July 2020
Like many people, I have most of my best ideas in the shower.
This is sometimes annoying: I could use more than one shower’s worth of good ideas a day, but I’d rather not end up as a shrivelled yet insightful prune. Mostly, though, shower ideas are the incentive that keeps me smelling okay, so I grudgingly accept the constraint.
The time when it was most constraining was the first time I became a manager. I only had a few reports, so managing them wasn’t a full-time job. But I was very bad at it, and so it should have been what I spent all my shower insights on.
Unfortunately, I was spending my non-management time on programming. And even if I tried to use my showers to think about my thorny and awkward people issues, my mind somehow always wandered off to tackle those nice, juicy software design problems instead.
Management Attempt #1 didn’t go very well; being distracted by programming, I made lots of embarrassing mistakes that made my reports’ lives harder, which in turn made me feel stressed and guilty. I ended up bouncing back to being an individual contributor after a few months.
That experience of mine resonates strongly with Byrne Hobart’s observation about focus in knowledge work:
The output of knowledge workers is extremely skewed based on focus. The productivity tiers seem to be: <10% focused on the job at hand: meaningful risk of getting fired. 10-50% focus: “meets expectations,” gets regular raises. 50%+ focus: superstar, 10x engineer, destined for greatness.
“50%+ focus” is roughly when something becomes the top idea in your mind. It’s when you start caring enough to think about it in the shower. It’s when you start habitually asking “how could this go faster?” It’s when you get relentlessly resourceful. It’s around when you start annoying your coworkers and/or significant other, although that part is avoidable with practice.
Most importantly, you can only be 50%+-focused on one thing at a time—or zero, in bad cases. That makes it critical to conserve your attention, so that you can spend it on what matters.
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