and check the news (I have notifications turned off).

Rule #4: Drain the Shallows

Insight: most knowledge work needs some amount of shallow work (checking email, meetings).

Insight: deep work is exhausting. It pushes you to the limit of your cognitive abilities. Researchers like Anders Ericsson (of deliberate practice fame) have estimated the upper limit to be four hours a day.

Guideline: schedule every minute of the day. Don’t spend the day on autopilot. I work in half hour blocks of time (pomodoros) and move things around as I work through the day (because no day runs perfectly to plan).

I just realized I forgot to restart my pomodoro timer after that “news break”.

Insight: on some days you’ll rewrite the schedule multiple times. The goal is not to stick to a rigid schedule but to be thoughtful and deliberate about what you’ll do with the time remaining.

Guideline: if you uncover a promising insight, rework the schedule.

Guideline: quantify the depth of each activity. This can be hard to do. Newton recommends asking yourself - how long would it take to train a recent college graduate to do this activity?

Guideline: ask your boss for a shallow work budget. For most knowledge workers this should be in the region of 30-50%. Below 30% you could become a hermit who thinks big thoughts but doesn’t communicate.

Insight: this limit frees up time for more important activities and stops shallow work from filling up your day. We tend to fall into shallow work moment by moment and not see the cumulative impact.

Guideline: don’t work after 5:30pm. Newton calls this fixed-schedule-productivity.

Guideline: beware of saying “yes”, the most dangerous word in the knowledge worker’s vocabulary. When saying no, be clear in your refusal but ambiguous for the reason. For example, “that sounds interesting but I can’t do that because of scheduling conflicts”.

Insight: fixed-schedule-productivity is a meta-habit that switches you into a scarcity mindset and attunes you to disruptive requests for shallow work. It makes the default answer “no”.

Guideline: become hard to reach. Email is impossible to avoid but anyone with your address can send a message that consumes more time than it took to write. Newton has some specific guidelines for those who want to be open to contact from the general public like a form or FAQ with checklists.

Guideline: do more work when you send or reply to emails. Newton calls this the process-centric approach to email. Identify the process (or project) the email relates to then the current and next steps. This can reduce the number of responses and time spent rereading the thread in future, saving time in the long run.

Guideline: don’t reply if:

• The email is ambiguous
• It’s not a question that interests you
• Nothing good/useful would happen if you responded and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

On the latter, Newton quotes Tim Ferris: “develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things, whether important tasks or true peak experiences.”

Personally it drives me crazy when I receive a long email and the key information or the important action I’m expected to take, is hidden in the second sentence of the third last paragraph. I have developed some standard replies like…

“Thank you for your detailed email. It’s not clear what action you expect me to take, so I’m assuming none is required. If some action is required, please reply to let me know.”

I’m a big believer in action-based communication but that’s yet another story for another day.

Insight: deep work can be intense and cause uneasiness. It’s easier to be artificially busy and swim in the shallows. As you get closer to producing your best work you can become nervous that your best is not yet good enough.

Insight: deep work can generate a life rich with productivity and meaning. Newton finishes the book with a quote from Winifred Gallagher, “I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.”

Postscript

In the time since reading the book I’ve been finding some of Newport’s rules or guidelines have made their way into my daily work. I’m using a work-shutdown ritual and scheduling the day with tasks from my GTD projects. In some cases I’ve modified guidelines I’ve been using for years. I schedule deep work for 2-3 hours every second day. I’ve started using the Pomodoro technique again because it seems to resonate with some of Newton’s ideas.

Thanks for reading!

If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

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Disclosure: some links in this post may use Amazon affiliate links.

Summary

In the previous post in this series, I summarised the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. In this post, I go into more detail, describing how deep work is valuable, rare and meaningful. Then we take a closer look at Newport’s Rule #1: Work Deeply.

As before, I have organized these insights, examples and guidelines within the framework and headings of the book. In a way, these are my detailed notes from the book.

Deep Work Is Valuable

Technology is shaping a new economy.

Example: Instagram had 13 employees when purchased for $1B. Companies with few employees can have huge value. The wealth created flows back to the owners (in this case VCs, founders and employees).

Insight: being able to quickly master hard things and the ability to produce at an elite level are key abilities. Technology is changing fast so we need to learn continuously. This takes deep work. We must also be able to transform these abilities into results that people value.

Example: Newton mentions Ericsson’s paper on deliberate practice which requires focussed attention (lack of distraction) and feedback so you can correct your approach. It’s not enough to have talent.

Example: Adam Grant the author and professor, batches hard but important work into long uninterrupted phases. As a professor he does all of his teaching in one semester then he focuses on research in the rest of the year. When researching he works in 3-4 day bursts where he avoids interruption. Newton summarizes this approach as the equation:

High-Quality Work = (Time Spent) * (Intensity of Focus)

Insight: when Newton studied undergraduate performance, he noticed the best students often studied less than those just below them in grades. Intensity seemed to be the key difference.

