What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate.
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Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
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After quite a while of thinking I decided, ``No, I should be in the mass production of a variable product. I should be concerned with all of next year's problems, not just the one in front of my face.'' By changing the question I still got the same kind of results or better, but I changed things and did important work. I attacked the major problem - How do I conquer machines and do all of next year's problems when I don't know what they are going to be?
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...I suggest that by altering the problem, by looking at the thing differently, you can make a great deal of difference in your final productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on what you've done, or you can do it in such a fashion that the next person has to essentially duplicate again what you've done. It isn't just a matter of the job, it's the way you write the report, the way you write the paper, the whole attitude. It's just as easy to do a broad, general job as one very special case. And it's much more satisfying and rewarding!

Great essay on procrastination.

Jack Holt e-mailed me a link to Paul Graham's essay on procrastination. It's great, couldn't agree more. Thanks, Jack, and Paul.

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Comments on this Entry:

(Pascal Venier on Jan 1, 2006 10:29 AM) An old classic ... in praise of procrastination is Stanford Philosopher short essay from 1995 on "Structured procrastination": http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~john/procrastination.html

[David Allen] 

I challenge the notion that collaboration will increase simply because of the availability of a new set of interrelated tools, or Web 2.0. This is the same trap that allowed thousands to think of e-learning as a fast and cheap alternative to other options, when in fact it is a complex and viable approach, but not always fast, nor easy, especially when you want quality outcomes. Good elearning requires a shift in operating culture. Likewise, collaboration requires a cultural shift...

I believe there is a great deal of potential to distributed collaboration. I'd go so far as to say it will be a required competence and essential business/organization activity. It will be facilitated to some extent by tools. But it won't happen without us increasing our skills, practices and intentions for collaboration.

The third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the the best stuff prevails.

Does this sound familiar? It's the principle of a market economy. Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states.

There are two forces that together steer design: ideas about what to do next, and the enforcement of quality. In the channel era, both flowed down from the top. For example, newspaper editors assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote.

Open source and blogging show us things don't have to work that way. Ideas and even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up. And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better. For example, open source software is more reliable precisely because it's open source; anyone can find mistakes.[ Paul Graham]

So if we are parents or teachers or curriculum designers trying to help young people really find or develop their talents or prepare themselves for their future life's work, we we really should be doing is help them find things that they find beautiful. And when they find it, we can help by giving them space and time and help (if necessary) to think and study more deeply.

There's a report on the subject here (pdf download). I haven't read it yet, but will try to find the time so I can report back to you on it. Any experts on beauty out there? I'd love to pick your brain about ramifications on the future of work.

This device and the technology should be considered by HR during the facilities design phase (for open space environments) when the "policy" questions are being asked: Who gets an office and why? Where will performance conversations be conducted? Where will sensitive strategy sessions be conducted?

What is even more interesting to me than the technology is the picture that Rajat points us to. What do you think the average age is and what are the implications of that for the future of technology, design and work? (We might also notice the gender and race of the group too.) Maybe Rajat can get us started with his initial thoughts?