Filed under: Advice, Career, College, Life, Productivity, Research, University, Work
There is no grey area in classifying me as a door-closed worker bee. I am hard-wired to focus with extreme intensity on tasks and goals and To Do lists. I can’t not be in motion. I’m one of those jackasses who looks forward with unquellable elation to a long-planned and well-deserved vacation, and by Day #3 I’m done with sitting around and reading and have begun cataloguing and alphabetizing anything that’s not nailed down. I know. I disgust even myself. And while no one has ever accused me of being a slacker, almost everyone who knows and loves me has told me (for my own good and for the sanity of those around me) that maybe it would be better if I took it down a notch, for Pete’s sake.
Too bad for me that, due to my preference for having the office door closed and for all distractions to be annihilated with my laser-beam eyes the moment they open their yaps to ask me a question or tell me something inane that has nothing whatsoever to do with my current task, I will probably not choose the problem or endeavor that will be important enough to catapult me to fame. Or so theorizes Richard Hamming in his talk, “You and Your Research.” I’m not a research scientist, but I think Hamming’s theory is applicable to all humans, regardless of their field.
This talk centered on Hamming’s observations and research on the question “Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?” From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.
Here’s what he had to say about those who work with the door open vs. those who prefer to work distraction-free:
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.
So, clearly I’m probably going to be missing the chance to take note of, and then solve, the big and interesting problems of our day. I know myself pretty well, and I could have told you years ago that I will always tend toward missing the important stuff as I will be too busy crossing s**t off of my list.
While I like the fact that I’m not a slacker, I am trying to re-wire myself enough so that I’ll be better able to stop the train and focus on the present day, instead of constantly looking to the horizon, which seems always to be the thing I’m trying to get to. (And for anyone who paid attention in Reality 101, please won’t you slap me and tell me again that it’s impossible to ever get to the horizon, which means I’ll never be finished, so its probably okay to just take a breather every now and then).
Posted by Alexa Harrington
(via Ben Casnocha)
Two of the advantages of being a mediocre theoretical physicist and a mediocre management theorist are that I can not only mix metaphors but also tell nasty habits of others who practice the same perversions.
With few exceptions, management theorists suffer from having too much experience in a limited spectrum of organizations. This ailment is almost universal and its victims includes Hamming, so in the vernacular, take his – and my – pronouncements cum grano.
Bell Labs is not a common laboratory environment although it does have the management goodness of being a mixture of academic (at least pseudo,) and most of the time, corporate. As such it is representative of neither type and is, in many ways, unique.
What Hamming is talking about, not incorrectly but limitedly, is a technique of long recognition called ‘Management By Walking Around’. The aspect he is dealing with is management of self as opposed to the more common aspects of management of organization and membership. To condense things into a short story, the way I would ask you to think about the door metaphor is to learn when you close the door, when you leave the door open, and when you go out the door and seek other people. (The latter is part of what is missing in the quotations and probably in the treatise.) Consider the difference in the situation of people who call on you and people you call upon. Both interactions are important but the differences need be understood.
As example, I would mention Albert Einstein. He learned this early and enough so that he could compensate for the shortage of people visiting him in later years. But he was famous for standing up in the middle of a discussion and saying “I have to work now” and even if he was in his own home, leaving and “’shutting the door’.
Message, learn how to balance among the three states, and learn what balance is right for what you do and who you are. That’s the heart of any form of management. Its dealing with the exceptions that get managers their pay, not dealing with the regularities. And this goes for self-management as well.
Comment by Simple Country Physicist 06.27.09 @ 8:01 am