Example: Teddy Roosevelt had a broad range of interests in college. He spent relatively few hours studying but when he did he focussed completely on the subject he was studying. Roosevelt used artificial deadlines and constraints, like interval training for his attention centers.

Insight: when switching from one task to another, a residue of your attention stays with the original task. Experiments show performance on the next task is affected in proportion to the amount of residue.

Insight: self-organisation approaches like Scrum, free managerial time for thinking deeply about problems teams are facing.

Deep Work Is Rare

Insight: modern workplace trends like open offices and electronic communication make deep work harder.

Insight: newer communication communications like realtime chat are even worse than email for deep work. We can choose to open an email, whereas chat interfaces are real time and generate interrupts on our phone or computer.

It’s easier for someone to use chat notifications to interrupt us for something that’s not urgent. This is a personal bugbear of mine. I’ve tried to deflect this issue by stopping WhatsApp notifications and adding guidelines to the company wiki on how to use Slack (chat software).

Guideline: communicate best practices around chat.

Insight: even short interruptions delay the total time to complete a task. While this stands to reason, I tracked down the referenced academic paper by Mark, Gonzales and Harris. I couldn’t find specific data on this in the paper.

Insight: as knowledge work becomes more complex, it gets harder to quantify or measure the value of someone's effort.

Insight: without context on which behaviours have the most value to the organization, people revert to the activities that are easiest to do in the moment. This is frequently email.

Methodologies like Getting-Things-Done (GTD) seem complicated by comparison with a 15-element flowchart to decide what to do next. I work using a simplified variant of GTD and find it useful. In the years since, Newport seems to think less of GTD.

Insight: meetings fracture schedules and makes it hard to find time for sustained focus.

Insights: emails are asymmetric. It can take seconds to forward an email that consumes hours of the receiver’s attention.

Example: the physicist Richard Feynman invented a myth for himself that he was actively irresponsible about administrative duties. “To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time … if you have a job administering anything, you don’t have the time.”

Insight: “Clarity about what matters, provides clarity about what does not”.

I often say, prioritization is about being comfortable about what I’m not doing. I may have read this somewhere else but I can’t remember where now.

Insight: busyness is a proxy for productivity. Without clear indicators of what it means to be productive, knowledge workers do “stuff” in a visible manner.

Insight: deep work is displaced in favor of distracting behaviors. For example, journalists and authors are told to be active on social media. Engineers are asked to punch virtual timesheets.

Deep Work Is Meaningful

Example: Newton mentions Ric Furrer, a blacksmith who uses traditional painstaking methods to shape a sword by hammering it for hours. One mistake can break it. There’s a connection between this deep work and a sense of meaning he seems to get from his work.

Insight: craftwork like Furrer’s is simple to define but hard to execute. Knowledge work is more ambiguous. On the surface everyone seems to be in the same cycle of email, documents, spreadsheets and slides.

Example: the science writer Winifred Gallagher discovered the connection between attention and happiness when she had cancer. She focussed on what she could do and what was good in her life “movies, walks and a 6:30 martini.”

Insight: our brains construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.

Example: a couple arguing about household chores. They each might focus on the other’s selfishness. Alternatively, they could focus on the fact that an ancient festering conflict has arisen again. This time could be the first step in finding a solution.

Guideline: find the emotional “leverage point” to convert a negative event into a more positive outcome.

Example: scientists tested the neurological reaction to positive and negative images in young and elderly subjects. They found the elderly didn’t react as much to the negative. The elderly had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive.

Insight: when you spend time in deep work, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning.

Example: the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studies “flow”.

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Insight: work is easier to enjoy than free time because it has built in rules and goals. It’s easier to concentrate and lose yourself. Free time is less structured.

Insight: in experiments, researchers found a correlation between the number of flow experiences and life satisfaction.

Guideline: redesign jobs so they resemble flow activities. By default, most work environments are difficult to shape.

Guideline: as an individual, seek opportunities for flow because that will lead to deep satisfaction.

Example: Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Sorrance Kelly research how sacredness and meaning have evolved during human history.

Insight: the work of a craftsman is not to generate meaning but build the skills to find the meaning inherent in the material they’re working with. In craftwork this material could be wood or metal. In knowledge work, the material could be code or a marketing campaign.

Insight: the approach to the work is more important than the outcome. The process of embracing deep work can transform knowledge work from a “draining obligation” into a “world of shining, wondrous things”.

Rule #1: Work Deeply

Example: the artist David Dewane designed the “Eudaimonia Machine” a sequence of rooms culminating in a “deep work chamber”. He imagines alternating between 90 minutes in deep work and 90 minute breaks.

Insight: when trying to concentrate we are often overcome by the urge to switch attention to something more superficial.

Insight: humans have a finite amount of willpower. Interestingly, another book (Indistractible by Eyal Nir) says this insight is based on research that mixes up cause and effect. I’ll write about that book in a near future post.

