Working Like a Craftsman
Last year, I took a “research sabbatical” for the last few months of the year. This year, I’m reframing it as an “annual adventure”—partly because it’s not fully time “off,” and partly because people keep telling me that you can’t take a sabbatical when you don’t have a real job. :)
A few weeks ago, when trying to figure out what I wanted to do during my adventure time, I emailed a friend and chef, Ben, and asked how people get really good at cooking. That question, and his response, ultimately led to me enrolling in a culinary course at a local community college and led to that chef friend inviting me to be his sous chef at a private dinner last weekend.
As we were cooking, Ben asked, “Why are you interested in this anyway?” In response, I described to him how cooking is fun because it forces a state of focused effort and presence. In that sense, it’s almost meditative.
Later, while washing dishes, I shared how enjoyable that task was. Not only is it a task I can get lost in, it’s one in which I can immediately see the impact of my action. It feels productive.
Similarly, I may be frustrated by my son’s challenge with potty training—still!—but when my kids were babies, changing their diapers was my favorite part of parenting.
Why? Because of the close connection between problem and solution. I could put in effort and know immediately that it was impactful. In contrast, the payoff of investing in reading to them or providing moral guidance won’t be known for decades!
I know I should do those things, but they just don’t deliver in the same way.
All of that made me think about how most of us have an experience at work that is much more like the reading and moral guidance aspects of parenting. After we graduate from our individual contributor roles, there’s often a great distance between our effort and seeing the impact of that effort.
That happens first because the initiatives we lead, as they grow in size and complexity, take longer to bear fruit. But perhaps, more importantly, we stop doing work ourselves!
For example, we spend time “explaining,” “influencing,” and “coaching.” But when that’s your work, it’s easy to arrive at the end of a meeting without knowing if others really got it. And it’s easy to get to the end of a jam-packed day and not be sure that we did anything productive. They’re those, “What did I even do today?” kinds of days.
The guy washing the dishes may have other challenges in his role, but not uncertainty about whether he did something real.
Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, talks about this as the benefit of being a craftsman—being able to literally see your work at the end of the day. In a blog post, he cites a passage from Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft:
“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.”
If we have a leadership job but want to experience the satisfaction of the craftsman, it’ll probably take intentional action.
It could be as simple as writing a to-do list in physical form. There’s satisfaction in the manual action of crossing things off. Because there’s a space limitation to paper—unlike unlimited electronic lists—we can actually accomplish 100% of what we write down. (The first item of my daily to-do list is “Floss” because if I do it early, it feels like I’m getting things done. And if I need a momentum-creator in the middle of the day, that’s often there for the taking.)
Another thing we control is our time. Rather than letting the day drive us, we can reserve time at the start to do something real and feel like we’re making progress.
Finally, I think this has an implication for leaders. Because of the gap between effort and impact, we need to help others feel productive. We can do that by bringing greater synthesis and appreciation into our interactions.
Here’s what I think we accomplished in this meeting.
Thanks for doing that. What I learned was X. What I’ll be thinking about more is Y.
We may not be able to literally see our impact like a craftsman can, but we can help ourselves and others feel the impact more readily.
Leadership Wisdom
“Recent research by the Mayo Clinic into the well-being of doctors and nurses reveals that 20 percent is the threshold level [for doing something you enjoy]: spend at least 20 percent of your time at work doing specific activities you love and you are far less likely to experience burnout. Research by colleagues at the ADP Research Institute reinforces this finding. According to their recent global study of twenty-five thousand workers, if you have a chance to do something you love each and every day (even if you aren’t good at it yet), you are 3.6 times more likely to be highly resilient.”
— Marcus Buckingham, in Love + Work