From Hard Work to Heart Work — September Edition
Updated: 19 hours ago
Cal Newport spent years studying how knowledge workers actually produce their best work. His finding: constant availability sits close to the opposite of what real output needs. People who protect unstructured time to look at a problem before acting on it consistently outperform people who stay in constant motion.
I watched that finding play out twice this month, in 2 unrelated situations, with the same shape underneath. Both managers had the facts they needed already sitting somewhere in their organization. Neither had looked.
What 2 weeks bought him
An operations director I coach runs a distribution unit of 100 people split across 3 teams. He came into our session with a plan already drafted: merge the 3 teams into 1, present it the following week, move fast before the summer slowdown made everyone harder to reach.
The plan looked reasonable on paper. It was also built entirely on his own read of the situation, without a single hour spent watching how the 3 teams actually handed work to each other.
I asked him to wait. Not to abandon the plan, just to hold it for 2 weeks and spend that time on the ground, watching how the 3 teams actually handed work to each other instead of assuming he already knew.
When we met again, the plan had changed completely. The real bottleneck turned out to be a single IT system that 2 of the 3 teams had been quietly working around for a year, rerouting work by hand rather than escalating a fix nobody thought was theirs to request. A reorganization would have moved the boxes on the chart and left the actual constraint untouched.
2 weeks of watching saved him 6 months of reorganizing a problem that was never about structure.
👉 Read the original post here
30 minutes, 5 months late
A partner at a law firm spotted a tension with a senior colleague in March. He noticed it, filed it under things to deal with later, and moved on. Spring passed. Then summer. Each time the moment came close, something else took its place: a client deadline, then a hiring decision, always something that made this week look like the wrong week to raise it.
While it is happening, avoidance disguises itself as sequencing. Something more urgent always seems to come first.
In August, back from the summer break, we blocked 30 minutes on his calendar with 1 condition attached: he would write down, beforehand, the single thing he needed to say, and he would say it without softening it.
25 minutes into the conversation, the colleague told him he had believed, for months, that his position at the firm was at risk. He had already started interviewing elsewhere.
The tension the partner had been managing in his head as a minor friction was, from the other side, a resignation quietly taking shape. His only regret afterward was not blocking those 30 minutes in March, when the cost of waiting was still small.
👉 Read the original post here
What the 2 stories have in common
Neither manager lacked information. The operations director had colleagues who knew about the IT workaround. The partner had a colleague who would have told him the truth the moment he asked. What both men lacked was a protected slot on the calendar to go find out, and the willingness to sit with a question before answering it.
Reward structures explain this pattern better than discipline does. Announcing a reorganization looks like leadership. Opening a recruitment looks like leadership. Watching a team's handoff meeting for 2 weeks with no visible output looks, to most organizations, like doing nothing. So the manager who is actually managing well, protecting time to diagnose before deciding, often looks less productive than the one who moved fast and got the diagnosis wrong.
I keep coming back to the same 3-part framework when I size up a team: direction, alignment, and trust. Almost every situation I see traces back to a gap in one of the three, and you only find out which one by watching and asking. The org chart will not tell you. Neither will the engagement survey.
Newport's argument was built for individual knowledge work. Applied to management, it says something sharper: quality decisions are set by the time protected to look before acting. Speed after the calendar clears does not fix a bad diagnosis.
2 things to do this week
1. Pull your last 3 one-on-ones. Look at what was actually on the agenda. If every one of them was a status update and 1 or 2 logistics points, the person across from you has already learned there is no room for anything else. Change that in the next one: open with "how are you, really," and resist the urge to fill the silence that follows.
👉 Read the original post here
2. Block 1 hour this week with no agenda. Sit in on a meeting you would normally skip, or simply watch how work moves between 2 people on your team. Treat that hour like a client call you cannot move. It is where the real problem in your team finally gets room to surface.
The book behind this issue
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, by Cal Newport.
Newport's case: do fewer things and work at a natural pace, judging output by quality rather than visible busyness. He wrote it about individual output. Read it as a manager and it becomes a case against the instinct to reorganize, hire, or announce before you have actually looked.
Worth reading if your team's calendar looks productive and you are not entirely sure it is.
If any of this sounds like your team, I work with managers and leadership teams in Swiss SMEs to find what is actually holding them back, and build the conditions for it to move again.
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