Guideline: develop rituals to minimize the amount of willpower needed to switch into and maintain concentration.

Guideline: decide your “depth philosophy”, how you will integrate deep work into your schedule. Some options are:

• Monastic: be hard to reach like Donald Knuth (computer scientist) or Neal Stephenson (author)
• Bimodal: clearly defined time periods of deep work (from days to months like Adam Grant)
• Rhythmic: work deeply for part of every day. Newton mentions Jerry Seinfeld as a comedian who would write every day. This mode can result in more total deep hours over a long period of time.
• Journalistic: train yourself to switch into a deep work mode any time the opportunity presents itself. Walter Isaacson is cited as an example. This mode requires practice.

Insight: David Brooks said great creative minds “... think like artists but work like accountants”.

Guideline: a deep work ritual decides:

• Where
• How long
• How you’ll work (i.e. an internet ban)
• How you’ll support the work (good coffee or tea)

Examples: of people who made a “grand gesture”. J.K Rowling lived and worked in an expensive hotel in Edinburgh to finish the Deathly Hallows. Bill Gates uses “think weeks” to get away from day-to-day work and read.

Insight: open plan offices are not conducive to deep work.

Guideline: when designing an office space, make sure to include spaces for deep work. Consider a “hub-and-spoke” arrangement with a combination of communal and deep work spaces.

Insight: discern between what to do and how to do it. In Newton’s own case he’d identified why deep work was important but not how to do it. For this he applied guidelines from “The 4 Disciplines of Execution” (4DX) by McChesney, Covey and Huling.

Guidelines: the four disciplines are

1. Focus on the wildly important - say yes to the work “that arouses a terrifying longing”. In the book they suggest focussing on 1-2 wildly-important-goals (WIGs).
2. Act on the “lead” measures. A “lag” measure like customer satisfaction gives you results too late to make adjustments. “Lead” measures quantify new behaviours. In this case, a lead measure could simply be the time spent in deep work.
3. Keep a compelling scoreboard & make it visible
4. Create a cadence of accountability. For example, perform a weekly review of deep work done and a plan for the following week. David Allen’s GTD has a similar guideline.

Insight: execution is more difficult than strategizing. The authors of 4DX analysed hundreds of case studies to isolate the 4 disciplines (guidelines) above.

Insight: downtime is important for recovery and long term energy levels. It aids insights (making this a meta level insight).

Example: in an experiment, two groups did a “backward digit-span” test after going for a walk. The first group went for a walk in nature and the second through a city. The nature walking group performed 20% better in the experiment.

Insight: for a novice, an hour of intense concentration is the limit. Through deliberate practice this can be expanded to four hours (rarely more).

Insight: incomplete tasks can dominate our attention in our free time.

Insight: rest improves the quality of deep work.

Guideline: use a shutdown ritual at the end of the work day. Review incomplete tasks and make sure they’re recorded. Say a phrase to provide an explicit cue to your mind, for example “shutdown complete”.

It’s time to shutdown this post. I’ll return in a few days with the final installment of this summary of Cal Newport’s Deep Work.

Thanks for reading!

If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Credits: photo by T La on Unsplash

Disclosure: some links in this post may use Amazon affiliate links.

I purchased Deep Work by Cal Newport a couple of years ago. Soon after, it must have strayed off the first page of my Kindle and I forgot about it. Recently, I was talking to a good friend about juggling many projects and priorities at work. He suggested this book and then I remembered I had already bought it.

In the book, Cal Newport explains the challenges many knowledge workers face and strategies we can apply to find time to do more meaningful work.

I’ve written this post to better learn and share what I’ve learned. I’ll summarize Newton’s book as a set of:

• Insights: his astute observations
• Examples: people or stories
• Guidelines: tips, patterns or principles you can use to work more deeply

I have organized these insights, examples and guidelines within the framework and headings of the book. In a way, these are my detailed notes from the book.

Of course a summary is just a map, not the territory. I highly recommend you buy and read Newton’s book.

Introduction

Insight: Newport defines deep work as

“Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

Examples: he cites Carl Jung, Peter Higgs, JK Rowling, Bill Gates and Neal Stephenson as people who have leveraged deep work to accomplish extraordinary things.

Insight: modern communication tools have fragmented knowledge workers’ attention “into slivers” and 30% of their time is spent in email.

I have seen higher estimates in other places. In my previous role at Goshido, our mission was to redefine communication and replace email. Unfortunately we didn’t succeed, but that’s another story for another day.

Back to the book.

Insight: meaningful work that needs deep thinking, gets dispersed into “distracted dashes” and the quality of the outcomes suffer.

Insight: to be valuable in this fast moving economy you need to be able to learn hard things fast. This means you need the ability to do deep work but it’s becoming rarer and harder to do.

Newport neatly condenses his approach in one paragraph which I’ll break down as a guideline:

Summary: “I’ve invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life while making sure I get the most out of the time this frees up.”

How: “I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule.

