Knowledge workers perform a rich variety of work tasks. Research, development, communication, time sheet, coordination, and sifting through emails and Slack messages.
If you go at the essence of each of those types of work, however, you’ll see that there are only two kinds of work. There’s the work that keeps you employed. And there’s the work that gets you promoted.
Busy work keeps you employed. Deep work gets you promoted.
Staying on top of your Slack notifications keeps you employed. Delivering your projects on time and on budget gets you promoted.
Let’s call work that keeps you employed maintenance work, and work that gets you promoted advancement work.
If you are interested in a promotion (or a raise, if climbing the ladder is not your thing) then you should pay attention to how you distribute your effort between maintenance and advancement work. This is easier said than done, however.
While some activities are clearly maintenance or advancement, most are in between. Is writing a memo about the project you just shipped advancement or maintenance? On one hand, it would be more impactful to move onto a new project, on the other, you need to let people know about your contributions if you want that promotion.
An additional challenge is that maintenance work is usually more attractive for our brains than advancement work. Checking Slack is easier than sorting through the user feedback in search for patterns. Commenting on the internal project boards leaves a visible trace. Writing the report might take days and people might wonder where you’ve been.
Maximizing the time you spend on advancement work comes down to discipline. The discipline to choose hard work with delayed gratification. The discipline to placate that internal voice that says “it looks like I’m not doing anything” whenever you have not made yourself visible on Slack for a couple of hours.
In order to keep the balance between maintenance and advancement work in check, it helps to establish a scaffold around your work day. Here’s a proposal made of three components: Plan, measure, and reflect.
Plan your days, or the portion of your days that is under your control and free from pre-scheduled meetings or activities. Having a plan mitigates our brains tendency to choose the path of least resistance and gravitate towards the less energy demanding and emotionally satisfying maintenance work.
Planning also helps making the most of your natural attentional rhythm. Allocate advancement work for those slots when you are more likely to be energized. Schedule maintenance work in between, as a way to flush the attention residue.
Keep in mind that plans don’t have to be written in stone. Things change all the time, and as such daily plans should be malleable. The point of a daily plan is to exercise intentionality over your time.
Measure the value of the work you get done. As you complete tasks in your plan, ask yourself how valuable each and the project it belongs to was. Was it towards the maintenance or advancement end of the spectrum?
Reflect and course correct. Once you accumulated a couple of weeks worth of measurements, you’ll be able to gauge how much time and energy you direct towards the different kinds of work. If the distribution doesn’t seem appropriate, use the data to have a conversation with your manager about it.
Over longer periods of time, this practice can give you insight on your ability to estimate the value of your work. As I mentioned above, knowledge work is ambiguous and sometimes it’s hard to say whether a project falls more into the maintenance or advancement category. But the more you practice assigning a value and checking back once the project is done, the better your confidence range will become.
Knowledge work is highly self-directed. This is a great opportunity for personal fulfillment. We know from research that autonomy is among the key psychological nutrients humans need.
Freedom in knowledge work is a double edged sword. Left to its own devices, our brain can all to easily default to the least energy demanding and most immediately gratifying work. More often than not, that’s the kind of work that might keep you employed, but it won’t get you promoted.
President Eisenhower once said that “freedom is an opportunity for self-discipline”. If you see work as more than a means to pay the bills, if you want to spend that large portion of your day growing and accomplishing something of value, develop the discipline to consistently direct your time and effort towards the right kind of work.
This is what productivity in the knowledge world is all about. Not doing more, but doing better.