The two types of work
Starting this post, I’ll also start sharing interesting links of articles that I found interesting. Happy reading!
There is a pattern that I’ve noticed about PMs who’re early in the field - they often ask about what tools to use and learn for PMing? The question seems innocuous in itself. Some tools are indeed better than others. However, underlying the question is often an assumption that a lot of the work is about mastering these tools. It’s not, the work is about using these tools as a means to an end. And even that is a small portion of the total work. Then why do people ask these questions?
Most people think they break up their time into two parts - work and pleasure. However, I’d argue that the actual division is three - pleasure, fake work, real work.
Pleasure is easier to identify - you could be watching Netflix, playing video games, chilling with your friends or drinking on the beach. Fake work is tougher to define; however I’ll still make an attempt. Fake work is when you do seemingly important tasks, but they don’t actually lead to any progress.
Why does fake work exist?
Because we feel guilty of pleasure and lazy of doing real work.
In an age driven by productivity porn, it’s easy to feel guilty after spending hours on Netflix. So you shut off Netflix and decide to work. Now, you can do real work - calling up customers, writing docs for review, etc. But this is hard - you might face rejections here, you will be challenged by other people on your doc, etc.
So you choose the easier option - do work that seems important but easy. There is no general list of examples here, but anything that focuses just on a part of the process regardless of the outcome could fall in here. This could mean - multiple email checking and organising sessions, random data analysis without hypothesis, “let’s set up a weekly meeting without any agenda”, hours spent in choosing the right note taking tool (like in the PM example above), etc.
At the end of such sessions, you will feel good about yourself for accomplishing something. But unfortunately, that something isn’t significant.
The trait that makes fake work harder to identify is that there are types of work where the outcome feedback cycle is very long. In those kinds of work, all you can focus on is your input. E.g. Think of long term public market investing. By definition, all you can do is read and place bets and wait for a few years to see how it has played out. So it’s easy to conflate work without outcome orientation in this bucket and keep doing it.
Even when you do identify fake work, you can’t completely eliminate fake work. You will need to check new emails and reply to older pending ones. But if that ends up being the default option over real work in most cases, it halts progress.
In short, get real sh*t done.
Read for the week: Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 essay on the history of Ivy league admission process is telling on how flawed it is.
Well said! Thanks for calling me out on my fake work