When: “Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out…”

Why: “...can produce a lot of valuable output.”

First Newport describes the problem and explains how deep work is valuable, rare and meaningful. The rest of the book explains four high level “rules” for how to do deep work:

• Work Deeply
• Embrace Boredom
• Quit Social Media
• Drain the Shallows

Guidelines

My first draft of this post was 12 pages so I’ve decided to break it up into 3-4 parts. In the meantime here are all the guidelines I noticed in the rest of the book.

Out of context these guidelines might seem a bit abstract but I’ll go into more detail in future posts.

How Deep Work is Valuable, Rare and Meaningful

• In a company or team, communicate best practices around use of chat applications.
• Find the emotional “leverage point” to convert a negative event into a more positive outcome.
• Redesign jobs so they resemble flow activities.
• As an individual, seek opportunities for flow because that will lead to deep satisfaction.

Work Deeply

• Develop rituals to minimize the amount of willpower needed to switch into and maintain concentration.
• Decide your “depth philosophy”, how you will integrate deep work into your schedule. Options include: monastic, bimodal, rhythmic, or journalistic.
• A deep work ritual decides: where, how long, how you’ll work, how you’ll support the work.
• If designing an office space, make sure to include spaces for deep work.
• Apply “The 4 Disciplines of Execution” (4DX): 1. focus on the wildly important, 2. act on the “lead” measures, 3. keep a compelling scoreboard & make it visible, 4. create a cadence of accountability.
• Use a shutdown ritual at the end of the work day. Say a phrase to provide an explicit cue to your mind, for example “shutdown complete”.

Embrace Boredom

• Take breaks from focus rather than work-breaks from distraction.
• Work intensely like Teddy Roosevelt. Identify a difficult but important task and give yourself less time to do it than you’d normally take. Set a countdown timer.
• Meditate productively. Focus on a problem you’re trying to solve while doing something else physically.
• Practice focusing your attention.

Quit Social Media

• Accept social media can be useful but set a threshold for using it.
• Use a structured process to identify the communication tools you’ll use. Assess whether each tool’s benefits outweigh it’s drag on your attention.
• Be deliberate in selecting your entertainment. Create lists of quality alternatives in advance.

Drain the Shallows

• Schedule every minute of the day. Don’t spend the day on autopilot.
• If you uncover a promising insight, rework the schedule.
• Quantify the depth of each activity - how long would it take to train a recent college graduate to do this activity?
• Ask your boss for a shallow work budget. For most knowledge workers this should be in the region of 30-50%.
• Don’t work after 5:30pm.
• Beware of saying “yes”, the most dangerous word in the knowledge worker’s vocabulary.
• When saying “no” to a request, be clear in your refusal but ambiguous for the reason.
• Become hard to reach.
• Do more work when you send or reply to emails. Identify the process (or project) the email relates to then the current and next steps.
• Don’t reply if: the email is ambiguous, it’s not a question that interests you, nothing good/useful would happen if you responded and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

In future posts I’ll explain how to implement some of these guidelines and why they work.

Thanks for reading.

The bigger picture

This is an example of a guideline that we use in this blog/publication. Guidelines are also known as:

• best-practices
• patterns
• principles
• tips
• hacks
• mental models
• directives

In future posts we’ll curate individual guidelines or glean collections of them from articles, books and other content. We’re planning posts on:

• Productivity
• Starting a business
• Managing cash flow in a growing business

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Thanks again for reading! If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

Credits: photo by @pascalvendel on Unsplash

I’m experimenting with learning by listening instead of reading (which I think is my default mode). I had to listen to the podcast twice to distill the insights and guidelines. In this case I noticed more insights than guidelines. I’ll read the book in the future and see if I find more guidelines.

Here are the key insights I gleaned from the conversation:

• Innovators often procrastinate. It’s how they incubate ideas.
• Innovators manage fears and doubts differently. They hate taking risks. They hedge their bets and hesitate. He named TS Eliot and the founders of Google as examples.
• Innovators have lots of bad ideas, that's how they get to the good ones. He mentioned Shakespeare as an example.
• Innovators tend to have broad rather than deep experience.
• They question the status quo.
• Their fear of regret or failing to try overcomes their fear of failure.
• They are commissioned or rise to the occasion. He mentioned Michelangelo and Martin Luther King.
• There's little correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.
• Women and racial minority groups are less likely to speak up when they have original ideas.
• Later born children tend to be more creative/innovative. This is called niche picking. In studies of more than 300 pairs of brothers in baseball, the younger brother was more likely to steal a base.
• In a study of architects, parents who focussed more on values than rules raised more innovative children which brings us to the main guideline in the conversation (below).
• With strengths and virtues you can have too much or too little. He calls it the Goldilocks effect. Balanced teams need innovators but also followers and those who are good at execution.

Summary

When helping someone develop, focus on values more than rules because that will enable them to think for themselves rather than learn to follow.

