As someone who is currently reading Slow Productivity and also watching Shōgun, I concur with this point from Austin Kleon:

During a recent phone call, my friend Matt Thomas told me he likes to take a high/low approach to balancing his input, which started when he was in grad school reading dense theoretical texts by day and chasing them with movies like Fast Five at night. I’ve currently got a good combo going: I’m reading Middlemarch and binge-watching Bridgerton. (As the poet Donald Hall wrote in Essays After Eighty, everybody who works with their brains all day needs to lighten up a bit at night: "Before Yeats went to sleep every night he read an American Western. When Eliot was done with poetry and editing, he read a mystery book.”)

You don’t say…

Before providing employees with solutions to manage their stress, Fleming recommends that employers do more to tackle the ways in which their business might be causing the stress. A Deloitte survey of US workers, in 2022, found three systemic factors had an “outsized impact” on wellbeing: leadership behaviour; job design; and organisational working practices. It prompted the researchers to conclude that “perks and programmes”, alone, achieve little.

I really like this No Wrong Doors approach, and I think we can learn a lot from it in modern knowledge organizations:

Some governmental agencies have started to adopt No Wrong Door policies, which aim to provide help–often health or mental health services–to individuals even if they show up to the wrong agency to request help. The core insight is that the employees at those agencies are far better equipped to navigate their own bureaucracies than an individual who knows nothing about the bureaucracy’s internal function. […]

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how engineering organizations can adopt a variant of the No Wrong Doors policy to directly connect folks with problems with the right team and information. Then the first contact point becomes a support system for navigating the bureaucracy successfully.

The Slackification of the workplace has, among other things, resulted in too many different places someone might be able to go for help. It’s frustrating to be sent from team to team, with no one really taking the time to understand and assist with the problem. What if we took a “No Wrong Channel” approach instead? I know it takes a bit of extra time, but I think it’s a worthy goal to become “a support system for navigating the bureaucracy successfully” when someone wanders into our team channel with a question that is not necessarily in our direct sphere of influence.

I’ve been very interested in the rise of the 4-day workweek (4DWW) ever since we adopted it in a previous company and saw the benefits and value it brought to our business. In Do we need to be honest about Fridays? Bruce Daisley makes an interesting observation about how the 4DWW might eventually sneak up on most businesses:

I’ve met several organizations who use Friday as a meeting-free day (to allow team members to chow down on emails and admin). Others tell me that their Fridays are a much slower pace, where meetings peter out mid-morning. […] So, let’s be real, is this how the reality of a four day week will take hold for most of us? That Friday will be kind of a catch-up day for those who need it but that many of us will work at half speed, casually ‘keeping an eye on things’.

Yes, I’m a relentless fanboy of whatever Paul Ford writes, but this is a truly wonderful post about what makes AI so addictive and impossible to look away from. He frames AI as a technology that truly has no shame because “it possesses an absolute willingness to spout foolishness, balanced only by its carefree attitude toward plagiarism.” And so:

By aggregating the world’s knowledge, chomping it into bits with GPUs, and emitting it as multi-gigabyte software that somehow knows what to say next, we’ve made the funniest parody of humanity ever. These models have all of our qualities, bad and good. Helpful, smart, know-it-alls with tendencies to prejudice, spewing statistics and bragging like salesmen at the bar. They mirror the arrogant, repetitive ramblings of our betters, the horrific confidence that keeps driving us over the same cliffs. That arrogance will be sculpted down and smoothed over, but it will have been the most accurate representation of who we truly are to exist so far, a real mirror of our folly, and I will miss it when it goes.

I finally read this very long essay about Rewilding the Internet that’s been making the rounds. It’s about 30 mins of your time and in my opinion it’s time well spent.

It’s about what internet-builders can learn from the field of ecology, where the word “rewilding” has a very specific meaning. It’s essentially about systems thinking, which I know a lot of us care about deeply.

Rewilding the internet is not a nostalgia project for middle-aged nerds who miss IRC and Usenet. For many people across the generations today, platforms like Facebook or TikTok are the internet. They’ve long dwelled in walled gardens they think are the world. Concentrated digital power produces the same symptoms that command and control produces in biological ecosystems; acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached. Rewilding is a way to collectively see the counterintuitive truth; today’s internet isn’t too wild, even if it feels like that. It’s simply not wild enough.

In the end, I can’t help but think that though I love these ideas, it’s just… too late. I hope I’m wrong though.

In Crazy Charlie’s Window Michael Lopp says something that has stuck with me for a couple of weeks now (emphasis mine):

The reason, decades later, I frequently think of this unpaid weekend adventure sifting through a year of garbage, hardware, and knick-knacks is because it is when I discovered the compounding non-obvious value from doing exceptional work.

It’s a great story, well worth reading. Matthew Ström makes this point in a slightly different way in The polish paradox (again, emphasis mine):

The polish paradox is that the highest degrees of craft and quality are in the spaces we can’t see, the places we don’t necessarily look. Polish can’t be an afterthought. It must an integral part of the process, a commitment to excellence from the beginning. The unseen effort to perfect every hidden aspect elevates products from good to great.

Doing good work and getting the details right result in better outcomes, yes. But it’s about more than that. It’s not just about the job, it’s about us. The sense of accomplishment and purpose that comes from doing great work is an intrinsic reward that is life-giving far beyond the confines of our immediate job duties.