Looking Forward to When It Rains

One of the masquerades we pull in the modern workforce is that we are supposed to be efficient for X hours a day, Y days a week, as if productivity is a nicely measurable and observable function that we have absolute control over. This is obviously a myth. When you start to talk about productivity, you must first ask, productive to what ends?

The reality of much of human output, or creativity, is that it can be bursty and difficult to define. There are roles wherein productivity is more fixed; when I was sanding sports floors, one such task involved in preparing a floor for sanding or coating was to push a vacuum up and down the length of a basketball court. Each time, your ~30cm vacuum brush head would cover a distance of 4 or 5 boards wide while you walked the length of the complex; then, you'd shift the head on your way back to cover a new set of ((4-5)-1), to ensure you did not miss dust and debris.

When doing this more rote sort of work, there is little you can do to become more efficient. You can walk faster, and maybe achieve a double-digit percentage increase on the covered ground that you vacuum each unit of time. However, you are somewhat limited by the machine, your stamina as a human carrying a 9kg backpack for hours on end, and your capacity to focus on narrow stretches of floor for long periods of time.

I've probably spent hundreds to thousands of hours in my life doing the above task. There is marginal difference from my performance on any given Monday to my performance on any given Saturday. The productivity equation is clear: area of coverage x consistency of coverage / units of time. Here, productivity is linear, easily defined, easily recognisable.

Slack Economics

However, when in office or administration environments, the productivity equation or function becomes more opaque. When I worked in an email-based admin role doing customer-service-type work, if I relayed incorrect information to a student regarding government policy on subsidy requirements, I could open the university up to a PR situation, or result in expensive lawyers being consulted, or damage the brand identity, not to mention cause harms to the student.

Immediately, the productivity equation is complicated by a series of probabilities, intangibles, and the output of the function becomes obscured. For this type of work, orgs typically pay an overall salary, which is a product of local market rates, perceived reasonable value, risk enabled by the role, typically anchored against an hourly wage. The org is not paying that admin worker based on any precise or exact derivation of productive value to the organisation, because that is generally difficult to measure reliably for individuals, and impossible given the inherent complexity of even modest organisations. The org instead presumes that if they have six hundred admin staff on a median of 85,000 AUD annually, the more productive within the cohort balance out the unproductive or counterproductive at scale.

In these roles, whether people commonly acknowledge it directly or not, you are often being compensated to handle bursty or unknown problems. You may have only six weeks a year where you are important and necessary, say for a peak period, or an unexpected audit. You are paid for the remainder of the year to be retained for the approximate value you may create as unaccounted-for issues of indistinct shape bubble up between the 'peak periods'.

The rest of your year, you may float around, and depending on the organisation's greater effectiveness, your day may be filled with meaningful preparation or professional development, or more commonly, pointless busywork, or utter neglect. It is not an uncommon experience in these roles to sit idle, be told to look busy, while you are completely blocked from any sort of meaningful contribution, regardless of your motivations.

Put differently, many white-collar generalist and administrator positions are an insurance product. You become organisational slack. Your value is delivered in the confidence you give executives that miscellaneous unknowns will be absorbed. While you may be expected to cosplay some sort of daily pantomime productivity, your real utility, and the reason the organisation works with you to pay your bills, is for when 'The shit hits the fan'. You're there to be a body thrown at some unknown future crisis. They just make you get up early and catch the train every day in case you have to do something, someday.

These types of generalist white-collar roles like 'administrative officer' can be rather sticky as a consequence. I would tell my younger self: hey, you are obviously motivated by some sort of progress with your skills/impact/outcomes/salary, stay out of these jobs if you can, dude! While you are within these roles, if you are being truly productive for the needs of that role, you are likely specialising in a series of temporarily necessary and useful skills and information that do not generalise well to the greater labour market, and are likely not observed by anyone more than two rungs above you in the org chart.

Your power to negotiate still exists, sure. In my experience, however, you will be fighting an uphill battle if you cannot point to overtly measurable outcomes when negotiating your value, and you are probably more vulnerable than you would expect to being wiped out in large restructuring initiatives.

Within this role, I became a subject matter expert on a few niche Australian education acts. I'm trying desperately not to brag about this, but I was undeniably in the top 10 people in Australia, when it came to the knowledge of some niche set of requirements within some tertiary administration act. The other 9 people were probably the individuals at other universities in similar positions that had developed that exact skill. If I were to extensively detail the weight of that knowledge throughout my resume, I'd certainly leave the reader thinking:

If the above sounds like you: look professional, look busy, and endeavour to deliver value within your role for your own sake, given you are not working for some purely extractive, awful organisation. Know, however, what you are really being paid for if your clueless manager counts the times you've used the bathroom, or minutes spent looking out a window. The better you can model the economic reality underlying why you are where you are, the more easily you can navigate within the system to a more favourable position. If you want out, you can get out.

