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Comment by KRAKRISMOTT | Hacker News Reader

But getting rid of shallow work is the entire reason why people get executive assistants.

I don't either Cal or the author would have a problem with exec assistants - they're being paid for that.

Where it can be a problem is when there are "attentive" people on a team and "inattentive" people who are ostensibly equals.

Team members with higher conscientiousness tend to get lumped with an outsized share of undesirable, low impact busywork because others won't do it.

This dynamic can cause problems in all sorts of groups and also at home.

I can relate to this.

I'm one of those people who usually had a little too much work to do, but still felt bad when no one else volunteers for a task.

Often I'll offer to take it.

I'd end up enjoying work less & less and got a bit disgruntled until I was back to my base-line of work.

I definitely see it as a weakness in me, but also in my manager who let it happen.

As I got older, I started to work at around 90% capacity and grab a tea or chat with a colleague or do some admin for the remainder. This enabled me to jump on to urgent requests and even make extra efforts like physically walking over to discuss the matter. This also enabled me to look out for junior colleagues who seemed a bit stressed.

"Team members with higher conscientiousness tend to get lumped with an outsized share of undesirable, low impact busywork because others won't do it."

I agree. I get shit on at work and at home.

Exactly. Conscientiousness is a personality trait and those who are lucky enough (yes it is highly correlated with positive life outcomes) to have it in abundance would do well to calibrate their expectations of others accordingly.

Do you have some data on that? My experience is that conscientious people get rewarded with misery.

Unless the attentiveness is driven by neuroticism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Maybe so, but unrelated to the book and its message.

The author referencing the book in this context is in complete bad faith.

I dunno, I can see it both ways. The front-loaded email style or eschewing social media certainly make life easier for others. But on the other hand, many of his examples of Monastic deep workers (Einstein, Darwin) absolutely relied on those around them to function. I think mentioning the book in this context is valid; the book has very little to say about the consequences of deep work behaviours on others, and that might be a failing.

> But on the other hand, many of his examples of Monastic deep workers (Einstein, Darwin) absolutely relied on those around them to function.

Every one of us relies on those around us to function. Walking into a grocery store and buying food that’s ready to eat just scratches the surface of this reliance.

Humans are fundamentally a cooperative species, which has enabled collective outcomes that would be impossible if we reduced our reliance on others.

This becomes a problem when people are treated poorly in the process. Slavery is the obvious extreme, and various kinds of discrimination and power plays are some of the bad behaviors that emerge from this social reliance.

But reliance is not in itself a problem. It’s at the core of being human.

I would reiterate that the existence of bad behavior that enables focus for one person at the expense of others with no fair exchange of value is not an intrinsic consequence of the ideas in Deep Work.

Cal also writes about reverse office hours. The idea is that instead of holding a 1 hour meeting where every person only has a small contribution to make (in the realm of 5 minutes or less), they don't attend that meeting but rather the person with the objective that needs input from several different players is tasked with going to the different players when it's convenient to the ones you need the small contributions from.

So I don't think Cal is only interested in optimizing his own life and dumping everything EFT style onto others.

Undoubtedly it was easier for Darwin to work 4 deep work hours a day because he didn't have to handle the kids, prepare the food, clean the house and mow the lawn and work in the garden. Based on having read Cal a lot I haven't seen him advocate this selfishness in the modern world.

Was that on his blog, or in the book? Maybe I glazed over. I think it would be interesting to see him write something from the perspective of "optimising other peoples' time" to be honest. Many of the patterns do it implicitly, he's just never considered explicitly how your deep work habits can help others (afaik).

I think the argument's slightly more subtle than that - you don't have to advocate for it, it just naturally happens. Maybe it's viewing executive function as a zero sum game, where if I get some you lose some. I think we've all come up with examples that show that's not universally true, although we haven't proved it doesn't just kinda implicitly happen.

I'm currently in the position of being a carer, and large uninterrupted blocks of time are basically impossible for me right now. It's frustrating for everyone involved. Would the author of the linked piece say that I'm being robbed of my executive function because I'm looking after a sick partner? I think her model might be deepity in the Daniel Dennett sense - sounds good on the surface, but has too many exceptions to be useful. As someone else said, we're all interdependent (today's post about us all being temporarily abled fits in here somewhere). I'm not going anywhere with this, I've just been musing a lot about executive function lately.

That doesn’t actually eliminate the work. The books point isn’t about delegation it’s that nobody should be doing shallow tasks.

Either avoid the need for them or automate them.

Getting rid of shallow work is why people hire people.

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