On his Athletes and musicians pursue virtuosity in fundamental skills much more rigorously than knowledge workers do piece from his working notes, Andy Matuschak writes:
“Knowledge work rarely involves deliberate practice. […] Core practices in knowledge work are often ad-hoc, and knowledge workers generally don’t seem to pursue a serious program of improving in those core skills. I suspect that this is in large part because the possibility of improvement isn’t salient.”
Another way to phrase this is that knowledge workers get more easily stuck in local maxima, unaware of how top performance looks (or may look like) and unaware that they can chase this. I attribute this to — mostly — the culture of knowledge work. How knowledge workers set-up their workflow and use different tools, is often a mix of habit, heuristics, randomness, and prior exposure. To add to that, companies rarely allocate time for personal performance improvement and/or for improving core skills; knowledge workers are expected to improve, largely, via on-the-job learning. And expecting improvement solely via on-the-job learning is like, well, expecting Giannis Antetokounmpo to better himself by only ever playing league games — no individual practice, no drills.
How can we solve this? Perhaps by:
And to expand on 1): this can be done by giving workers an example to follow and a performance level to chase; either with tool-specific examples (e.g. showing how power users use Excel) or with examples of how top performers structure their work on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.
(Side-note: This applies to software companies marketing their software too; when creating tutorials for your software, don’t just put out basic ones. Create video exhibits of how power users work and what they can do when using your software at full strength. If done right, it can increase your product’s stickiness.)
In fact, the very act of watching how a top performer functions, can lead to immediate results, as a lot of skills do not have to be embodied; they can be adopted outright.
This works for sports, this works for Sudoku… let’s try it for knowledge work.
I got about ~40% faster solving sudoku after casually watching an hour of YouTube (turns out sudoku YouTube is a thing) and now I’m wondering how many other things in life are shaped like this.
— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) May 25, 2020