X years of experience in low-hanging fruit

There is a distinct clarity that I miss from my floor-sanding days. The company that I worked for had explanations for every process and policy. You could disagree with the odd explanation, but overall, I would have struggled to find obvious shortcomings with many of the processes, as they had emerged iteratively from the foreman's 30 years in business, a career working in a machine-like way on a narrow set of problems. When a business seems to automatically refine itself like that, at a timescale of decades, where is the role for a sweet little consultant like me?

To puff myself up: I've had some serious professional accomplishments in my short period of time working as a consultant. I've been a part of lifting monthly revenue for a legacy business by triple digit percentages within a quarter with one client. I've recovered six-figure sums of vendor debt within a week for another. But if you brought me in to consult with the sports flooring business I started in as a gangly 14 year old, I'd struggle to justify my price.

My recent professional accomplishments can sound impressive, but they were achieved via really simple interventions. The value was not the solution, it was discovering the correct problem. The revenue gains the first client saw were based on correcting some wild pricing decisions by a businesses' ex-director, which saw the company's top product by revenue losing money on every sale due to a combination of razor thin margins, ad-hoc discounting, beyond conservative pricing and no consideration of cost-to-serve. Alternatively, take my own soon-to-be patented method for recovering huge amounts of debt quickly from businesses: discover nobody has got in touch with them, and call them, to politely ask for the money.

These sorts of obvious improvements are impossible with lean, mean, well-structured businesses that have iterated and achieved antifragile artisan status. I sometimes worry that one day I'll run out of these obvious solutions, and when I sheepishly send my client an invoice with the regular big number to be paid, I'll be grabbed and aggressively shaken, as deserved for my audacity. I've met and worked with some seriously (shockingly) wealthy owner-operators in the Australian construction industry, but they never seem to have budgets for management consultants, or get caught saying things like "Nobody gets fired for hiring IBM".

In most knowledge work, the value you deliver does not cleanly map to your time. In knowledge work, you can make a single heuristic decision and have an outlier impact on the organisation to the tune of large sums of currency gained (or lost). You can bumble your way into an almost unused dashboard, and toggle a setting, and save your client six figure sums of recurring expenses. Or shut down a random service that the entire org was unknowingly dependent upon, and immediately generate squillions in lost revenue via the downtime. Both of these circumstances depend on a person wandering into external unknowns.

Put out buckets

You never know when you are going to have the most productive 5 minutes of your life. Similarly, you never know when you'll have a moment of inspiration, or an opportunity to grasp an outlier outcome. That is why I recommend finding ways to set up 'buckets' in different areas of your life. Just as you may not be reliably able to forecast when the next rain is, you put out a bucket, so that whenever it happens, you get that sweet, sweet rainwater.

For example, the creative piece bucket: You have a day, where you feel incredibly inspired to produce some set of music. You suddenly have this Dwarf Fortress-esque strange mood overcome you, and if you had your trusty banjo in front of you, you could produce some art of outsized value. Consider the alternative: the external winds of creative force possess you for a moment, and you've left your banjo in storage, or sold it to move past the pain of your musical ambitions. Perhaps that experience just passes you by, and you have no country hit single to show for it.

Alternatively, a programming bucket. Say you study the way, working on odd projects outside of your day job. Perhaps you don't ever use >90% of the technologies that you might encounter in your project work. The skill development here is, at best, tangential; you may never use the Rust language in your work, you may never have to fiddle with some new approach to developing GUIs. But suddenly, you see yourself making a mistake that may have caused your homelab to all but spontaneously combust. Or you see a colleague starting down a path that led you to some inexplicably painful computer consequence. Your dutiful neurons fire, and you quickly steer your org away from disaster.

A final, self-helpy woo-woo way of setting up a bucket is, where possible, to make explicit to yourself what you are after, be it goals or values. If you can achieve a state of internal decision clarity, you may understand that you, personally, are less fulfilled by big piles of money but extremely motivated by the satisfaction of creation and the respect of your highly creative writer's group. If you can recognise this cleanly, when an opportunity for a different circumstance that seems conducive to your true goal appears, you can quickly jump for it, even if the decision seems completely mad to a random passerby.

A pretty good job description for myself at the present is to go into fresh environments and try repeatedly to identify what productivity even is in a given context.¹ If you are seeking to be a more productive person, you should examine to what ends you are being productive, and consider spending a little bit less time throwing your lifehours at certain problems. Instead, set up some buckets in clever places, and spend a little time enjoying the sun.

Footnotes

1. See, consultants can tell you what they do. ↩