Examples & Stories

Grant mentions a study of architects and his own family. The specific values he mentions are:

• Excellence is important
• Caring about how actions have an impact on others

When the architects grew up they “had a very clear set of guiding principles”. Children from families that were more focussed on rules learned to follow and accept the status quo.

In his own family when Grant finds himself accused of making a rule, he tries to find the value behind the rule. For example, when he asks his kids to stay at the dinner table until everyone is finished, he emphasizes respect and the value of having everyone to share a family meal.

When?

Helping someone develop, either a child, student, a work colleague or indeed yourself.

How?

Try to identify and explain the value behind the rule. Explain why it’s important.

Why?

A focus on values gives people a clear set of guiding principles, helps them think for themselves and be more innovative.

Notes on terminology

The words value, rule, principle and guideline can have a number of meanings.

In an article about the difference between principles and values, Keith Norris has a different interpretation:

… principles are rules or laws that are permanent, unchanging, and universal in nature. Values are internal and subjective, and they may change over time.

Norris refers to Stephen Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. He defines values as:

… beliefs and opinions that people hold regarding specific issues or ideas, and are ultimately internal, subjective, and malleable.

He recommends:

If you’re looking to create a timeless sense of purpose and to shape the overall mission of your life, then you should use principles. Establishing a set of principles creates a compass to which you can refer whenever something is in doubt or you need to take a stand or evaluate any particular opportunity, behavior, or situation.

To me it seems Norris/Covey’s principles are similar to Grant’s values and the concept of guideline we’re using in this blog.

The bigger picture

This is an example of a guideline that we use in this blog/publication. Guidelines are also known as:

• best-practices
• patterns
• principles
• tips
• hacks
• mental models
• directives
• how-tos

In future posts we’ll curate individual guidelines or glean collections of them from articles, books and other content. We’re planning posts on:

• Productivity
• Starting a business
• Managing cash flow in a growing business

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Thanks for reading! If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

Credits: thanks to @ameen_fahmy for making the above photo available freely on Unsplash

Disclosure: some links in this post may use Amazon affiliate links.

Summary

In his classic 1999 HBR article Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker explains how knowledge workers (and indeed all humans) can understand themselves and navigate their careers. In this blog post, I’ll summarise the key guidelines from the article including a brief story about the ambassador who refused to be a pimp.

Examples & Stories

I’ll start with the story.

In 1906, the German Ambassador to Britain resigned unexpectedly. He had been asked to host a dinner for the King of England at the time, Edward VII. The king was a known philanderer and it had been made clear to the ambassador that the king expected extra guests. Rather than organize the dinner, the ambassador resigned. He cut short a promising career. Later he explained he had been shaving and looked in the mirror and said to himself “I refuse to see a pimp in the mirror in the morning when I shave.”

Guidelines

In this post, I’m trying to extract the “guidelines” from Drucker’s article. Each guideline is a solution to a problem. In essence they provide a good practice: what to do, how, when and why. As a summary, here are all the guidelines I found in the article as a nested list. Later I’ll go into a little more detail on some of them.

• Build on your strengths
• Be your own chief executive
• Understand yourself by asking…
  • What are my strengths? (using feedback analysis)
  • How do I work?
    • How do I learn best? (read, write, listen, talk, do)
    • How do I work best with others (alone, subordinate, coach)?
    • Am I a decision maker or an advisor?
      • Don’t promote the number two (advisor)
    • Do I perform well under stress?
    • What kind of work environment suits me best (structured or unstructured)?
  • What are my values?
    • Do the mirror test
    • When scaling an organization, combine external hires with growth from within
  • Where do I belong?
    • Distinguish between strengths and values
  • What can I contribute?
    • Create an 18 month plan
    • Take responsibility for relationships & for communication
      • Share values and ways of learning with coworkers
• Pick a role and organisation that fits your values
  • Structure an organisation for short term results or long term growth
• Find a second purpose mid-career
  • Move organisation/role
  • Start a parallel career
  • Social entrepreneurship

It’s a long list. Next I'll go into more detail on some of the guidelines.

Build on your strengths

Why? it takes more effort to go from incompetent to mediocre than from competent to excellence.

Examples: in one of the first manager training programs I undertook early in my career, the coach had us all do a DISC assesment. She reassured us no one can be great at everything. Rather than obsess over our natural shortcomings, work to being them up to a level where they are not holding you back. Don’t go too much further and try become someone you’re not. This is also the core tenet of StrengthsFinder.

Drucker says, "The conclusion bears repeating: Do not try to change yourself—you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform."

What are my values?

Why: working in an organization that’s incompatible with your values is bad for you and the organization.

How: Drucker suggests the mirror test. He focuses more on examples from organizations (see below).

I find values quite nebulous and Drucker doesn’t say much about how to discover personal values. All of his examples are of organizations. In a later post I’ll return to this guideline from other authors and try learning by writing / summarizing.

Examples & Stories:

• Pharmaceutical companies could aim for constant, small improvements or occasional, expensive, and risky breakthroughs.
• A company might look to hire people from the outside only after exhausting all the inside possibilities. Others believe in first looking outside “to bring in fresh blood”. Drucker believes companies should try to do both.
• A pastoral church could focus on increasing the number of newcomers or the spiritual growth and filtering of those who don’t fit.

Take responsibility for relationships & communication

Why: modern organizations have shifted from force to trust.

In a previous article, I provided guidelines for how to manage your manager. Drucker recommends understanding one’s manager.

"It is incumbent on the people who work with them to observe them, to find out how they work, and to adapt themselves to what makes their bosses most effective"

Find a second purpose mid-career

Why: life changes. Knowledge workers outlive organizations. A second major interest can make a contribution and help you know when to change the work you do. If a major life event happens, a second major interest may make a big difference.

How: start to explore before you need do.

“Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values.”

Reading the article, another guideline occurred to me.

Check for candidate values fit

When: interviewing a candidate for your organization

How: create a standard set of questions based on the values of the organisation

Why: to be effective in an organization, a person needs values that are compatible (they don’t need to be exactly the same). People’s values don’t change and organizations change slowly.

These are just a few of the guidelines. I recommend you read the full article.

The bigger picture

This post is an example of a curated set of guidelines from an article. Future posts will curate books and other content. We’re planning posts on:

• Productivity
• Starting a business
• Scaling a team
• Managing cash flow in a growing business

Guidelines are also known as:

• best-practices
• patterns
• principles
• tips
• hacks
• mental models
• directives

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Thanks for reading! If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

Disclosure: some links in this post may use Amazon affiliate links.

Credits: photo by Ana do Amaral on Unsplash

When you’re trying to get someone to make the right decision or take the right action, provide concrete instructions because that will make it easier for them to do the right thing.

Examples & Stories

At work I’m currently putting together a field guide for change management based on our experiences with a number of change programs. During my research, I read the following story in Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath.

Researchers at Stanford University conducted an experiment to find the factors in getting students to donate food to charity. They first asked students to rate their perception of their classmates’ willingness to donate to charity. In effect, the researchers categorized the students as either “saints” or “jerks”. They then provided each student with one of two sets of instructions.

Basic instructions:

• A well known location on campus to bring some tinned food

Detailed instructions:

• A map with the location of place to bring the tinned food
• A specific request - a tin of beans
• A suggestion to the student to think of a time when they would be near the location
• A follow up call to remind them where and when to donate

Of those who received the basic instructions, 8% of the saints and 0% of the jerks donated food. This was not entirely surprising. Of those who received the detailed instructions, 42% of the saints and 25% of the jerks donated food.

That’s right, jerks who received detailed instructions were more likely to donate than saints with basic instructions. If you’re hungry, you’re more likely to get food from a jerk with a map than a saint without one.

When?

… you’re trying to get someone to do something or change their behavior in a specific way...

How?

Provide detailed instructions. Anticipate decisions the person will need to make and give them concrete options. Make it easy for them to take action or make the right decision. The Heath brothers call this “Shaping the Path”.

This experiment is also mentioned in Bob Sutton’s Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst. In a section titled “Be Repetitive and Concrete” he suggests providing checklists which were used during World War 2 by B-17 pilots. Early in its lifetime, the B-17 was considered difficult to fly but a set of checklists for takeoff, flight, landing and taxiing tamed the complexity. Checklists were also used in medicine by Atul Gawande to reduce to number of infections post surgery.

Why?

As the Heath brothers say, “what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.” People only have capacity for a finite number of decisions in a day. The less thinking they need to do the more likely they are to take action.

The bigger picture

This is an example of a guideline that we use in this blog/publication. Guidelines are also known as:

• best-practices
• patterns
• principles
• tips
• hacks
• mental models
• directives

In future posts we’ll curate individual guidelines or glean collections of them from articles, books and other content. We’re planning posts on:

• Productivity
• Starting a business
• Managing cash flow in a growing business

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Thanks for reading! If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

Photo by Dave Mullen on Unsplash

Disclosure: some links in this post may use Amazon affiliate links.

Summary

When something goes wrong, do a learning review as soon as you can. This can be useful for teams in a work setting or for you as an individual (i.e. school projects).

Examples & Stories

A couple of years ago I did some research on best practices for doing project/incident postmortems. This is a summary of what I learned.

The phrase “Never let a good crisis go to waste” is sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill. It’s a phrase I heard a number of times in Ireland during the financial meltdown of 2008-2011. Ever since, if something goes wrong at home or at work, the quote pops into my head.

In my day job, we sometimes encounter situations that don’t go a well as they could have; a customer issue takes too long to solve or some process or product doesn’t work as well as it should. To learn from the situation, we usually do a blameless postmortem or a learning review. Typically, in work situations, more than one person is involved in the situation and the review.

I have also done a personal learning review when something goes wrong or I receive feedback on something I could have done better. In general, I am trying to focus on building on my strengths but if an issue causes a significant impact, I have found it is worth spending time to do a learning review.

Camille Fournier in her excellent book The Manager’s Path, suggests using the term “learning review” instead of postmortem. In the book Camille explains:

“the “postmortem” process is a critical element of good engineering. In fact, instead of calling the process a postmortem, many have started calling it a “learning review” to indicate that its purpose is not determining cause of death but learning from the incident.”

Etsy: an online marketplace, have published a postmortem facilitation process. Their 20-page process builds on blog post by John Allspaw in 2012. In the process Etsy describe:

“the goal is not to find the cause of an accident. The goal is to seize the opportunity for an organization to learn as much as they can, in a relatively short period of time, about how people normally perceive and perform their work. Because the people involved were doing their normal work on a normal day when the event in question happened.”

We’ll see more details on how Etsy run postmortems below.

Google have documented their postmortem process in the book “Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems”. Like Etsy they also strive for blameless post mortems:

“For a postmortem to be truly blameless, it must focus on identifying the contributing causes of the incident without indicting any individual or team for bad or inappropriate behavior. A blamelessly written postmortem assumes that everyone involved in an incident had good intentions and did the right thing with the information they had.”

How?

At a high level I recommend doing a learning review in three separate phases:

• Document what happened at the time - an initial timeline. Try to avoid blaming yourself or others during this phase. Focus on the facts and rationale for decisions during the event.
• Decide what to do - find remediation actions to resolve the issue or change processes to reduce the likelihood the issue will happen in the future.
• Implement the remediation actions and follow-up later.

A learning review is more effective when you separate the reflection about what happened (past) from deciding what to do about it (future).

If you’re trying to understand a personal issue, use a notebook (paper or electronic). Ask anyone who might observed something during the issue, to provide input.

When documenting what happened for a group learning review, you can use a shared electronic document. Ask everyone involved to add to the timeline of what happened. Remember, the people involved did what they thought was the right thing at the time.

Try not to ask “why” something happened because that could imply a judgement. Instead, ask “how”. What was the rationale? What data was the decision or action based on? This is a subtle but important distinction.

Camille Fournier makes the following recommendations in the The Manager’s Path:

• Resist the urge to point fingers and blame
• Look at the circumstances around the incident and understand the context of the events
• Be realistic about which takeaways are important and which are worth dropping

Etsy recommend a four step process:

• Gather the initial timeline - the people closest to the event gather objective data and construct a timeline of events.
  • Sometimes the data can be scattered in different places (support cases/tickets, emails, chat messages, phone logs).
  • The timeline doesn’t need to include every detail.
• Hold a debriefing meeting - to gather subjective data (opinions, judgments, assumptions, beliefs).
  • The attendees read the initial timeline before the meeting
  • Up front, the facilitator should try to establish a sense of trust with all participants. “We will be focusing on the HOW of what happened, not the WHY.”
  • Walkthrough the timeline - everyone asks questions. Look for descriptions not explanations.
  • “Pause at intervals during debrief discussions and ask people to raise their hands if they have learned something they didn’t know before.”
  • The facilitator adds additional notes to the timeline. The main focus is the timeline but if remediation ideas come up, note them to discuss later.
• Pivot towards learning
  • This can happen in a separate meeting or a distinct phase of the debriefing meeting.
  • Brainstorm “learning points” which may include remediation actions
  • Choose a small subset of the team to take the brainstorm list of “learning points” and reflect on them.
• Report on the viability of the “learning points” and remediation actions
  • Two or three days later, the sub-team reports back on the viability of the remediation points.

Google’s process has more suggestions on what to do after the “learning points” are decided. They also have ideas on keeping the process working:

• Review each postmortem (or learning review) later
• The Google example postmortem document has the following main sections
  • Authors/Date
  • Status
  • Summary
  • Impact - the effect on customers/revenue
  • Root Causes - “An explanation of the circumstances in which this incident happened. It’s often helpful to use a technique such as the 5 Whys”
  • Trigger
  • Resolution
  • Detection
  • Table of Action Items (each has an owner)
  • Lessons Learned
    • What went well
    • What went wrong
    • Where we got lucky
  • Timeline
• Add an interesting or well-written postmortem to the monthly newsletter.
• Get newly hired engineers to role-play a previous postmortem. Get someone involved in the previous incident to be the incident commander.
• Ask for feedback on postmortem effectiveness.

Why?

Things will always go wrong. We’ll learn more from mistakes or omissions if we can be as open and honest with ourselves as possible. This is easier if you can separate the activity of gathering the facts from deciding what to do.

Why ask “how” instead of “why”? In the Etsy guide they explain:

“Asking “how” enables us to hear other people’s stories. Asking “why” creates a story of our own and tends to elicit only the evidence that supports our story.”

This is somewhat ironic considering I am including this in a section called “Why”.

In finance Michael Batnick writes

"The difference between normal people and the best investors is that the great ones learn and grow from their mistakes, while normal people are set back by them"

Ray Dalio explains why learning is crucial in the book Principles: Life and Work:

"Stretching for big goals puts me in the position of failing and needing to learn and come up with new inventions in order to move forward. I find it exhilarating being caught up in the feedback loop of rapid learning—just as a surfer loves riding a wave, even though it sometimes leads to crashes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still scared of the crashes and I still find them painful. But I keep that pain in perspective, knowing that I will get through these setbacks and that most of my learning will come from reflecting on them."

The bigger picture

This is an example of a guideline that we use in this blog/publication. Guidelines are also known as:

• best-practices
• principles
• tips
• hacks
• mental models
• directives

In future posts we’ll curate individual guidelines or glean collections of them from articles, books and other content. We’re planning posts on:

• Productivity
• Starting a business
• Managing cash flow in a growing business

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com). Thanks for reading!

Please follow, share or comment on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

This post was first published on Learn Share Do.

Credits: Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash

Disclosure: some links in this post may use Amazon affiliate links.

Summary

This post summarizes guidelines (or patterns) to help you manage your boss or your boss’ boss or beyond. For younger readers, I guess the tips and guidelines here could also be used to manage your parents. I hope my kids read it.

Examples & Stories

A few weeks ago Niall Larkin (@NiaLLLarkin) sent me a link to Kate Matsudaira’s article “Design Patterns for Managing Up” in ACM Queue. Niall knew I’d be interested because the guideline concept in this blog, is inspired in part by design patterns. One of our goals is to curate great knowledge. When I saw Kate’s article was already in the form of patterns, I decided to share it here and do what I can to promote it further.

In this post, I’ll summarize the guidelines in her article with a few additional maxims from my experience. I encourage you to read the full article (after you’ve read this summary of course).

When?

In all of these situations you’re in a conversation with your manager or manager’s manager or someone even higher in your organization.

The Guidelines

These short guidelines each have three sections:

• When: you could apply the guideline
• What: you could do in the situation
• Why: it is important to do this

Guideline: when you don’t know something, admit it & commit to follow-up

When: you’ve just been asked a question and you don’t know the answer. What: avoid saying a simple “I don’t know” or guessing an answer. Say something like “I don't know, but Phyllis does and I will ask her and get back to you by the end of the day”. Why: you don’t want to look stupid (now or later).

Guideline: be the bearer of bad news & give a timeline

When: something goes wrong and it’s your responsibility. What: a) let your boss know about the problem right away, b) share the next steps, c) give a timeline. If you don’t know when the problem will be solved, say when you’ll provide an update. Don’t over-analyse the problem, give your boss a head’s up straight away. A previous boss of mine had a mantra - “no big surprises”. Why: you should own the message. It’s worse if your boss hears about the problem from someone else. Don’t make her think.

Guideline: when you hear a dubious decision, don’t react, ask questions & commit

When: sometime a decision will be made that you don’t agree with. What: there’s a right way and a wrong way to disagree. First take a breath. Ask about the context and rationale. Remember, someone up there thinks this is a good idea. As Stephen Covey and Richard Carlson say “seek first to understand, then be understood”. I know it’s easier said (or written) than done but your boss is unlikely to change her mind if you freak out. If you can’t change her mind at least you’ll have a better explanation when you explain it to your direct reports (or kids). Finally if you still disagree, consider Andy Grove’s advice and “disagree and commit”. Why: you might not have all the information the decision maker had.

Guideline: when you receive negative feedback: pause, accept and commit

When: you’re going to do something wrong sometime. If your boss is any good she’ll tell you in a skillful and constructive way. What: in the article, Kate recommends you say "I hear you. I will be more mindful of that in the future." Personally I’d use slightly different words but the sentence would have that form. Like the previous guideline, I’d also “seek first to understand, then be understood”. Why: getting defensive makes your boss have to work harder to try to help you learn. Most bosses don’t like to deliver negative feedback. This guideline is also easier said than done but you’ll learn more faster if you don’t get defensive.

Bonus guideline: when you need your boss to take action, make it really clear

This guideline is not in Kate’s original article but it’s something I try to do (and I encourage my direct reports to do also). When: we all need help at times and you’ll need your boss to take action or make a decision. What: make it super clear by mentioning the action you are requesting at the start of any written communication. If email, you could put a keyword (like #ACTION or #URGENT) in the subject. Why: your boss probably gets twice as many emails and juggles three times as many issues as you do. She is not going notice a subtle, indirect request in the third last paragraph of a long email.

The bigger picture

This post is a summary of guidelines from an article. In future posts we’ll curate individual guidelines or glean collections of them from articles, books and other content. We’re planning posts on:

• Productivity
• Starting a business
• Managing cash flow in a growing business

Guidelines are also known as:

• best-practices
• patterns
• principles
• tips
• hacks
• mental models
• directives

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Thanks for reading! If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

This post was first published on Learn Share Do.

Credits: photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

Disclosure: some links in this post may use Amazon affiliate links.